Perfume+reviews

[|Review] which discusses (well) the ideas about Romanticism and the Enlightenment encoded in the novel.

=ESSAY BY NICKY GORDON ON ENLIGHTENMENT THEMES (thanks, Nicky!)=


 * How the characters in Perfume relate to the ideas of the Enlightenment**

A number of characters in the novel Perfume represent the conflicts of the Enlightenment, a period of time where new ideas about freedom and scientific method were fighting the older ideas of faith and religion. The conflict between '//faith'// and '//reason//' are represented within the novel with two minor characters; on one end, Baldini represents the old views of the world, before the Enlightenment, while the other extreme, reason, is portrayed through the Marquis that finds Grenouille after his solitude in the cave. Interestingly, neither character is represented positively, making the portrayal of the Enlightenment much more complex than just a criticism of one side of the conflict. Suskind's view of the Enlightenment is probably that reason is better for human development, but emotion will trump reason any time, and the character that best portrays this is the main character and anti-hero of his novel, Grenouille. The main character of Perfume can be seen as an Enlightenment hero, having succeeded through nothing else than his own skill, intelligence and ability to reason, but is still influenced strongly by his emotions, which trump his reason many times throughout the novel.

The simplest view of how the ideas of the Enlightenment is portrayed in the novel is seen through the character Baldini, whose negative portrayal in the novel appears to portray the idea that Suskind is criticizing faith, and the importance of faith in people's lives before the enlightenment. Baldini is a conservative character, believing in a number of old thoughts and ideas. When analyzing his rival Pelassier's perfume, Baldini launches into a long, rambling tirade on the Enlightenment, ridiculing the idea that “syphilis //is a completely normal disease and not a punishment from God//”, amongst many others. By criticizing ideas that modern readers take as fact, Suskind portrays Baldini as a rambling idiot – a portrayal helped with the long paragraphs and quick changes in topic found throughout this section of the novel. Baldini is also not a trustworthy character, as his entire fortune is based off the work of others, including Grenouille. For someone so devoted to his faith, Baldini is quick to find an excuse for his deeds, by calling Grenouille a “//Divine Providence...against Pelassier!//”. Therefore, Baldini is an //ironic// character – through Baldini's beliefs based on faith, Suskind appears to be making a statement against faith.

However, the idea that //Perfume// is solely a criticism of faith is too simplistic, especially when one looks at the Marquis, another minor character in the novel. The Marquis portrays the other side of the Enlightenment – the amateur scientist, relying on reason. Rather than championing him, Suskind portrays the Marquis as a crackpot, believing in a number of strange and bizarre theories, such as the //fluidum letale//. When introducing the Marquis, Suskind writes about all of his theories in different areas of knowledge, which gives the reader the impression that the Marquis is easily bored, quickly moving from topic to topic. Also, the fact that he is so taken in by Grenouille and his story shows that perhaps the amateur scientist is less intelligent than he believes.

So, if Suskind gives negative portrayals of both extreme faith and extreme reason, what is he trying to say about the Enlightenment? It is possible that Suskind believes that although modern man is driven primarily by reason, our emotions will trump reason every time. It could be argued that Grenouille best portrays this idea, as he is both driven by reason and emotion throughout the novel. Grenouille can be viewed as an 'Enlightenment' hero, as moves from the lowest of the low to someone that is revered, due to his own skills. When he manages to stop his execution thanks to his perfume, Grenouille thinks that it is all due “//not to a father, a mother, or least of all a gracious God, but to himself!//”. To achieve this, Grenouille used the scientific method, experimenting and using trial and error to create the perfect perfume. However, he starts this due to his emotions, stemming from his wish to have his own odor, and to smell like a human being. The reader is also affected by emotion trumping reason – according to reason, the murder of young girls in order to create the perfect perfume is perfectly reasonable, but the reader views it as a horrible deed – the reader's emotion trumps their reason.

