The poetics of smell in Carolina Pihelgas’s novel “Looking at the Night”
Keywords: poetics of smell, memory, trauma, mother-daughter relationship, corporeality, sensuousness, affective literature
This article explores the representation of the sense of smell in Carolina Pihelgas’s novel “Looking at the Night” (Vaadates ööd, 2022). Among the senses, smell is particularly difficult to capture in language, often requiring the use of metaphors, comparisons, and figurative expressions. In Pihelgas’s work, smells are not employed merely to describe the environment but also to mediate the characters’ inner lives, memories, traumas, and intergenerational experiences.
The novel consists of three parts, recounting the stories of grandmother, mother, and daughter. Smells weave these narratives together, signifying both personal and historical experiences: they evoke trauma, the ambivalence of the mother-daughter relationship, the preservation of memory, as well as broader political and social conditions. Pihelgas often attributes smells to phenomena that lacks them literally (“the smell of a life drifting meaninglessly”, “the scent of anxiety”), thereby rendering emotions corporeal and poetic. The analysis identifies two types of olfactory descriptions: source-based smells (e.g. of rooms, nature, objects), which create a realistic atmosphere and connect characters to their surroundings; and abstract or poetic smells, which convey feelings, memories, and affective experiences.
The article situates Pihelgas’s poetics within the framework of sensory studies, suggesting that smells contribute to the novel’s emotional tension and its atmosphere of gravity. The poetics of smell functions as a bridge between body, memory, and history, linking intimate, personal experience with cultural and intergenerational trauma.
Piret Põldver (b. 1985), University of Tartu, Chair of Estonian Literature, doctoral student and junior researcher (Ülikooli 16, 51003 Tartu), piret.poldver@gmail.com
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