The Smell of Success - A Reassessment of Perfume - South Atlantic Modern Language Association

South Atlantic Modern Language Association
The Smell of Success: A Reassessment of Patrick Süskind's "Das Parfum"

Author(s): Bruce E. Fleming
Source: South Atlantic Review, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Nov., 1991), pp. 71-86
Published by: South Atlantic Modern Language Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3200522
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The Smell of Success: A Reassessment of
Patrick Siiskind's Das Parfum
BRUCE E. FLEMING
DESPITE (OR PERHAPS BECAUSE OF) the huge international

success of Patrick Suiskind's first novel, Das Parfum (Perfume), the
initial critical reactions to it in the English-speaking world were less
than universally enthusiastic. In contrast to the German critics, who
had pointed out the work's strangely unashamed echoes of a good
deal of German romantic literature through appropriation of lan-
guage and implicit plot quotations (reactions well documented in the
article by Judith Ryan that I will be considering in some detail below)
those critics working from the English translation of John E. Woods
largely confined their attention to the work's plot. And it was here
that they encountered problems.
This plot may best be summarized as follows: a human freak of
nature, named Grenouille, is born in eighteenth-century Paris. He
himself emits no odor, but he senses smells outside of him with
extraordinary acuity. Orphaned, unloved, and apprenticed to a series
of tradesmen, he ends up as the helper to a perfume maker named
Baldini, a has-been hack who comes to depend on his apprentice's
genius in creating perfumes to sustain his reputation. Disappointed
by the emptiness of exercising his prodigious talents as a maker of
perfumes for other people, Grenouille decides-after a seven-year
hiatus in a cave-that his goal in life will be the collation of the essences
of individual women, caught in wax and then distilled like the per-
fumes of flowers. The murders he must commit to produce these
essences get him thrown into jail and almost executed-and, along
the way, provide the subtitle of the book: Geschichte eines Mdrders
(Story of a Murderer). By applying a single drop of the amalgam
perfume of the essences, however, he avoids execution and becomes
72 Bruce E. Fleming
the rage of the city; shortly thereafter, however, he douses himself

with it and throws himself into a crowd of beggars, who eat him.
Reviewers of the English translation seemed by and large unable
to find any central principle to explain these doings. Indeed, the
critical reaction was not only mixed, but unable to arrive at a consen-
sus regarding the nature of the object of criticism. A number of
reviewers dealt with the plot by simply summarizing it, such as
Michael Gorra, writing in the Hudson Review. In addition, Gorra
betrayed his perceptual uncertainty by firmly straddling the fence in
both his description of the work and his evaluation of it, writing that
Perfume "is the sort of book that must be either a great triumph or a
great failure," given that it is a "bestseller blend of historical recon-
struction, trash Gothic fantasy, and political allegory" (136). Robert
Adams, in the New York Review of Books, was more decisive; he ob-
jected to the central realization scene in the cave, thought the plot as
a whole "a good deal of stuffing" and dismissed the book as "a
ridiculously improbable piece of verbal claptrap" (26).
To be sure, Adams was not totally against trying to explain these
puzzling plot twists, suggesting that the book was an allegory of the
Third Reich. Yet, he concluded, "as allegory, it is more portentous
than clear" (26). John Updike, writing in the New Yorker, toyed with
the idea that the work might be fabular, but devoted most of his
review to criticizing the plot as unconvincing; for him the ending was
especially so. He suggested that, instead, it is "the authenticity ... of
the historical background, and the fascinating elucidation of the
procedures of perfume-making... [that] carry us quite pleasurably
along" (124). Updike's puzzlement was clear in his conclusion that
"we close the book with the presumably postmodern sensation of
having been twitted" (125).
Puzzlement and variation were the order of the day as well in the
Anglophone formulations of the book's literary antecedents. Lee
Lescaze, writing in the Wall Street Journal, compared the book to
goings-on in the Brothers Grimm; Peter Ackroyd, considering it in the
New York Times Book Review, thought of Dracula and Oscar Wilde; the
word "gothic" was widely used. Disagreements arose as to the impli-
cations of these perceptions. Was the book principally concerned with
our lives in the here and now (as Ackroyd suggested)? Or was it
"essentially escapist" (so Michael Hofmann in the Times Literary Supple-
ment)?
In a recent, highly persuasive article, Judith Ryan proposes a
reading of this book that, at first glance, would seem to render useless
such second-hand reactions. Her position is that Perfume, or rather-
South Atlantic Review 73
and this is her point--the German original, Das Parfum, is most

