Patrick Süskind’s 1985 novel Perfume: The story of a murderer

Patrick Süskind, Das Parfum: die Geschichte eines Mörders. Diogenes, 1985

Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The story of a murderer. Translator: John E. Woods. Vintage International, 1986.

Again a long break since I last wrote, caused by the need to edit the final volume of a research project three of us had been working on since the early 1990s,¹ then extended by an emergency hip replacement in February while on holiday in New Zealand.² But that’s all behind me now.

I’ve just finished the 1985 German novel Das Parfum (‘the perfume’) by Patrick Süskind. It was the bestseller of the century in then West Germany and a New York Times bestseller, and Wikipedia reports that it has been translated into 49 languages. Looking for articles about it via Google Scholar, I found plenty, in German, French, English, Dutch, Indonesian and Afrikaans (at that point I stopped). Clearly there is a widespread regard for it as a work of literature. I hadn’t intended to write about it, as I usually restrict myself to novels of Christian experience,³ and Das Parfum isn’t one of those. But it has gradually dawned on me that it is a novel that requires a response, so here we go. (I will do my best not to spoil the story by telling you too much.)

The novel

The novel is a biography of the fictitious Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (grenouille is ‘frog’ in French), a tale of the events and journeys of his twenty-eight-year life, from his birth in Paris in 1738 to his death there in 1766. In the absence of birth control, his mother, a market seller, kills her babies at birth. Grenouille survives only due to an odd series of events, and his mother, meanwhile, is guillotined for infanticide. He grows up completely without love and doesn’t know what love is. He is remarkable for one thing: his sense of smell is like that of a dog. I don’t think the author uses this comparison, but he describes Grenouille as spending his life in a universe of smells and scents. He finds his way in the dark by his sense of smell, he perceives Paris as a multitude of smells that he learns to separate one from another and thanks to his perfect olfactory memory he acquires a “vocabulary of smells”. His collection of remembered smells range from the ugly to the height of beauty. He has the other senses too, but they mean much less to him than smell. 

The author assumes that all human beings have a sense of smell, but in such small measure that, unlike Grenouille, they are often barely aware of it. He also assumes that all human beings have a personal odour which others detect, often only unconsciously. Grenouille, however, has no odour of his own. We are not told why, but it plays an important role in Grenouille’s life, because it means that most of the time other people are hardly aware of his existence because they can’t smell him.

The subtitle of the novel is (deliberately, I assume) incongruous. The novel’s full title is Das Parfum: die Geschichte eines Mörders—and of the English translation Perfume: The story of a murderer. It is his sense of smell that turns Grenouille into a serial murderer. Amidst the multitude of revolting smells in eighteenth-century Paris he gets a whiff of utter beauty and pursues it to its source. It is the scent of a lovely young woman. Overcome by her odour, he kills her (quite why he kills her is not made clear—at least, not to me). Süskind describes the murder itself only briefly and in a matter-of-fact manner. The murder is never solved.

Meanwhile, an elderly perfumer who has lost whatever skill he once had and whose business is going under realises that there is something usefully strange about Grenouille, and employs him as an apprentice. Grenouille is of great service to his master, as his olfactory genius enables him to analyse the elements of a rival’s bestselling perfume and to compose one that is immensely superior. The business flourishes, and Grenouille learns all the finer points of how to distil perfumes. So tortuous are Grenouille’s journeyings outside Paris after his apprenticeship that the reader is only vaguely aware of his life-goal: to distil a perfume with a human-like odour superior to all normal human scents. But the materials for this must come from human beings, so he kills two dozen young women and extracts their odour from their hair and their clothing. The only other thing we know about the murders is that there is no evidence of sexual activity.

As I was coming toward the end of the novel, it occurred to me that the German title Das Parfum is referentially ambiguous. It can be translated Perfume, i.e. ‘perfume in general’, as in the English title of the translated novel, or The perfume, i.e. a specific perfume. Given the storyline I have just outlined, the second seems more appropriate to me: Grenouille desires to create the perfume to outdo all others.

The reader gradually realises that there is a reason for Grenouille to create the perfume. He has no odour of his own, so this will become his scent. Instead of going almost unnoticed, everyone will be obliged to take notice of him—and to love him. He succeeds in making this scent, and he wears it. This takes us into the final chapters of the book. I don’t want to disclose what happens. But I do want to say that Grenouille doesn’t understand what love is, and his life remains ambiguous to the end. He dies, and the reader is left wondering whether this was what Grenouille wanted or not.⁴

Comment

Das Parfum fits rather well the Wikipedia’s definition of a picaresque novel:

The picaresque novel is a genre of prose fiction. It depicts the adventures of a roguish but “appealing hero”, usually of low social class, who lives by his wits in a corrupt society. Picaresque novels typically adopt the form of “an episodic prose narrative” with a realistic style. There are often some elements of comedy and satire.

