书评丨城市的气味——香烟、性欲、现代性

These stories are all positioned in the indoor scenes of Western characteristics: cafe, apartment, atelier and ballroom. Urban literature is born out of such background influenced by the impact of modern consumer society and Western petty bourgeois culture. The burst of erotic desires of young people takes place where the smell becomes a catalyst.

In Lu Xun's Soap, a young girl was succumbed to the street and begged for a living. SiMing, unlike his friend who teased her so sexually, projected the surging sexual desire on his wife instead by buying her an aphrodisiac-like sandalwood soap. However, this article is not strong in the relationship between scent and smell while focusing on taunting as always, exposing the hypocrisy of SiMing's disdain for the new oriental woman and the desire for Western openness.

Compared with Lu Xun, Mu Shiying's three short stories about tobacco are creating a more ambiguous atmosphere. Camel and Craven A put the visual center of the male protagonist's gaze on the beautiful feet, which is the origin of lust. The male protagonists associate the smoking style of women with their imaginary personality. That smoke as a clue slowly reveals their true inner feelings in the story. Camel takes place in the cafe where literati enjoy and which is also a typical street building in urban era. In this small space, the interior is soaked with the incense of coffee beans, and the western-style dressed woman takes a puff and over-sweeten her coffee. He has been stalking her for many days. On the surface, he is curious and resentful about her unsatisfactory way of smoking and drinking coffee. In fact, he is exploring the personality behind this strange way. He is absolutely obsessed by her after finding out her erudite on cigarette, coffee and wine. It is believed to be a "covet" of a fresh new exonerate urban life via a glimpse of a new fashionable occidentalized woman. For Craven A, HuiXian reveals two contradictory personalities, depend on smoking or not. Only does she smoke can she betray her weary soul masqueraded by the extravagant orgy in urban city: a 20-year-old body and a fifty-year-old soul. HuiXian’s secular thoughts expressed her intoxication and loss in urban life. Smoking guided her to outpour the struggle of spirit and life.

As for Etiquette and Hygiene, the connection between smell and city is even more obvious. At the end of Huangpu Beach, there is a district of foreigners with the beam of sunlight and fresh scent of grass. Few blocks away lie the local area with a mixture of grease and body odor. The smell distinguishes the class and slashes the city by half. The male protagonist is disgusted but can't help to go to the Chinese brothel. He longs for order and cleanliness but is also desperate for lust. In addition, his office is warm even without heating because of the large number of customers. The melancholia of spring, coupled with the scent of perfume rouge and human body temperature, he had his teenage dream by thinking of a young woman with a dimple on left face. It’s common sense that people shouldn’t visit other people's homes or enter other people's rooms casually. I think it has something to do with smell. A place where a person lives for a long time will have her own scent which can be traced back to what she has experienced: cooking smell, medicinal scent, perfume and excretion odor. The untreated odor in space is like a body odor patient without a deodorant, showing a person's nude state in front of others.

There is one detail in Craven A and Etiquette and Hygiene. The female protagonists’ eye color could be light gray and green. I think this detail serves as the same way as going to a coffee shop, smoking an imported cigarette and dancing in a ballroom. It is a yearning for exotic experience. It is not necessarily the true color of their eye, but perhaps is the deliberate design of the protagonist's sexual fantasies on foreign women.