essentially an example of pastiche-a technique related to parody
that she places squarely in its postmodern context and defends from
those who would find it (merely) derivative. Indeed, she suggests
that a reevaluation of pastiche would "force a revision of literary
values derived from the period around 1800: notions of genius, origi-
nality, and universality" (397). More specifically, her application of
this to Siiskind leads to the following conclusion:
The pastiche technique of Das Parfum is a deliberate strat-

egy that has important ideological implications, especially
in the German-speaking countries where the canon it both
resurrects and criticizes has still not been subjected to the
kind of searching analysis that has been taking place on
this side of the Atlantic. (402)
For Ryan, the technique of Das Parfum explains not only its style
but also its plot, which she sees as a kind of retelling in brief of two
centuries of art theory. She charts as follows the life curve of the
protagonist Grenouille:
From his early definition as an illegitimate nobody from

the eighteenth-century underclass, he passes through a
phase of Romantic dualism, then a phase of aestheticist
dissolution, and finally he emerges as a postmoden can-
nibalized self. (401)
Thus, for Ryan,
The final scene, in which Grenouille is torn apart and

eaten up by the crowd, enacts the central paradox of the
novel, poised as it is on a brink between transcendence
and critique.... Literature is simultaneously "essential-
ized" and placed into a more critical context.... (401)
Ryan's reading of the novel leads almost inexorably to the conclu-

sion that, lacking a knowledge of the original, the Anglophone critics
who had to react to the book were simply missing the point, as
indeed, anyone who read it in translation would be bound to do-
tending, for example, to see the initial evocation of Paris as successful
realism rather than the echo of Baudelaire and Rilke she suggests it is
(400). In fact, a reading-in-translation of this work such as the review-
74 Bruce E. Fleming
ers cited above were obliged to undertake can actually help a critic
see an aspect of the work that may well be concealed beneath the so
carefully woven drapery of its language, namely, its fundamental
acceptance, at the level of the barest bones of its plot, of precisely
those romantic notions that Ryan holds it to have transcended.
To be sure, I will be suggesting that the particular expression of
these romantic ideas closest to that of Das Parfum is found in the
works of those disaffected romantics, the modernists; the text from
which I will be quoting most heavily is Thomas Mann's "Tonio Kr6ger,"
a Bildungsnovelle (as we might call it) of the artist as Biirger which
offers a redefinition of the rules by which the romantic artist should
relate to society in order to survive in the modem age, while at the
same time reaffirming his/her essentially unchanged nature. The
view that the modernists can profitably be seen as the legitimate
inheritors of the romantics is, I believe, uncontroversial today. Even
Edmund Wilson, back in 1931, saw that this was the case, and the
point has since been driven home by Frank Kermode in Romantic
Image and by M. H. Abrams in Natural Supernaturalism (ch. 8). My
claim is thus that the text not only "resurrects" (Ryan's word) but also
reiterates (which is to say: valorizes, agrees with) romantic concep-
tions of the artist still very much current in the works of Mann, as well
as those of Proust, to which I will also be referring.
I propose, therefore, that Das Parfum/Perfume, when looked at in
the skeletal form of a series of events, reveals itself to be a parable of
the romantic artist. In using the word "parable" here I am, of course,
attempting the same sort of taxonomic reassessment that Ryan did; I
say parable rather than pastiche, but both are understood as an
alternative to the realistic novel as perfected by Austen, Dickens,
Balzac, and Tolstoy. Yet my choice of term expresses a different
relation to romanticism than that which Ryan suggests. She acknow-
ledges that romanticism is the source of a good number of the literary
echoes of this work; my claim is instead that it is only romantic
paradigms that can give us any explanation at all for the largest
patterns of the plot. Such paradigms, moreover, are something we
must dig for; they are not to be found on the surface, as are the echoes
of romanticism on which she bases her analysis of pastiche. Stiskind
may be parodying the phrases of romanticism, but because its para-
digms inform even his own work, he is not parodying its most
fundamental notions.
The romantic backbone of this work (for one almost hesitates to
call it a novel) is, in my view, neither revised, superseded, nor decon-
structed by the pastiche-laden flesh of language that forms the body
of the book. Nonetheless, Ryan's claim that it is postmodernist in its