The most famous picaresque novel is Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, written in Spanish and published in 1605.⁵

The cover of an edition of the English translation describes the novel as a ‘tour de force of the imagination’, and I concur. Süskind’s description of Grenouille’s world of odours and scents is pungent (to use a term from the vocabulary of smell).⁶ He captures mid-eighteenth century Paris and provincial France brilliantly, vivdly. But none of this would be possible without a great deal of research and historical knowledge. Unsurprisingly, Süskind studied history at a French university, Aix-en-Provence, and then moved to Paris. But even with this background he must have studied mid-eighteenth-century Paris minutely and researched the production of perfume there. Das Parfum is also brilliantly structured. The author’s descriptions of places and events are distinctively evocative and very detailed, so that the reader dwells in one place with him for quite a while. But just at the moment that boredom might arise, he takes us to another place and another perspective, so that, for example, we view the events surrounding Grenouille through other characters.

Süskind’s vocabulary is striking in its breadth. Apart from using the odd French term for things that are not readily translatable into German, Süskind uses none of the germanised French and English loanwords that are frequent in today’s German writing. Instead, he uses an amazing range of German words that sent me to the Oxford German dictionary on my iPad more frequently than any other German novel I’ve read. Around half the words I looked up weren’t in the dictionary, but the other half gave me a clue why not: most of them were labelled “South German” or “Austrian”, and I take it this is also true of those that were missing from the dictionary. Süskind grew up in rural Bavaria on and around the Starnberger See,⁷ and presumably acquired a variety of Bairisch, the vernacular of most of Bavaria and almost all of Austria.⁸ He sometimes employs its vocabulary to evoke smells, noises, movements and more. The fact that his German has no modernisms also allows the reader dwell without distraction two-and-a-half centuries ago .

Is there a message in Das Parfum? I think there is, but it is ambiguous—and I’m sure there are numerous messages that I have missed because of allusions I’m not familiar with.⁹ Chapter one begins,

Im achtzehnten Jahrhundert lebte in Frankreich ein Mann, der zu den genialsten und abscheulichsten Gestalten dieser an genialen und abscheulichen Gestalten nicht armen Epoche gehörte. Seine Geschichte soll hier erzählt werden. Er hieß Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, und wenn sein Name im Gegensatz zu den Namen anderer genialer Scheusale, wie etwa de Sades, Saint-Justs, Fouches, Bonapartes usw., heute in Vergessenheit geraten ist, so sicher nicht deshalb, weil Grenouille diesen berühmteren Finstermännern an Selbstüberhebung, Menschenverachtung, Immoralität, kurz an Gottlosigkeit nachgestanden hätte, sondern weil sich sein Genie und sein einziger Ehrgeiz auf ein Gebiet beschränkte, welches in der Geschichte keine Spuren hinterlässt: auf das flüchtige Reich der Gerüche.

In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages. His story will be told here. His name was Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, and if his name—in contrast to the names of other gifted abominations, de Sade’s, for instance, or Saint-Just’s, Fouche’s, Bonaparte’s, etc.—has been forgotten today, it is certainly not because Grenouille fell short of those more famous blackguards when it came to arrogance, misanthropy, immorality, or, more succinctly, to wickedness, but because his gifts and his sole ambition were restricted to a domain that leaves no traces in history: to the fleeting realm of scent.

Grenouille is in no sense a nice person. He receives no love and grows up loveless. He has, in Süskind’s words, a raven-black soul. He forms no warm human relationships and for seven years withdraws entirely from human company. He is entirely self-sufficient and forms his life-goals in complete isolation from the opinions of others. His main goal, making the ultimate perfume, involves killing other human beings. Most of the murders are not described. It is almost as if the author wants to keep his reader from recognising that Grenouille is a psychopath—or perhaps to prevent readers from associating their stereotypes of a psychopath with Grenouille. Un-nice though Grenouille is, Süskind allows us to sympathise with him at times—if we want to. Süskind’s storytelling maintains an emotional distance from his (anti-)hero that allows us to make up our own minds about him.

Near the end of the novel, when Grenouille has perfected his perfume and as he looks upon its apparent success, he thinks . . .

