Lessons

For Roland, smell is not only connected to eroticism and desire—it is also intertwined with power and domination. In one of his first and defining encounters with Miss Cornell, Roland remembers how “[h]er perfume overwhelmed his senses and deafened him […] like a hard object, a smooth river stone, pushing in on his thoughts” (3). Cornell’s perfume and “scent” intoxicates the young Roland, controlling and defining the teaching space as her own, and making him more susceptible to seduction.

At the same time, smell is deeply linked to memory. After Alissa has left him, Roland opens a drawer looking for a document and finds Alissa’s jumpers “folded in their neat piles” (106). He says that “the blossomy scent of her perfume breathed on him again with affection” (106). Smell can evoke the memory of a person in an immediate and powerful way. McEwan suggests that smell, cutting through our rational defenses and our attempts to police our memories, puts us directly in touch with a feeling and a moment in the past. In this way it can also put us in touch with something unexpected about ourselves.

The evocative power of smell does not have to be restricted to a specific person.