Dear csteele,

Word association games are excellent.

There was a time when teachers and researchers perceived
at reading and writing as two quite separate processes.
Reading was seen as "receptive," a passive taking in of
another's ideas, while writing was seen as "productive,"
inviting an active, creative and individually original
construction of ideas.

It's now well accepted that reading is a very active process,
one in which the reader is consistently engaged in making
meaning by bringing to the text his or her own wealth of
linguistic, and real world knowledge.

I may be digressing a bit here - but recent studies have
focused upon the similarities between the processes of
reading and writing, and it's generally agreed that the
two are complimentary aspects of one composing process.
The implications of this for classroom practice are very
exciting: the more children are helped to become aware of
the author's craft in writing, the more skilled and sensitive
children become as readers, the more adept they are likely
to become in putting their own thoughts to paper.

Word games play a vital part in this process. They encourage
the pool of ideas, vocabulary, language structures - and this
will play an inportant part upon which to draw in their
writing. Its all part of their education. In essence, growth
in language is an index of personal growth. From a child's
earliest acquaintance with nursery rhymes, poetry, folk
and fairy tales and picture books the senses of sight, sound
touch, taste and smell are aroused and stimulated:

The Queen of Hearts
She made some tarts
All on a summer's day
The Knave of Hearts
He stole those tarts
And took them clean away

The earliest literature was verbal, and was transmitted orally
through story.

"It seemed to Terrier as if the child saw him with its nostrils, as if it were staring intently at him, scrutinizing him, more piercingly than eyes could ever do, as if it were using its nose to devour something whole, something that came from him, from Terrier, and that he could not hold that something back or hide it" ... "all at once he felt as if he stank, of sweat and vinegar, of choucroute and unwashed clothes. He felt naked and ugly, as if someone were gaping at him while revealing nothing of himself" ... "his most tender emotions, his filthiest thoughts lay exposed".

The late departed Christopher Hitchens in prosecuting his case against religion would often refer to heaven as a ’celestial North Korea’ where every movement, every utterance indeed every thought was known. He thought that would be hell. Well that hell lay before  Father Terrier.

I am obviously putting forward my own thesis about what Suskind was trying to achieve with Perfume. I would love someone to challenge it if they were inclined to do so since I feel I'm getting a little over-indulgent especially since we are only at chapter 3. I’ll happily continue to dissect the entire book because I'm sure to learn more but I feel a tad sheepish.

Dear Lexi,

I agreed with all of your post until "From a child's earliest acquaintance with nursery rhymes, poetry, folk and fairy tales and picture books the senses of sight, sound touch, taste and smell are aroused and stimulated". Is it an over-reach to think that words can stimulate the senses? Perhaps they can help recall in a muted fashion what we may have smelt, or seen, or heard. Rather than the senses isn't it the imagination that is being stimulated?

I like the notion of reading being active, I'm not sure that film would afford the same level of engagement.

Dear csteele,

Perhaps I didn't express myself well. An element essential for
personal growth - can be direct, indirect, or imaginative.
Literature provides a potent source of vicarious experience
and so fires the imagination with sensory and emotive images
to provoke imagined experience. Thus I gave the example -
from a child's earliest acquaintance with nursery rhymes ...
et cetera.

"Charlotte's Web," is redolent of manure and the farmyard,
and follows the sensuous cycle of the seasons. "The Wind
in the Willows," exudes sap and woodland textures, and
the "Book of Wirrun" soars upwards with tumbling wind
waves, whilst below the slopes are dusted with purple, and
the forest rises "gold-edged against the setting sun."

Latent emotion is aroused in the old rhymes, like the
troubling of the waters - "Curly locks, Curly locks, Wilt
thou be mine," and undoubtedly the immediate appeal of
fairy tales is in the poetry of their contained fear and wonder.
In "Treasure Island," the bony clutch of Blind Pew
is an experience to send shudders down the spine.
Often emotional response comes
after a sensory reaction, which is the great strength of
Roald Dahl's writing, as evidenced in his personal story -
"Boy," as well as in his riotously, wickedly and warmly funny
extravagances - "The BFG," and "The Witches."

And all the while the reader's language is being fed and
enriched - not just with the inventive vocabulary of
Dahl's "snozzcumbers," but consider the delight of Pender's
Barnaby in "Barnaby and the Horses," - "What a strong,
snorting, tossing sort of word it was, What a belonging
sort of word."

But enough said.

Ive enjoyed our discussion on this thread - and I look forward
to more discussion on other threads.

Dear Lexi,

I also appear not to have expressed myself well.

I'm not sure the written word can stimulate the senses without our experiences of those senses in action in the real world.

For those who hadn't ever smelt or tasted a tart no amount of writing is going to allow the rhyme you quoted to stimulate the senses in any meaningful manner (remember the task we were given in school of trying to describe the colour red to a blind man).

For those who have, their sensory memories will assist in fleshing out the story, adding much to its meaning. It is the evoking of these memories that help make the story real for the reader or listener.

It can happen, as it did to me, decades later. I spent last weekend down in the Otway ranges in southern Victoria. Deep within them lies a quite magical place, a dense grove of 100 ft high Californian Redwood trees planted in the 1930s.

To enter into them is to leave the noise and the bustle of the world behind. All sounds are muted even the river that runs past seems hushed. The soft light, the bark, the ground cover and the density of the trees serve to cocoon you. Lets leave aside for a moment the fact that they are an aggressive monoculture as simply nothing can grow beneath them.

I have been there numerous times in the past but on this occasion I was with my 9 year old nephew and it didn't take long until we were armed with pretend guns (sticks) and engaged in a stalking game through the forest. It quickly evoked for me the stories of Robin Hood in the Sherwood Forest which at the time of reading didn't seem to ring quite true. As a kid growing up in Australia and South East Asia I had always contended with dry crackling leaves, bark and twigs underfoot, with bull ants if lying in wait.

In this place a person could be walking just meters away and not be heard,

Cont...

Cont...

the soft cover on the ground meant you could lie in absolute comfort and await the unwary, the tree density meant you could easily stay out of others line of sight, and one could easily spring and grab somebody without them being forewarned.

This was the first time in my life I really GOT the whole Sherwood forest thing.

Last year I was given a book about the experiences of a Vietnamese lad in the war assigned to a tree-cutting platoon. The book described a type of single species forest where people enter and never come out. It is so disorientating that they are quickly lost and end up starving to death.

I asked my friend if such forests really exist in Vietnam? His eyes widened and he said “Of course!' and that even today one must be very careful around them. Though the writing was quite powerful his experiences meant the book was orders of magnitude more evocative for him.

So why is Perfume so evocative for us? Look at the quote Poirot provided in the first post;

“the streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of mouldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlours stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber-pots. the stench of sulphur rose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries and from the slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood. People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes, from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth”

Except for the stench of caustic lyes and the congealed blood all the other smells most of us would have experienced, some quite powerfully in our lifetimes. These are not descriptions of Arabian deserts or the Artic wilderness, Suskind's genius perhaps lies more in the choice of subject matter than his writing skills but I am pressed to find a more sensory stimulating novel.

“And all the while the reader's language is being fed and enriched”. Indeed.