flesh is, in my view, by no means incompatible with my assertion that
it remains romantic in skeleton. For if modernism is both an assimi-
lation of and rebellion against romanticism, it is clear as well that
postmodernism stands in the same relation with respect to modern-
ism, presupposing at its core the notions of "genius, originality, and
universality" that it inherits from romanticism (via modernism) at the
same time that it puts them into question on the surface.
The reading of Das Parfum as postmodernist pastiche leaves, as I
say, unexplained the principal pattern of plot progression-a prob-
lem I will turn to below. Yet it also leaves unanswered a number of
the most immediately obvious questions that occur to us with respect
to the book-most obvious, at any rate, if we turn aside from its
intoxicating language or from counting its literary allusions. And it is
precisely these questions that provide the first prima facie evidence of
the book's fundamentally romantic (or modernist/romantic) core. The
two most immediate of these questions are undoubtedly the follow-
ing: first, why is the subject matter of this book the sense of smell?
And second, why is it set in the eighteenth century? I believe that a
reading of this work as romantic at the core provides us with an
answer to both of these questions.
We arrive at an answer to the first by considering the work's status
as a parable of the artist. Frank Kermode points out, in The Genesis of
Secrecy, that we make sense out of parables by constructing a generic
story of which the particular sequence of events we are dealing with
seems to be an example. This postulated generic level links the
specific happenings we are attempting to understand to yet another
set of specifics, where the "real" subject of the parable is to be found.
(Of course, disagreement can arise concerning just what second set of
specifics is implied-for with proper mediation through a genre,
many candidates for meaning can be proposed.) If Das Parfum is in
fact a parable of the artist, it therefore seems intuitively right for
Siiskind to have given it a protagonist who deals in sense impres-
sions; after all, artists also deal in such impressions. This provides the
generic similarity for the two sets of specifics (here artist and Grenouille)-
the unspoken commonality to which, in Kermode's view, we appeal in
interpreting parables. The fact that Grenouille's developed sense is that
of smell is important as well. For had he been gifted in one of the
senses which already possesses a related art form, it would be pre-
cisely his divergence from the situation of the artist in that medium
that would be foregrounded. As a result, it would be impossible to
see his story as a parable of the artist.
76 Bruce E. Fleming
We note too that smell is the only sense for which a specific art
form remains to be developed. The art form corresponding to hearing
is music, and the art forms of sight are painting, sculpture, film: the
visual arts. Perhaps great chefs or (even better) winemakers are
artists of taste. And can we even conceive of an art that exploits
primarily the sense of touch? The hero of a parable about the artist
must, therefore, be a master of that one sense for which there do not
exist, in the popular imagination, artists: smell. And Grenouille is
precisely such an artist.
We must take for granted Siiskind's decision to set the work in a
recognizable time and place rather than in the generic landscape of
the New Testament parables; given that there is a precise setting,
however, we can explain as follows why he chose this particular one.
(I am referring to the aspect that so many readers found charming-
its "realistic" evocation of eighteenth-century Paris.) The reading of
this text as a parable of the romantic artist gives us a way of making
sense of the setting without appealing to whatever autobiographical
meaning the country may have for the author. No other country
besides France offers so handy a means of marking an absolute
dividing line between the classical order and the romantic era, for this
break was marked in France by a political revolution. Thus this
setting would be particularly appropriate if the work is in fact a
parable of the romantic artist. Of course, in saying this I seem to be
leaving out of account the prerevolutionary French romantics or
protoromantics such as Rousseau, whose influence links both the
pre- and postrevolutionary eras. Yet my point is not that romanticism
is absolutely separated from classicism in France, only that the de-
marcation seems more distinct there than elsewhere.
As for the time, we remember Kermode's rules for parables and see
that it was a felicitous decision on Siiskind's part to set his work before
that revolution which made possible artists who conform to the
parable that Grenouille lives out. Set after the Revolution, Grenouille's
attributes could no longer be used to construct a parable of the
artist-for then the reader would sense, as I have suggested above,
the divergence between the now-viable situation of the romantic artist
and Grenouille's situation. (Perfume-making is not really art, at least not
for the romantic imagination.) At the same time, however, it seems
"right" that the time of the novel should be so short a time before the
Revolution, so that this protoromantic protagonist does not seem
merely an anachronism. If Das Parfum is to be a parable of the artist
expressed in historical terms, therefore, it must be exactly what it is:
the story of someone unnaturally gifted in smelling, living in France
before the Revolution. And this is precisely the reason why, thinking
backwards from the book to the interpretation, we should conclude
that it probably is such a parable.
It is equally clear, continuing to use as our matrix for interpretation
the hypothesis that we are dealing with a parable of the romantic
artist, that Grenouille himself may emit no odor-and this Siiskind
has foreseen as well. For such a state mirrors the nature of the
romantic (as well as the postromantic) artist: he himself is alienated
from the world, and it is for this reason that he perceives that world
with such acuity. Thus the combination of Grenouille's own lack of
odor with his ability to sense others' odors with superhuman preci-
sion seems appropriate when understood with the aid of the reading
I am proposing here. This particular combination of qualities none-
theless worried John Updike, who (writing for the New Yorker)
thought them unrelated, even antithetical. I propose, however, that
they are antithetical but not unrelated; the contradiction is in the state
being described, not in the fiction describing it.
In fact the notion of the artist as someone defined by precisely this
antithetical combination has been stated most clearly by Thomas
Mann in "Tonio Kr6ger," one of the clearest statements we possess of
the symbiotic contradictions of the postromantic artist's existence.
Tonio, we recall, is caught between the two worlds exemplified in his
name. "Tonio" comes from his mother, dark-haired, passionate, and
southern. "Krager" comes from his stem high-bourgeois father, con-
sul in the cold north. And fittingly enough, it is in the exact center of
the novella where Tonio makes clearest the contrasts and contradic-
tions of being an artist-in his case, a writer-in an era when outward
rebellion no longer sufficed to express the artist's still-powerful sense
of romantic alienation.
He is talking to his friend, the painter Lisabeta Ivanovna, who has
made fun of his bourgeois-correct clothing. And during the soliloqy
he offers in response, he tells her, "'Es ist notig, daB man irgend etwas
AulBermenschliches und Unmenschliches sei, daig man zum Mensch-
lichen in einem seltsam femen und unbeteiligten VerhAiltnis stehe,
um imstande und iiberhaupt versucht zu sein, es zu spielen, damit zu
spielen, es wirksam und geschmackvoll darzustellen"' "The artist
must be unhuman, extra-human; he must stand in a queer aloof
relationship to our humanity; only so is he in a position, I ought to say
only so would he be tempted, to represent it, to present it, to portray
it to good effect."' Naturally, Tonio is not totally pleased with this
situation: "'Ich sage Ihnen, daB ich es oft sterbensmiide bin, das
Menschliche darzustellen, ohne am Menschlichen teilzuhaben... Ist
78 Bruce E. Fleming