=**Finally, a pretty good review with some interesting ideas:**= In //Perfume//, a text most critics, including Woods and O’Brien (n.d.), Fleming (1991) and Donahue (1992), would agree is a postmodern pastiche, author Patrick Süskind uses the Gothic monster in the form of the odourless perfumer and serial strangler, Grenouille, in this tale of “one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages”, that era being eighteenth century France (Süskind 2003, p. 1). If the Gothic monster, as Botting (1998, p. 163) claims, signifies “ugliness, irrationality and unnaturalness”, then Grenouille is indeed such a creature. From his grisly birth under the gutting table of a fishmonger to his frenzied, gruesome death, or rather consumption, cannibalised by a group of homeless desperadoes, Grenouille’s entire existence is unnatural, his body misshapen and deformed, his behaviour and ambition irrational and most devious and foul. Yet it is difficult to despise this monster, for Grenouille, not having the odour of a human, nor any odour at all, is an outcast, a mere shadow of a human in an acrid, pungent sea of humanity with all its scents from sweet to sour. Grenouille merely wants what most people would deny themselves with perfumes, lotions and creams. Grenouille wants to smell – to exude the odour of human flesh. Grenouille just wants to be a part of the human race; to be acknowledged as human and to be loved as human. In a way, his arrival amidst a mess of entrails and his demise, being eaten and digested, is an ironic metaphorical treatise to the inhumanity of that which Grenouille both loathes and lusts for, humanity itself. Perhaps Grenouille is not so much a monster, but rather, as Botting (1998, p. 163) states while referring to that most famous of monsters created in Shelley’s //Frankenstein// (2003), “more a victim of monstrous social exclusions”. There are certainly some unmistakable similarities between the two, both rejected at birth and both resorting to self-imposed exile high in the mountains as far away from society as possible. There is even a connection with another well-known outcast of Gothic literature, the ‘Count of Otherness’, the sucker of blood in Stoker’s //Dracula// (1997). Grenouille, referring to his determination to achieve his goal of acceptance, likens himself to a tick, a parasite that, as Donahue (1992, p. 38) states, “literally lives off the blood of others” and patiently waits till it smells that blood before it risks all to fall from a tree to its prey. When Grenouille exiles himself to the mountains, he makes his bed in a tunnel “a hundred and fifty feet below the earth…as if in his own grave” (Süskind 2003, p. 126). His escape from society, his home away from what humans would call home, is a crypt: “For here, inside the crypt, was where he truly lived” (Süskind 2003, p. 127). He lives, as Dracula lived, as the ‘Undead’. When Grenouille returns from his exile to the land of the living, he is adopted by an eccentric marquis:

he was softened for several hours in baths…waxed from head to toe with nut-oil soap….His finger- and toe-nails were trimmed, his teeth cleaned…he was shaved, his hair cut and combed, coiffed and powdered….Grenouille was fitted out in a silk shirt…silk stockings, frock coat, trousers and vest of blue velvet, and handsome buckled shoes of black leather, the right one cleverly elevated for his crippled foot. (Süskind 2003, pp. 148-149)

The marquis is overwhelmed with the result of his efforts, making of them ‘Frankensteinian’ success: “I have made a man of you” (Süskind 2003, p. 149). But no amount of grooming or finery will make a ‘real’ man of Grenouille. In order for Grenouille to become a ‘real’ man, he needs to acquire a scent. Ironically, this scent, Grenouille decides, is the scent of “very lovely young girls” whom he has to kill in order to obtain their odorous essence (Süskind 2003, p. 203). This ‘perfume d’homme’, the smell which Grenouille hopes will, as Fleming (1991, p. 83) claims, “make him lovable”, makes him more a god of love. He wears this perfume when he is to be executed for the murders of all those young girls whose scent was its primary ingredient. But the crowd, congregated to celebrate his public crucifixion, are suddenly overcome by his odour, overcome by ‘love’:

It was as if the man had ten thousand invisible hands and had laid a hand on the genitals of the ten thousand people surrounding him….The result was that the scheduled execution of one of the most abominable criminals of the age degenerated into the largest orgy the world had seen. (Süskind 2003, p. 247)

Yet though Grenouille has finally achieved his goal to be loved, or to inspire love in its physical form at least, he does not feel either love or loved. He feels hatred: “And suddenly he knew that he had never found gratification in love, but always only in hatred – in hating and in being hated” (Süskind 2003, p. 249). He realises he can never be accepted for who he is, no matter how potent a perfume he wears. Any adulation will only ever be for the scent, not the being beneath it. This “suffering monster”, as Botting (1998, p. 163) would call him, is not so much “a figure of vice and transgression” or an “excessive and viciously improper…character”. This monster is a monster in the Gothic tradition, an outcast, an other, “seeking”, as Woods and O’Brien (n.d., p. 9-5) claim, “the acceptance of the society into which they are unwittingly, and rather violently born”. Süskind uses this Gothic monster, as Donahue (1992, p. 36) argues, in “a dense montage of allusions…as a critique of reason, of Romantic fascination with criminality, and of the psychology of aesthetic decadence and obsession”. Süskind uses this Gothic monster, as does Shelley and as does Stoker, to hold a mirror up to society and ask the question: who really is the monster?

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