Smell and Spirit in ‘The Palace of Shattered Vessels’ by David Shahar

Abstract

This paper addresses olfactory representations in David Shahar’s ‘The Palace of Shattered Vessels’. It offers a novel approach to Shahar’s work by introducing an alternative way of reading through analysis of sensory representations. Literary representations of sensory experiences, including smell, are complex constructs charged with significance. Their meaning may be individual or collective, culturedependent or universal. This makes sensory representations the vehicles of complex meanings.

In David Shahar’s unique poetics the distinctions dissolve between material and spiritual, concrete and numinous, real and symbolic. For example, the smell of stone represents Jerusalem, the smell of wood represents France, and together with more fragrances they elicit a ‘manifestation of the spirit’ – a moment of religious epiphany. Shahar relates good and bad smells to moral stances rather than to physical sources, and also describes smells that do not exist in reality. In his work smell is not a physical quality but an attribute of morality that symbolizes a spiritual and mental essence. In this essence personal and national values blend beyond distinction. While representations of light in Shahar’s work refer to Jewish mysticism, olfactory representations hint at a pre-Jewish past and Christian- European culture.