der Kiinstler iiberhaupt ein Mann? Man frage 'das Weib' danach!
Mir scheint, wir Kiinstler teilen alle ein wenig das Schicksal jener
priiparierten paipstlichen Siinger ... Wir singen ganz riihrend sch6n.
Jedoch--' " "I tell you I am sick to death of depicting humanity without
having any part or lot in it.... Is an artist a male, anyhow? Ask the
females! It seems to me we artists are all of us something like those
unsexed papal singers ... we sing like angels; but--"' (295-97; 99).
The parallel of Grenouille to Tonio becomes more striking when
Grenouille decides that he must seek out the perfumer Baldini. For
there are two things he wants from this man. In becoming an appren-
tice perfumer, Grenouille will acquire what Tonio so cherished, the
"Mantel einer buirgerlichen Existenz" 'cloak of middle-class respect-
ability.' The second, though perhaps more central, thing he is looking
for is "die Kenntnis jener handwerklichen Verfahren, nach denen man
Duftstoffe herstellte, isolierte, konzentrierte, konservierte und somit fiir
eine h6here Verwendung fiberhaupt erst verfiigbar machte" 'the
knowledge of the craft itself, the way in which scents were produced,
isolated, concentrated, preserved, and thus first made available for
higher ends' (121; 111). Tonio too understands perfectly well the
difference between emotion and form, or between sensibility and the
finished work: many people--such as the poetry-writing lieutenant
he so despises--have the first attribute in each of these pairs, yet it
is only artists who can move from emotion or sensibility to the
formed work of art.
The scene in Das Parfum in which this relation between sensibility
and expression, talent and technique, is expressed most clearly is the
moment when Grenouille replicates by smell alone a perfume that all
of Baldini's precise measurements have failed to copy. Technique
without genius--such as Baldini's-is, we see, empty. Yet on the
other hand, it is Baldini who knows that, if he cannot get Grenouille
to write down precise measurements, this moment of genius will
be lost forever. And it is, after all, the hack Baldini who teaches
Grenouille precision.
Nonetheless, if Suiskind realizes that Baldini and his kind are
necessary to serve as a counterbalance to the fervor of the artist as
well as to provide a buffer against the world, such a realization does
not eliminate what seems to be his resentment of people such as
Baldini. The delirious pages where he has Baldini imagine the mone-
tary future that is his if Grenouille remains alive and working make
this clear, as does Siiskind's withering portrayal of the priest, who
presents such a contrast to the astute though illiterate wet-nurse (only
the latter is aware of the truth about Grenouille, realizing that the
child is somehow evil because he does not emit an odor). The negative
portrayal of the priest suggests that rationality is the least powerful
of the faculties: a commonplace in romantic and modernist works as
well. Wordsworth, after all, knew that science has to murder before it
can dissect. And we have only to look at Yeats's snide but apparently
heartfelt poem 'The Scholars" to see another version of the same
duality: poetry is written by ardent young men; scholars of that
poetry are dried-out prigs.
Awareness of duality is also behind the brief essay Siiskind offers
early on in Das Parfum on the relation between words and reality. The
child Grenouille, in that Urszene for eighteenth-century philosophers
of civilization, is learning to speak. However, he utters his first
word--"wood"--only in order to save himself from the odor of the
object in itself that has threatened to overwhelm him. Smell, we
understand--or by extension all our senses-is reality; words are
useful not because they link us with reality, but because they distance
us from it. When, days later, Grenouille is threatened by the memory
of this overpowering smell, he wards it off by merely saying "wood,
wood." Yet without words we cannot communicate with others; nor
can we get our bearings in a world populated by others. Like the
Wittgenstein of the Philosophische Untersuchungen, Siiskind believes
that there are no private languages--yet the public languages we
have are lies. The artist is caught perennially between the twin threats
of incomprehensibility for others and deformation of his innermost
being. (Another name that comes to mind here is Bergson: the inner
is true, the social is unreal.)
The pattern of Siiskind's book as a whole is that of a number of
climaxes, comprehensible (once again) only if we see them as periods
of artistic crisis that Grenouille resolves, at least for a time, by engag-
ing in an act of formed expression. I count three such principal
climaxes, all of which follow upon crises of artistic expression. All
three are characterized by periods of isolation that end in a (perverse)
return to the world of humans; and they occur in a scale of increasing
seriousness. Grenouille's life, that is, alternates between periods in
which he is immersed in his subjective self in the fashion of a roman-
tic visionary of the type of (say) Novalis or Nerval and those in which
the ineluctable attraction to humanity of a Tonio Kr6ger becomes
predominant-a kind of dialectic of romanticism and modernism, the
latter itself presupposing the former.
The first such crisis and resolution is that which results, almost
incidentally, in the first murder Grenouille commits. He has been
working for a tanner, during which time it has not been clear that he
80 Bruce E. Fleming
would survive: his working conditions are bitterly hard and he has
contracted anthrax to boot. When it becomes clear that he is in fact
going to outlive both his circumstances and the anthrax, he is seized
with an irresistible urge to "hunt" in the city of Paris, which is "[d]as
gr588te Geruchsrevier der Welt" '[t]he greatest preserve for odors in
all the world' (43; 38).
This is Grenouille's first opening to the world of scent, the occasion
of his first real freedom to indulge his special gift. Like all those who
have been deprived of something, he overindulges upon attaining it.
As a result he is quickly in danger of losing his moorings: "Und auch
in der synthetisierenden Geruchskiiche seiner Phantasie, in der er
stlindig neue Duftkombinationen zusammenstellte, herrschte noch
kein Aisthetisches Prinzip. Es waren Bizarrerien, die er schuf und
alsbald wieder zerstbrte..., erfindungsreich und destruktiv, ohne
erkennbares sch6pferisches Prinzip" 'But there were no aesthetic
principles governing the olfactory kitchen of his imagination, where
he was forever synthesizing and concocting new aromatic combina-
tions. He fashioned grotesqueries, only to destroy them again imme-
diately, . .. inventive and destructive, with no apparent norms for his
creativity' (48-49; 43). Here Siiskind signals more clearly than usual
that the problem he is dealing with is that of the artist: Grenouille
lacks norms for expression, he is without principles for creation, he is
bereft of a form.
What resolves this crisis of formlessness for Grenouille? It is his
realization that the most fascinating smell of all is that of a human
being, more particularly that of a young girl--precisely the kind of
person that he, as a young man, should in the most common order of
things be attracted to. (This is what leads to Grenouille's first murder:
it turns out that he must strangle the girl in order to get close enough
to smell her fully.) Smells, it seems, do not float aimlessly in the
universe Suiskind has created; they are placed hierarchically with
respect to certain natural principles, even if the particular form they
take involves individual perversion of that order. This adhesion to
natural law seems to explain as well the fact that Grenouille's life-
work takes the form of a perfume made from the collective smells of
twenty-five virgins: at least the objects of his desire are "normal"
ones, even if neither his reason for desiring them nor the way this
desire is expressed is so. Like Tonio Kroger, he is an abnormal person
drawn by normalcy, not a creature from another planet.
Grenouille's second crisis, which takes place after his apprentice-
ship with Baldini, is his longest Yet, following this book along chrono-
logically to test out the reading I am proposing, we will not be
surprised either at the crisis itself nor its duration. In fact, it is

