The Daily Tar Heel Thursday, October 2. 19866
'Perfume' shows author has nose for bizarre
Smell. Of all the ways humans
encounter the world, this is perhaps
the most mysterious and yet the most
natural. Animals, of course, rely on
smell to live and hunt, to carry out
the most basic activities. But man has
relegated his nose to a second-class
status, using instead vision and
hearing to deal with and define
external reality. We disguise bodily
scent with roll-ons and sprays, trying
to hide what can be described as our
most personal attribute. '
For Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the
dark hero of Patrick Suskind's
splendid new novel Perfume, such
attempts at camouflage are meaning
less. For him, scent is both everything
and nothing.
Grenouille is born in 1738 in Paris,
to a fishmonger who previously had
four "stillbirths or semi-stillbirths, for
the bloody meat that had emerged
had not differed greatly fromt he fish
guts that lay there already, nor lived
much longer." From that inauspi
cious beginnning, Grenouille rises to
become one of the great monstrous
characters of all literature.
The instrument of that rise is, quite
simply, his nose. For Grenouille's
genius or more aptly, his gift
is a total sense of smell. His nose
serves as the ultimate detective,
. reaching to the core of reality and
enabling Grenouille to sense the
verities ordinary men miss. Every
thing is open to him.
With a sniff, he can sense the
composition, of any scent, the past
and future of any object. He is the
world's greatest perfumer, able to
create vJors that captivate the world.
ri ;!' ;l"-n he wears them,
:;h;.pe .1 . . ' "'
aim. He conies to view t-wuii..;; ;
disgust, as a seething mass blinded
to the world, chained by their narrow
view of existence and thus easily
deceived.
Grenouille is Faustian in concep
tion, unable to love, with hate the
only emotion he ever really knows
and fulfillment of his desires his only
concern. Yet, unlike Faust, he does
not sacrifice his soul for hfs wants,
because in a way, he has no soul to
lose. Words like community, respon
sibility, justice and God are mean
ingless to him. They are part of a
world he does not know, a world
unattached to the sensual, a world
of abstractions, a world that there
fore does not exist for him.
Grenouille is self-obsessed. After
he murders a girl to culminate his
quest for the very scent of life, he
whispers to himself, "I thank you. 1
thank you, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille,
for being what you are." The novel
traces his life, and his is a life
dedicated only to himself and his gift.
He grows up in a children's boarding
house and is forced to take a job
working for a tanner. From there,
he wheedles his way into a Parisian
scent shop and resurrects the perfu
mer's failing career with his magnif
icent ability to create enchanting
scents.
Eventually, Grenouille leaves the
City of Lights and heads south,
searching for the techniques to enable
him to extract scents from humans,
thereby capturing their essences. But
on the wav, he becomes infatuated
with himself, with the beautiful
feeling of being alone, free from the
olfactory effluvium of people
crowded together.
Grenouille seeks a truly solitary
existence, the chance to separate
himself from the humanity he finds
so rctK'.ifivc. ik flds a pce h.-gh
Jamos Surowiocki
Books
on a mountain top, a kind of burrow
deep in a rock where he is completely
alone, and revels in his own created
world, a world of scent. Happiness
is not found there for him, but
sensuality and satisfaction are.
So Suskind writes, "He had with
drawn solely for his own personal
pleasure, only to be near to himself.
No longer distracted by anything
external, he basked in his own
existence, and found it splendid. He
lay in his stony crypt like his own
corpse, hardly breathing, his heart
hardly breathing anrf'yet lived as
intensively and dissolutely as ever a
rake had lived in the wide world
outside."
Grenouille's mental experiences
while in the mountain are exquisitely
described. He selects odors as if they
were wines in his cellar or as if they
were fine books in his library. Each
scent recalls a place, a time, an
experience. And Grenouille drinks
from the scents passionately and
erotically. Throughout the novel, he
never once makes love to a woman.
But he makes love to his scents,
caressing and using them as intensely
as anyone ever did a lover.
But. if he goes to the mountain
to find himself, he leaves the moun
tain in flight from himself, from a
nightmare born of the fact that he,
alone in the world, has no odor. For
that is Grenouille's curse, r c
inseparable from his gift. i
ii ; , rrn-.- hi the
when he discovers this he finds he
cannot deal with it alone. So, he
returns to society.
It is after this return that Gre
nouille realizes that if he has no scent
of his own, then he can use his talent
to create scents for himself. And he
creates scents that differ according
to occasion and need. He has a
perfume that makes him inconspic
uous, one that makes him seem in
a hurry, one that makes old ladies
feel sorry for him. He creates a scent
with an odor of semen and sweat for
when he wishes to be noticed. He
controls people's reactions to him by
the perfume he chooses to wear.
But all these scents are merely the
prologue to his greatest creation. As
Suskind paints him, Grenouille is
fascinated with two things. The first
is himself. The second is his search
for the perfect scent, a scent he
encounters only twice in his life, a
scent that comes from the body of
a particularly beautiful virgin just
becoming a woman. It is a scent that,
just as a master jeweler cuts a perf ect
diamond and sets it in a diadem to
enhance it, so Grenouille, the master
perfumer, sets in a crown of odor.
The novel is subtitled "The Diary
of a Murderer," and so it is, as
Grenouille murders a succession of
beautiful virgins and steals their
scents, creating the setting in which
he puts the ultimate aroma, that
which he calls the scent of life. This
. scent gives him ultimate power, the
power to command the love of
mankind, to make him the object of
ultimate desire. It is the scent that
Grenoui1.'" 'msgine--. v!
cam
WOi.lv
.uiuscif, and
vi .our;.i;, w:. -a he finally im';v. ;i
perfume, in a brilliantly devise-ta
denouement, he does not find what
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he is looking for. The scent does in
fact make him the master ot ail ne
surveys, but what he surveys he finds
abhorrent. His desire changes from
that of having people worship him
to having people hate him, to having
them feel the only emotion he ever
understood.
But even in that moment, when
Grenouille's only sentiment is that of
disgust at what he has wrought, he
does not lose himself. He remains the
center of his existence even as that
existence crumbles. And perhaps
only in his death does he discover
meaning beyond himself.
This is a truly stunning debut novel
by Suskind,. who is a German playw
right making his first venture into the -field
of fiction. The novel vibrates
between the delicacy of a soft per
fume under the neck and the violence
of the stench arising from the streets
of Paris. Suskind creates a world of
tremendous life, a fairy-tale world
that belongs to a new vision of
experience. The descriptions of scent
capture ineffably that which is by
definition ephemeral.
But Suskind's real triumph comes
in his creation of Grenouille. And
Grenouille is a magnificently crafted
character, a misanthrope louowing
the beat of Oskar Matzerath's tin
drum and the footsteps of Faust on
the road toward his own fall. He is
sensual in a way that few characters
are, an admirer of things beautiful,
bathing in a world we do not know
but come to envy, a realm of scent.
This is a realm where language is
inadequate, where sensation domi-
nates. Grenouille's wickedness comes
not merely from his misanthropy, but
from his absolute dedication to his
own pleasure at the cost of all else.
In the end, though, he is unable to
conquer himself, unable to live with
the fact that he has no scent. For
Grenouille, scent is everything. It is
what defines a person or an object,
what separates one from another. A:
he has no scent, he has no true
identity, no true humanity, and that,
ironically enough, he cannot accept.
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