Double Cain

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring 1996 by Forter, Gregory

II. Love stinks

The violent smell of (violent) sex, then, the overpowering and murderous scent of a primordial "object-relation": this is where the trail has led us so far, and we may as well succumb at this point to the crudity and excess of that Cainian place. Nothing is to be gained by delicacies in a matter so evidently indelicate. Let us simply assert-what should by now be starting to come clear-that Cain's characters must fuck with their noses. Here they are, doing what they do best: She was so close I could smell her. (Postman 5)

I didn't look at her. But I could see her dress. It was one of these white nurse uniforms, like they all wear, whether they work in a dentist's office or a bakeshop. It had been clean in the morning, but it was a little bit rumpled now, and mussy. I could smell her. (Postman 6)

From then on, I began to smell her again. (Postman 11) A whiff of her smell hit me in the face, and I knew she was standing right beside me.... (Serenade 9)

Her dress slipped up, above her knees. tried not to look. It was getting hotter by the minute. I didn't look, but I could smell her. (Serenade 31) Her head touched my coat, and as it did I could swear she inhaled, as though sniffing what I smelled like. (Cloud 8)

She started unbuttoning my shirt, first pulling my necktie aside, until it was open down to my belt, and then pushing her face inside, and nuzzling into my armpit.... After some moments of that she seemed to wilt, crumpled in my arms, and lay with her eyes closed, her head against my chest.... Pretty soon she opened her eyes, and began whispering to me, "Okay, Mr. Kirby, I'll say it, why I could like Burl Stuart, across the drugstore table, and couldn't stand him that other way, or possibly marry him. Mr. Kirby, he stinks. Maybe he's your brother, maybe he smells nice to others, but to me he smells like feet. He makes me sick to my stomach. But you don't, you have a heavenly smell.... You smell like grass, grass that's just been cut...." (Cloud 43)

It would be pointless to extend the catalogue further, as the examples at hand already exhibit a nearly compulsive monotony that tells us all we need to know. Love, these excerpts say, is blind ("I didn't look," "I tried not to look," "eyes closed," and so on); it strikes not so much the eyes as the nasal passage, is both stimulated and sustained in an olfactory tremor that's all the more damning for being completely irresistible, all the more binding because it operates in a medium beyond the subject's active control. The Cainian subject gets turned on by way of a sense it can't turn off. Where vision, here, marks at least the possibility of a certain libidinal voluntarism-the sight of Cora's sulky lips may make Frank "want to mash them in for her" (Postman 2), but he can always try to quell his violent passion by looking away-smell is what invariably defeats such intention, enveloping and eclipsing it in an odoriferous cloud that opens the self onto the other only in the mode of a fatal enslavement.