perfectly understandable that, after working for Baldini, Grenouille
would be weary of artistic middlemen, as well as of the very necessity
to (de)form his own intuitions to make them palatable, or even
understandable to others. It is for this reason that he searches for
solitude, finding it only on a deserted mountain where no other
person's scent is present, even in trace form.
It makes sense as well that this episode, which lasts seven years-
coinciding with the Seven Years' War-is the most Proustian section
of the entire novel. (This combination of introversion with political
upheaval is a version of the same ironic juxtaposition of the personal
with the political that Grass used so successfully in Die Blechtrommel.)
For by now Grenouille has been in the world for a while-long
enough to store up some memories. And Siiskind, or at least Grenouille,
shares with Proust the conviction that the recollection of reality is
better than the experience of it, because recollection is under the
control of the individual. Memory, moreover, is impervious to change
and dissolution-as things in the real world, such as scents, are not. And
this evanescence of reality is something that has worried Grenouille
from the beginning.
In the solitude of his pitch-dark cave, Grenouille calls up from
memory the smells he has captured. We think the more readily of
Proust in this section (particularly the passages on reading in Du c6td
de chez Swann and Jean Santeuil, the latter cannibalized in a preface to
Ruskin published in English as "On Reading") in that Siiskind speaks
of them as if they were written in a book, and as if Grenouille were
the reader:
Er preBte seinen Riicken gegen die weichen Kissen des

