I could drink a case of you darling and I would/ Still be on my feet/Oh I would still be on my feet linger the words from Joni Mitchell's song. The substitution of ‘you’ with ‘wine’ suggests the intoxicating effect the singer’s lover has on them. Even so, what’s clear in the lines are the singer’s fervent adoration of their lover as well as the singer’s limitless capacity to delight in their lover and to not be overwhelmed. The singer repeats still be on my feet as if to reaffirm this inexhaustible capacity of theirs to love. ‘Anactoria’ (1866) by Algernon Charles Swinburne is a poem about Sappho’s unrequited affection towards its titular subject. In the poem, Sappho, the ancient greek poet and speaker of ‘Anactoria’ addresses her beloved with a similar claim to Joni Mitchell’s, ’I could drink thy veins as wine’. Sappho also describes the emotion of love as wildly and dangerously ‘[burning] and [foaming] like wine’.
This linking of intoxication with love is multivalent in ‘Anactoria’. For one, ‘Anactoria’ is a dramatic monologue with a convincing sincerity approaching drunken candour. Swinburne explained that in writing the poem he ‘had striven to cast [his] spirit into the mould of [Sappho’s]’. For the reader, it certainly seems as though it is ‘I Sappho’ who is speaking rather than Swinburne. There is also an intoxicated headiness throughout ‘Anactoria’, shown by the poem’s energetic cadence as well as repetitions of variants the word ‘sweet’. There is also an impression of intoxication given through an exhilarating flight of vivid ideas and figures in the poem, from Sappho’s fleshy desire to collide with Anactoria, to be ‘mixed with thy blood and molten into thee’, to Sappho’s pursuit after the goddess Love, ‘mine is she, very mine’.
Yet, Sappho’s desire to be united with Anactoria in the poem is blended with reality, ’the cruelty of things’, and these two conflicting strands result in ambivalence throughout ‘Anactoria’. As speaker, Sappho is indignant at Anactoria’s impending desertion to ‘lesser loves’ and ‘alien kisses’, and yet, in spite of this, Anactoria is perennially ‘faultless’ in Sappho’s eyes. Swinburne renders a physical sensation of the sheer pain of Sappho’s unreturned love. The poem begins ‘my life is bitter with thy love’, revealing Sappho’s torment. Anactoria’s beauty ‘sickens’,‘stings’, and ‘smites’ Sappho. But equally, Sappho vengefully imagines Anactoria as being ‘abolished’. Sappho directs her anger about Anactoria towards God, and interestingly envisions God as a combination of divinity and humanity, with a physicality that can be ‘[reached]…[smote]…[desecrated]’, as well as with ‘cold lips’ that can be ‘[pierced]…with human breath’. In this last phrase, the mention of ‘human breath’ others God, setting Him apart from being human, suggesting that He is divine, while God’s ‘cold lips’ are conflictingly material and human.
Even so, as ‘Anactoria’ progresses, the preponderance of corporal imagery recedes and the tangible and physical are replaced with eternal universality. This lends a sense that Sappho’s musings become a little less superficial as the poem goes on. Swinburne stated how in ‘Anactoria’ he ‘simply expressed, or tried to express, that violence of affection which hardens into rage and deepens into despair’. There is a definite progression suggested in this quote, from ‘hardens’ through to ‘deepens’. The end of the poem is a far cry from the start which exclusively revolved around Sappho and her lover.
Yet, in many ways, the ending of the poem is just as endearingly self-absorbed as the start. Sappho ends up collapsing everything into herself and her own subjective - she describes nature, ‘these hath God made, and me as these’. Sappho isolates her artistic immortality alone in the concept of imaginative transcendence as she says, ‘my voice [will] die not till the whole world die’. I suppose in this way, though, there is some reconciliation to Sappho’s previous anger towards God, as she realises ‘me He shall not slay’ since her works will have eternal universality once she herself has passed away. Sappho envisages how her ‘songs once heard in a strange place/Cleave to men’s lives’. The ‘[cleaving]’ of Sappho’s poetry here provides a substitute to the cleaving together with Anactoria which Sappho cannot have. The potency of Sappho’s voice is highlighted in the fact that her poetry can have so much of a pronounced effect in men’s lives having only been ‘once heard’. Sappho foregrounds the power of her pen for Anactoria, ‘these kisses of my lips on thine/Brand them with immortality’. Sappho’s expectation of the timelessness of her art acts as a release from her despair of her unquenched desire. Yet, sadly Sappho and Anactoria are to be immortalised in a tragic tableau of unfulfilled longing. In the end, it is both Sappho’s ‘song’, as well as her persisting, unassuaged desire which linger.
In contrast, the ‘fleeting realm of scent’, is instead a ‘domain that leaves no trace in history’. ‘Perfume’ (1985) by Patrick Süskind trans. John E. Woods tells the story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an especially ‘gifted and abominable’ perfumer living in eighteenth-century France. Grenouille ruthlessly aspires to ‘possess everything the world could offer in the way of odours’, his ‘higher destiny’ is to ‘revolutionise the odiferous world’ by creating ‘an angel’s scent, so indescribably good’. His sheer greed is revealed from the start as he exasperates his wet nurses.