Er, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, geboren ohne Geruch am stinkendsten Ort der Welt, stammend aus Abfall, Kot und Verwesung, aufgewachsen ohne Liebe, lebend ohne warme menschliche Seele einzig aus Widerborstigkeit und der Kraft des Ekels, klein, gebuckelt, hinkend, häßlich, gemieden, ein Scheusal innen wie außen – er hatte es erreicht, sich vor der Welt beliebt zu machen. Was heißt beliebt! Geliebt! Verehrt! Vergöttert! Er hatte die prometheische Tat vollbracht. . . Er war noch größer als Prometheus. Er hatte sich eine Aura erschaffen, strahlender und wirkungsvoller, als sie je ein Mensch vor ihm besaß. Und er verdankte sie niemandem – keinem Vater, keiner Mutter und am allerwenigsten einem gnädigen Gott – als einzig sich selbst. Er war in der Tat sein eigener Gott, und ein herrlicherer Gott als jener weihrauchstinkende Gott, der in den Kirchen hauste.

He, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born with no odor of his own on the most stinking spot in this world, amid garbage, dung, and putrefaction, raised without love, with no warmth of a human soul, surviving solely on impudence and the power of loathing, small, hunchbacked, lame, ugly, shunned, an abomination within and without—he had managed to make the world admire him. To hell with admire! Love him! Desire him! Idolize him! He had performed a Promethean feat. . . He was even greater than Prometheus. He had created an aura more radiant and more effective than any human being had ever possessed before him. And he owed it to no one—not to a father, nor a mother, and least of all to a gracious God—but to himself alone. He was in very truth his own God, and a more splendid God than the God that stank of incense and was quartered in churches.

The figure of Prometheus has been present in Western culture for two-and-a-half millennia. By the nineteenth century, he was the representative of human striving, especially for scientific knowledge, which risked overreach with disastrous results.

In this sense, Prometheus is ambiguous. If he succeeds, he is a hero. If his efforts fail, or bring catastrophe through overreach, he is a disgrace or worse, like Oppenheimer, the “father” of the atomic bomb. The story of Prometheus is a universal story: it echoes the story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9), when Noah’s descendants forgot about God and tried in their pride to build a tower that would reach the sky.¹⁰ Grenouille’s pride is obvious. His problem, though, is that he wants to be loved but doesn’t know what love is. To be desired? To be worshipped?

We are left at the end with an ambiguity. What is the motivation for the actions that lead to Grenouille’s death. What does he expect from these actions?

Throughout much of the novel I was inclined to think that Süskind is sympathetic to his Promethean character, but as I re-read the beginning of chapter one (above) I am much less certain.

Response

My training in English Literature sixty years ago invites me to ask what the novelist wants to say to me.¹¹ The novel confronts me with a character whose history turns him into a psychopath. His only serious emotion is hate. How do I respond to such people? For my generation, their epitome is Hitler, who had millions of people murdered and aimed to commit genocide in the process. How do I respond to folk who embody Promethean tendencies? Who try to make themselves like God?

Grenouille is a carefully crafted character whose Promethean feelings spring from the events of his early life, from his ignorance of any form of Christianity other than what he occasionally witnesses when he sets foot in a church, and from his lack of education. I am left wondering whether or in what measure one can hold such an injured and abused person responsible for their adult personality. The answer, difficult as it is, must be not to judge them, as they are just as precious to God as any other human being, and just as able to be redeemed, even if we don’t understand how God’s grace makes this possible.

But I haven’t actually encountered anyone like Grenouille (or Hitler, for that matter). Some scholars suggest that Süskind sets the novel in the mid-eighteenth century in order to express his disgust with the Enlightenment.¹² I have some empathy with this thought, because the West lives in the shadow of the Enlightenment, and its worship of “celebreties” in various fields reflects an obsession with Promethean characters, some of whom come to a terrible end. I have certainly encountered such people via the media. Am I sometimes so deceived my Western culture that I admire them? Sadly, the answer is yes.

Maybe Das Parfum will continue to speak to me. I’ll wait and see.