Kanapees, schlug ein Buch auf und begann, in seinen
Erinnerungen zu lesen. Er las von den Geriichen seiner
Kindheit, von den Schulgeriichen.... Und angenehme
Schauer durchrieselten ihn, denn es waren durchaus die
verhaf3ten Geriche, die exterminierten, die da beschworen
wurden. (165-66)
He pressed his back against the soft cushions of his sofa,

opened a book, and began to read from his memoirs. He read
about the odors of his childhood, of his schooldays. ... And
a pleasant shudder washed over him, for the odors he now
called up were indeed those that he despised, that he had
exterminated. (157)
82 Bruce E. Fleming
The pleasant shudder, instead of an unpleasant one, is the result of

the shaping hand of memory--or of art. Grenouille, in short, is
sufficient to himself. He is compared by Siiskind to an emperor and
even to God himself; clearly Grenouille believes that he has solved
his artistic problem forever through solitude, believes that his self-
sufficiency will never rupture. But of course it does, when the pendu-
lum of self and others that ticks in the postromantic artist swings back
once again to the pole of the other. And it is this that produces the
second crisis, far more severe than the first, and the longest in dura-
tion of the three. For Grenouille realizes that the danger of this
solipsistic feeding off one's self is in the loss of form. Form is provided
only by others and gives balance and pattern to one's feelings and
perceptions--even, it seems, to one's memory. He comes to this
realization after a dream in which he senses "diese graitliche Angst
des An-sich-selbst-Erstickens" 'the ghastly fear of suffocating on him-
self' and imagines himself enveloped in a fog (175; 167). He senses,
that is, the same miasmic formlessness holding us off from others that
has threatened him in Paris as an adolescent. Suddenly the seven-
year orgy on the contents of his own memory is over, and once again
he is dumped out into the real world, a world unlike that of his own
memory, for "die Zeit nahm kein Ende, die Zeit, in der ihm die wirkliche
Welt auf der Haut brannte" 'time would not end, time in which the real
world scorched his skin' (168; 159). Certainly Proust would have under-
stood this; perhaps the great modernist was spared having to leave the
cork-lined room simply because he, unlike Grenouille, never com-
pletely finished his book.
For the first time, moreover, Grenouille is upset that he himself has
no smell. Yet the problem cannot be this circumstance alone; surely it
would have been clear to him from his birth. Rather it is only now
that this becomes worthy of comment-and something to worry
about. For only now does he want to be like other human beings, all
of whom have scents. Like Tonio Kroger, Grenouille is bothered by
his own neutrality, his status of outsider with respect to the affairs of
human beings. And it is for this reason that he comes down from the
mountain, creating for himself a scent like a human's.
For Grenouille, the acknowledgement of this desire to belong is
progress. Tonio, who is not a character in a parable and who is
moreover considerably smarter than Grenouille, knows from the
beginning that he is attracted to the blond, rather stupid Northerners.
"Zu sein wie du .. ." '"To be like you ... ,"'he says of his first "love,"
Hans Hansen, even as a child (276; 80). But at the same time he
despises such people: they are, after all, too dull to understand his
books-though this is precisely why he loves them. It is only now that