Throughout the novel, Süskind romanticises the art of perfume through detailed descriptions of its making processes. Süskind establishes the richness of perfume through an analogue between writing and perfumery, as Grenouille muses on and is proficient in ‘the alphabet of odours’ and ‘the language of perfumery’. Yet, the comparison falls apart as Grenouille perceives the ‘grotesque incongruities between the richness of the world perceivable by smell and the poverty of language’. The inadequacy of the analogue emphasises the depth of the perfume craft. There’s an additional analogue, though, between cooking and perfumery, as Süskind mentions the ‘olfactory kitchen of [Grenouille’s] imagination’ where he is ‘forever synthesising and concocting new aromatic combinations’. And again, even the existence of this further analogue reveals the complexity of perfume making which is portrayed and exalted in the book.
In his mind, Grenouille has an ‘innermost universal theatre’, almost like an inner sanctum, where smells he has collected during the course of his life are stored. At leisure he ‘drinks without pause from his noble scents’ and 'devours' the smells. This imagery of Grenouille eating and drinking smells and being nourished by them suggests how intrinsic perfume making is to his being. Scents are bewitchingly '[intoxicating]' and '[dizzying]' for him.
In his mind, Grenouille has an ‘innermost universal theatre’, almost like an inner sanctum, where smells he has collected during the course of his life are stored. At leisure he ‘drinks without pause from his noble scents’ and 'devours' the smells. This imagery of Grenouille eating and drinking smells and being nourished by them suggests how intrinsic perfume making is to his being. Scents are bewitchingly '[intoxicating]' and '[dizzying]' for him.
Nevertheless, the subtitle of ‘Perfume’, ’the story of a murderer’ ensures that this is the barbaric action through which we see Grenouille in the book. The narrator disparages Grenouille as a ‘lump of humankind’ and a ‘cipher of a man’. Grenouille is sustainedly, grotesquely likened to a tick in ‘Perfume’, stressing his lack of humanity. Grenouille prioritises and is guided by ‘the principle of scent’, and the singular quality which he recognises in other characters is whether they emit ‘primitive human effluvium’. His cold-bloodedness is shown by how even his passions are characterised in terms of ‘an excitement burning with a cold flame’. Grenouille’s ultimate depravity is signalled in how he spends seven years in seclusion, not after some deeper meaning, but instead, Süskind writes, ‘he basked in his own existence and found it splendid’.
Grenouille has no natural body smell and the narrator states how this is selfish, ‘he gave the world nothing but his dung…not even his own scent’. Interestingly, it is the fact that Grenouille is scentless which means that he proves repellant to other characters. Yet, Süskind highlights the transformative power that perfume has in the book, which serves to work in Grenouille’s interests. Twice the narrator writes of how odour is inextricably linked with the very act of breathing, and so people are defenceless against its persuasive power. Certainly, for Grenouille, once he wears a floral perfume and so acquires a scent of his own, the book recalls ‘it was as if he had grown' because of this deceitful smell. Another of Grenouille’s perfumes convinces a magistrate in the novel to overturn his guilty verdict for murder and the same smell impels a group of characters to unprecedentedly ‘[do] something out of Love’.
Grenouille has no natural body smell and the narrator states how this is selfish, ‘he gave the world nothing but his dung…not even his own scent’. Interestingly, it is the fact that Grenouille is scentless which means that he proves repellant to other characters. Yet, Süskind highlights the transformative power that perfume has in the book, which serves to work in Grenouille’s interests. Twice the narrator writes of how odour is inextricably linked with the very act of breathing, and so people are defenceless against its persuasive power. Certainly, for Grenouille, once he wears a floral perfume and so acquires a scent of his own, the book recalls ‘it was as if he had grown' because of this deceitful smell. Another of Grenouille’s perfumes convinces a magistrate in the novel to overturn his guilty verdict for murder and the same smell impels a group of characters to unprecedentedly ‘[do] something out of Love’.
I would say that 'Perfume' itself is instantly inhaled just like the substance to which it refers because of how effortless the book is to read. At the novel’s ending on ‘the hottest [day] of the year so far’, the reader is reminded ‘it was a day like the one on which Grenouille was born’, which had been described as ‘one of the hottest days of the year’. Yet, it almost seems as if this last day was the day on which Grenouille was born because of how recent the beginning of the book felt, since ‘Perfume’ vexingly does not linger.
Sources:
- https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/swinburnes-poems-and-ballads
- Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, Metaphorical "Indiscretion" and Literary Survival in Swinburne's "Anactoria" in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 36, No. 4, Nineteenth Century (Rice University, Autumn, 1996), pp. 917-934
- Robert A. Greenberg, "Erotion," "Anactoria," and the Sapphic Passion, Victorian Poetry, Vol. 29, No. 1 (West Virginia University Press, Spring 1991), pp. 79-87
With thanks to Jitka Krause for the image.
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