Perfume+-+How+is+Grenouille's+character+established?

=(References are to the Vintage ed.)=


 * BABY GRENOIULLE**

P4 - 'Here, then, on the most putrid spot in the whole kingdom, Jean-Baptiste Grenoiulle was born on July 17, 1738...'

P5 - The bloody meat that emerged had not differed greatly from the fish guts that lay there already...'

P6 - 'It was too greedy, they said, sucked as much as two babies, deprived the other sucklings of milk...'

P7 - 'He (the officer) got rid of him (Grenouille) at the cloister of Saint-Merri..."

=WHAT SIGNIFICANCE DO GRENOUILLE'S ORIGINS HAVE? CAN WE COMPARE THE ORIGINS OF NOBORU OR THE CHIEF FROM //SAILOR?//=


 * GRENOUILLE'S MOTHER**... AND SURROGATE MOTHER

P5 - 'Her sense of smell had been utterly dulled...'

P 5 - 'She only wanted the pain to stop, she wanted to put this revolting birth behind her as quickly as possible. It was her fifth. She had effected all the others here at the fish both, and all had been stillbirths or semi-stillbirths ... by evening the whole mess had been shoveled away and carted off to the graveyard or down to the river.'

P5 - 'It would be much the same this day, and Grenoiulle's mother, who was still a young woman, barely in her mid-twenties, and who was still quite pretty and had almost all her teeth in her mouth and some hair on her head and - except for gout and syphilis and a touch of consumption - suffered from no serious disease, who still hoped to live a while yet, perhaps a good five or ten years, and perhaps even to marry one day and as the honourable wife of widower with a trade or some such to bear real children...'

P19 - 'Madame Gaillard's life already lay behind her, though she was not yet thirty years old... on the inside she was long dead. When she was a child, her father had struck her across the forehead with a poker, just above the base of the nose, and she had lost for good all sense of smell and every sense of human warmth and and human coldness - indeed, every human emotion...'

P20 - '...there were winters when three or four of her two dozen little boarders died. Still her record was considerably better than that of most other private foster mothers and surpassed by far the record of the great public and ecclesiastical orphanages, where the losses often came to nine out of ten.... Paris produced over ten thousand new foundlings, bastards, and orphans a year. Several such losses were quite affordable.'

=CAN WE DETECT AN AUTHORIAL VOICE HERE? IS GRENOIULLE'S MOTHER BLAMED FOR THE FATE OF HER CHILD? IF NOT HER, THEN WHO? HOW DOES SHE COMPARE TO FUSAKO AS A MODEL OF MOTHERHOOD? ARE THESE WOMEN USED AS VEHICLES FOR A SOCIAL CRITIQUE? IS THERE A COMPARABLE CRITIQUE IN //SAILOR//?=


 * GRENOUILLE IN VERY EARLY CHILDHOOD**

P9 - 'He looks good. Rosy pink and well nourished.' 'Because he's stuffed himself on me. Because he's pumped me dry down to the bones.

P16 - Then the child awoke. Its nose awoke first... The eyes were of an uncertain colour, between oyster gray and creamy opal white, covered with a slime of film and apparently not very well adapted for sight...The timy wings of flesh around the two tiny holes in the child's face swelled like a bud opening to bloom. Or rather, like the cups of that small meat-eating plant that was kept in the royal botanical gardens... It seemed to Terrier as if the child saw him with its nostrils... He felt naked and ugly... His most tender emotions, his filthiest thoughts lay exposed to that greedy little nose... A strange, cold creature lay there on his knees, a hostile animal, and were he not a a man by nature prudent, God-fearing, and given to reason, in the rush of nausea he would have hurled it like a spider from him... (he) cast his clothes from him as if they were foully soiled, washed himself from head to foot, and crept into bed in his cell, crossing himself repeatedly, praying long, and finally with some relief falling asleep.'

P20 - 'He was as tough as a resistant bacterium and as content as a tick sitting quietly on a tree and living off a tiny drop of blood plundered years before... He was an abomination from the start...'

P22 / 23 - 'The other children, however, sensed at once what Grenouille was about... He disgusted them the way a fat spider that you can't bring yourself to crush in your own hand disgusts you... They probably realised that he could not be destroyed...'

P23 - 'He gave the world nothing but his dung...'

=HOW DOES GRENOUILLE FORCE TERRIER TO RETHINK HIS RATIONAL ENLIGHTENMENT IDEALS? WHAT DOES THIS SUGGEST ABOUT HIS CHARACTER AND HIS ROLE IN THE NOVEL? WHAT IMAGERY IS BEING USED TO CONSTRUCT HIS CHARACTER? IS IMAGERY USED TO CONSTRUCT THE CHARACTERS OF ANY OF THE CHILDREN IN //SAILOR//?=

P24 - "He (Grenouille) was less concerned with verbs, adjectives, and expletives. Except for 'yes' and 'no' - which, by the way, he used for the first time quite late - he used only nouns, and essentially only nouns for concrete objects, plants, animals, human beings, - and only then if the objects, plants, animals, or human beings would subdue him with a sudden attack of odor.'

P24 - 'He had closed his eyes and did not stir. He saw nothing, he heard nothing, he he felt nothing. He only smelled the aroma of the wood... perhaps a half hour or more (later), he coughed up the word 'wood'.

P25 - And so he learned to speak. With words designating non-smelling objects, with abstract ideas and the like, especially those of an ethical or moral nature, he had the greatest difficulty. He could not retain them, confused them with one another, and even as an adult used them unwillingly and often incorrectly: justice, conscience, God, joy, responsibility, humility, gratitude, etc. - what these were meant to express remained a mystery to him.'

=IS GRENOUILLE THE PRODUCT OR SYMBOL OF A CERTAIN PHILOSOPHY OR WAY OF VIEWING THE UNIVERSE? IS HE A VEHICLE FOR THE WRITER'S VIEWS? IS HE A PERSONIFICATION OF AN EMPIRICIST WORLD VIEW? ARE THERE CHARACTERS IN //SAILOR// WHO, IN PART, EMBODY A PHILOSOPHY?= = = = = =Back to Perfume Page= =Back to World Lit=