a version of this same conflict breaks out in Grenouille: he is attracted
to human beings, but he hates them at the same time. Like Tonio
Kr6ger, who in becoming an artist earns the goodwill of others that
he is not sure he deserves, Grenouille decides that the one thing
which will satisfy him is to be loved. And this he will accomplish
through his own efforts, through the creation of a smell that will
make him lovable: 'Ja, lieben sollten sie ihn, wenn sie im Banne seines
Duftes standen, nicht nur ihn als ihresgleichen akzeptieren, ihn lieben bis
zum Wahnsinn, ... weinen vor Wonne ...,wenn sie nur ihn, Grenouille,
zu riechen bekamen!" 'Yes, that was what he wanted--they would
love him as they stood under the spell of his scent, not just accept him
as one of them, but love him to the point of insanity, ... weep for bliss
... merely to be able to smell him, Grenouille!' (198; 189).
The definition of self through something that self has created is the
enterprise of the romantic and postromantic artist--indicating what
we might almost call the desire to be accepted not for one's self
(impossible, given the split of self from world that is at the fundament
of romanticism) but instead in a mediated fashion, through one's
creations. It is, at any rate, precisely this that motivates Grenouille's
subsequent twenty-four murders. Like the first, they are the product
of a channeling of his artistic urges into a form that involves other
human beings. For the women he kills are the most beautiful, the
most desirable, creatures known to humans. (It is clear that, here, this
means "known to men": the point of view of this book, like that of
most slashers, is irremediably male.) Their deaths are incidental to
this design: that of becoming something other than what one is--of
making one's self (as Gertrude Stein put it) historical. Because the
murders are means rather than end, the subtitle of the book is ironic.
For the world outside, Grenouille is a murderer; the irony is that he
will be remembered for his social identity rather than for the inner
truth that explains it.
Of course, this attempt to make one's self historical is doomed to
failure. On the day when Grenouille unveils his superperfume, his
execution day, it drives the people in the crowd wild; an orgy is
celebrated "ihm zu Ehren und in seinem Namen. .... Ein Wink von
ihm, und alle wuirden ihrem Gott abschwdren und ihn, den GroBen
Grenouille anbeten" 'in his honor and his name. A nod of his head
and they would all renounce their God and worship him, Grenouille
the Great' (305; 292). He has triumphed: he is loved, and completely
so. Yet at the same time he is, of course, excluded from this orgy, and
this precisely because he has created it Like Tonio, who admires
84 Bruce E. Fleming
Hans Hansen for not understanding Schiller, like the hero of John
Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse," who sees the workings of the fun-
house and understands all but would still rather be the person having
fun, Grenouille is caught in an impossible position. Yet it is precisely
this position that defines the artist in the postromantic age. Suddenly,
"[w]as er sich immer ersehnt hatte, dal naimlich die andern Men-
schen ihn liebten, wurde ihm im Augenblick seines Erfolges uner-
triiglich, denn er selbst liebte sie nicht, er haste sie" '[w]hat he had
always longed for-that other people should love him--became at
the moment of its achievement unbearable, because he did not love
them himself, he hated them' (305; 292).
Yet how, after all, could he love them? It is he who, in a sense, has
created them--or at least, created their love for him; and only God, it
seems, can love that which he has created. We more imperfect beings
love only what is outside of our reach. Of course, Grenouille's project
has been doomed to failure; the reader knows this, and Grenouille
has had to find it out. What we obtain must disappoint us, precisely
because what we wanted was, in fact, the thing-being-wanted, not
the-thing-obtained. Once again we think of Proust, who realized that
dreaming of Venice was another thing entirely from going there--or
of Woody Allen, who, in Annie Hall, does not want to belong to any
club that would have him as a member.
When even Richis, the father of Grenouille's final victim and the
person who comes closest in the novel to understanding his motives, is
unable to differentiate between Grenouille and his creation, Grenouille
experiences the third and final return of the fog that has terrified him
twice before. And yet this one is the last. After all, where else is there
to turn? The first crisis turns him towards human beings (or more
precisely to their murder) as a form of expression. The second crisis
shows him that he is not sufficient unto himself, and turns him
towards human beings as receivers of art. What is left now that these
creatures have shown themselves unworthy of receiving it? He can-
not even go back to the cave of solipsism: now there is only death.
Grenouille douses himself with the entire bottle of perfume dis-
tilled from the twenty-five virgins (a single drop of which has been
sufficient to inspire the orgy) and returns to Paris, where he is in-
stantly torn apart and eaten by a group of beggars. Perhaps we may
see this as his triumph: finally he succeeds in making contact with
other human beings in a way that he does not control. After all, it is
not merely the perfume that is eaten but his entire body. Or perhaps
