Review of Perfume - The Story of a Murderer
Süskind's Novel Takes the Reader on an Olfactory Journey
Jul 13, 2009
Perfume is both artificial and natural. It hides the scent of the human body, yet is made up of the aromas of everyday life. A highly developed sense of smell is both the height of refinement in the civilised world, and the essence of humanity's wild origins. Süskind explores the human relationship with scent in this unique and fascinating novel, a film version of which was made in 2006.
Jean-Baptiste Grenouille – The Wild Artist
Grenouille is a fascinating protagonist. He has a heightened sense of smell, but no odour of his own. He has an incredibly sensitive nose, but feels nothing about anything else; he has no remorse when he murders young women to steal their fragrance for his great perfume.
His search for perfume seems to be a search for identity. When he first suspects that his body is odourless, he feels ‘the fear of not knowing much of anything about himself.’ (pg 142) Like a vampire he steals the lives of others because he has no inner life of his own; for him, scent is literally life.
There is something incredibly animalistic about him. Throughout the novel he is consistently linked with nature: he can smell different types of water, and even distinguishes individual stones with his highly developed nose. He finds peace in the French wilderness, where he spends several months living in a cave, inhaling the calm scent of stone.
Like an animal he sniffs things out, taking us back to our stone-age origins, when our ancestors could smell fresh berries from quite a distance, and track animals by trail and scent. Grenouille has the sensitivity of the ancients, who would have used and valued their sense of smell as much as we do our eyesight.
Nature and Civilisation in Perfume by Patrick Süskind
The character of Grenouille mocks so called civilised eighteenth century European society, where refined people buy and discuss fragrance, but are unaware of the smell of their bodies. Indeed, ‘most people did not know they even had such a thing, and moreover did everything they could to disguise it under clothes or fashionable artificial odours.’ (pg 155) Despite the proliferation of perfumers, Paris is full of fetid, rotting stenches – Grenouille himself was born in a pile of decomposing fish.
Perhaps the sharpest satire comes in the character of Giuseppe Baldini, a perfumer of little talent who secretly hires Grenouille to make incredible scents for him. As a result, Baldini achieves a hollow success, where he becomes famous throughout Europe but does not have the satisfaction of being the artist.
It is ironic that true creative talent comes in the form of Grenouille, a murderer utterly devoid of the manners and refinement that eighteenth century French high society so valued. None of the 'civilised' characters have true artistic ability. Their world parallels twenty-first century western life, which seeks to disinfect everything, trying in vain to eliminate all natural scent and disease. Grenouille represents the wildness beneath a human’s artificially scented skin – he is the animal within, always pulsing to get out.
In another, less sanitised age, a character with a heightened sense of smell may have been a great heroic artist. It is a sign of modern times that he can only be a murderer. The empty soullessness of Grenouille comes from an incredible fear of the wild today. Many people watch nature programmes on television but are too frightened to walk through a forest at night, and pretend environmental destruction is not happening. To give him a morality as highly developed as his nose would be too terrifyingly natural. It is much more comfortable to make the wild man a savage murderer. Grenouille uncomfortably reminds readers of the human animal.
Sources/Further Reading:
Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Penguin Books, 1987) ISBN 0-140-12083-1
