The Postcolonial Poetics of the Olfactory: Three Third-World Texts and Their Critique of the West

郭玉德(Yu-Te Tom Kuo)

Post-Colonialism ； Olfactory ； Identity Politics ； Fluidity ； Diaspora ； Creole Subjectivity

小說與戲劇

18卷2期（2008 / 03 / 01）

23 - 51

英文

This article is meant to delve into the evolution of an olfactory depth in post-colonial writing through three decades from the mid-1960's till the early 90's. I spend a considerable chunk of argument in demonstrating how post-colonial writing had set forth squelching the olfactory in favor of visual-acoustic imagery in the 60s. Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea is a case in point on the ground that it evinces the Fanonian ”mask” fixation on a black/white epidermal politics. In short, it is a text at once visual and acoustic. In the second half of the article, I dig deeper into three later post-colonial texts, namely, A Bend in the River, The Satanic Verses, and Age of Iron, for evidences of an uprising olfactory subjectivity. The smell has risen to the status of being at least one of subjectivity signifiers, and, at least in the last text by Coetzee, it becomes a rival measurement for identity and echelon. The other main argument in the second half is a postmodern penchant for destabilizing whatever essentialism hidden in some early post-colonial texts, say, the Creole identity in Jean Rhys's Caribbean discourse. Together Naipaul, Rushdie, and Coetzee write in olfactory parlance to cast their post-colonial subjects in a diasporic mold. They write in a vein rife with genre parodies. For instance, Age of Iron can be reads as Curren's own antehumous obituary, or, her own epitaph inscription beforehand with olfactory codes. The olfactory can be a tongue-in-cheek caricature of the early combative Fanonian mien.

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