this suicide through the overstrong desire created in others is simply
the indication that the artist cannot, in fact, live in his half-and-half
state, part of the world and yet outside of it-that there is no solution
save incomprehension and violent death at the hands of those whom
one would so gladly have loved.
Does Grenouille's death, we wonder, finally manage to solve his
problem? Or is it a despairing gesture of defiance flung at the void?
It is precisely the fact that both of these are possibilities for under-
standing the ending that speaks for a reading of this work in terms of
the ambiguous situation of the postromantic artist: the situation of
greatest triumph is at the same time that of greatest defeat. Such an
ambiguity is undeniably present in the text, but only because the text
relates to a situation in the world that is itself ambiguous. If we do not
read it in this way, we may find it hard to avoid Updike's conclusion
that "the ending is the weakest part" and his imputation of technical
incompetence to the author: "Mr. Siiskind doesn't quite know how to
finish [Grenouille] off" (125).
For that matter, Ryan too finds it likely that we will think this ending
"parodic through and through," a kind of refutation of the romantic
understanding of history as the traces left by great personalities. For as
she points out, citing the novel's opening page, Grenouille is quite
literally "a figure whose particular genius forced him to leave 'keine
Spuren' 'in der Geschichte' ['no traces in history']" (399). Grenouille,
like the text itself, fragments and so disperses in the world. And if we
are not prepared to accept this, Ryan implies that the only alternative
to her reading is in fact to agree with Updike, declaring ourselves
"ready to accuse the novel of an unresolved rift in its structure," given
that the ending is "dramatically different from the historical narrative
with which the novel opened" (399). Yet both Ryan's and Updike's
readings, it seems to me, fail to take account of the extremely logical
linkage of actions in this book: the novel's ending issues inexorably
from the last of three similar, but progressive, attempts to come to
terms with the world. And it is precisely this patterning that makes
sense if we understand the work as a parable, a character study of the
(post)romantic artist.
United States Naval Academy
WORKS CITED
Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature.
New York: Norton, 1971.
Ackroyd, Peter. "A Killer, Haunted by Smells." Rev. of Perfume, by Patrick Siiskind. New
York Times Book Review 21 Sep. 1987: 38.
86 Bruce E. Fleming
Adams, Robert M. "'The Nose Knows." Rev. of Perfume, by Patrick Siiskind. New York
Review of Books 20 Nov. 1986: 24-26.
Gorra, Michael. "Fiction Chronicle." Includes rev. of Perfume, by Patrick Sfiskind.
Hudson Review 40.1 (1987): 136-148.
Hofmann, Michael. Rev. of Perfume, by Patrick Siiskind. Times Literary Supplement 11
Oct. 1985: 1153.
Kermode, Frank The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narratives. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard UP, 1979.
. Romantic Image. London: Routledge, 1986.
Lescaze, Lee. "Holding His Nose and Having a Fit." Rev. of Perfume, by Patrick Siiskind.
Wall Street Journal 3 Dec. 1986: 24.
Mann, Thomas. "Tonio Kr6ger." Erzihlungen; Fiorenza; Dichtungen. Vol. 8 of Gesammelte
Werke in dreizehn Banden. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1974. 271-338.
. "ronio Kr6ger." Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter.
New York: Vintage-Random, 1954. 76-134.
Proust, Marcel. "On Reading." On Reading Ruskin. Ed. and trans. Jean Autret, William
Burford, and Phillip J. Wolfe. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1988. 99-130.
Ryan, Judith. "IThe Problem of Pastiche: Patrick Siiskind's Das Parfum." German Quar-
terly 63.3/4 (1990): 396-403.
Siiskind, Patrick. Das Parfum: Die Geschichte eines M6rders. Zurich: Diogenes, 1985.
. Perfume: The Story ofa Murderer. Trans. John E. Woods. New York: Pocket-Simon
and Schuster, 1987.
Updike, John. "Old World Wickedness." The New Yorker 15 Dec. 1985: 124-26.
Wilson, Edmund. Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930. 1931.
New York: Norton, 1984.

The Smell of Success - A Reassessment of Perfume - South Atlantic Modern Language Association

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South Atlantic Modern Language Association

The Smell of Success: A Reassessment of Patrick Süskind's "Das Parfum"

DESPITE (OR PERHAPS BECAUSE OF) the huge international

the rage of the city; shortly thereafter, however, he douses himself

and this is her point--the German original, Das Parfum, is most

The pastiche technique of Das Parfum is a deliberate strat-

From his early definition as an illegitimate nobody from

Thus, for Ryan,

The final scene, in which Grenouille is torn apart and

Ryan's reading of the novel leads almost inexorably to the conclu-

of the book. Nonetheless, Ryan's claim that it is postmodernist in its

surprised either at the crisis itself nor its duration. In fact, it is

Er preBte seinen Riicken gegen die weichen Kissen des

He pressed his back against the soft cushions of his sofa,

The pleasant shudder, instead of an unpleasant one, is the result of

books-though this is precisely why he loves them. It is only now that

United States Naval Academy

Kermode, Frank The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narratives. Cambridge,

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