Footnotes

1. In case you are intrested: the Oceanic Lexicon Project aimed to contribute to our understanding of Pacific prehistory by reconstructing the vocabulary of Proto Oceanic. Proto Oceanic was the language of the Lapita Culture which existed in New Britain, New Ireland, Manus and numerous smaller islands around 1350 BC. Its speakers and their descendants were the first human beings to colonise the Pacific beyond the central Solomons. If this interests you, see the project website. The project publications are here. ↩
2. Apparently the ball at the top of the femur (which fits into the pelvis socket) disintegrated for no apparent reason and I fell. I’ve since learned that this is not uncommon among the elderly. ↩
3. See https://thoughts-around-faith.net/novels-of-christian-experience/ and more recent posts on novels. ↩
4. Fleming (1991) agrees, but other readers whose work I have read, e.g. Borchardt (1992), disagree with me here. Note, incidentally, that I read the commentaries and added these notes only after I had read the novel and written this post. ↩
5. Unlike Grenouille, Don Quixote is not of low social class but a foolish knight, but there will be exceptions to any short definition of a literary genre.
   I cannot claim to be very familiar with the genre. I read Don Qixote so long ago than I barely remember it. Recently I read George Borrow’s 1851 Lavengro: The Scholar, the Gypsy, the Priest, a mixture of fictitious events and real ones from the author’s life, told in the first person.
   Although the term ‘picaresque novel’ was only coined in 1810 in Spain, the genre is at least 1800 years old. Parts of Petronius’ Latin Satyricon survive from the first century AD, along with the whole of Apuleius’ Latin Metamorphoses from the second (retitled The Golden Ass by Augustine of Hippo). Dante seems to have adapted the genre in his Comedia, apparently written between 1308 and 1321. It is quite lighthearted in tone yet deadly serious in intent. It is written in verse, unlike other ‘picaresque’ narratives, but was the first literary work to be written in an Italian vernacular instead of Latin.
   Lazarillo de Tormes, by an unidentified Spanish author, published in 1554, is reckoned to be the first novel in the modern picaresque tradition. It draws on Plautus and Apuleius, as well as on an Arabic folk tradition well known in Spain at the time. It was followed by a number of Spanish picaresque novels by authors including Cervantes. These were imitated in Germany by Grommelshausen in his Simplicius Simplicissimus (1669), in France by Le Sage in his Gil Blas (1715), in England by Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) and Fielding’s novels which culminated in Tom Jones (1749). Fielding admitted he was imitating Cervantes. The tradition continues with Voltaire’s Candide (1759), Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1767) , Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848) and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884), and yet more examples in the 20th century.
6. Some of the more readable commentaries on Das Parfum concern Süskind’s use of language to describe smells and scents (Popova 2003; de Boer 2010). ↩
7. A lake southwest of Munich. ↩
8. Whether Bairisch, at least as it was still spoken in the 1960s, should be considered a group of dialects of German or of a separate language is debated. What is the degree of difference that requires a speech variety to be called a separate language? Speakers of 1960s Bairisch probably all understood standard German, but speakers of standard German had to learn to understand Bairisch. ↩
9. Adams (2000) writes, “The novel has been read variously as an indictment of Enlightenment rationality, as an allegory of the fascist mind, or simply as a cynical postmodern pastiche that serves the reader titillating but derivative kitsch. Whatever their view of the novel’s thematic intentions, all critics agree that Das Parfum’s rich intertextuality invites a search for the novel’s literary sources.” Fleming’s (1991) overview is similar. ↩
10. They said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves . . .” (Genesis 1:4) ↩
11. When I studied English Literature in my last three years at school ( late 1950s) and in my undergraduate degree (early 1960s), I was trained not to look at an author’s history or social context but to attend to the text and its effects, and to the “message” implicit in the text. I haven’t stuck to that training here, but the habit of looking for the message remains with me. Later literary criticism and literary theory have taken twists and turns that aren’t familiar to me. ↩
12. Borchardt (1992), Gray (1993). ↩

References

Adams, Jeffrey, 2000. Narcissism and creativity in the postmodern era: The case of Patrick Süskind’s Das Parfum. The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 75:259-279, DOI: 10.1080/00168890009597424.

Borchardt, Edith, 1992. Caricature, parody, satire: Narrative masks as subversion of the Picaro in Patrick Süskind’s Perfume. In Nicholas Ruddick, ed., State of the Fantastic. Studies in the Theory and Practice of Fantastic Literature and Film. London: Greenwood Press, 97-103.

de Boer, Minne G., 2010. De zoete en minder zoete geuren van Patrick Süskind: een contrastieve studie over het lexicale veld van de reuk. [Patrick Süskind’s sweet and not so sweet smells: a contrastive study of the lexical field of smell]. In Woordstudies II. Utrecht: Igitur.

Fleming, Bruce E., 1991. The smell of success: A reassessment of Patrick Süskind’s Das Parfum. South Atlantic Review 56:71-86. DOI: 10.2307/3200522.

Gray, Richard T., 1993. The dialectic of “enscentment”: Patrick Süskind’s Das Parfum as critical history of enlightenment culture. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 108:489-505. DOI: 10.1632/462617.

Popova, Yanna B., 2003. ‘The fool sees with his nose’: Metaphoric mappings in the sense of smell in Patrick Süskind’s Perfume. Language and Literature 12:135–151. DOI: 10.1177/0963947003012002296.