“Sensuality, desire, greed and the quest for love”

The Osmothèque inside Jean Baptiste Grenouille.
Patrick Süskind's "Perfume"

The Egyptians considered the nose to be the most important orifice in one’s body and handled it with great care during mummification, just as they maliciously sliced off the nose of an enemy’s face to prevent his survival in the Land of the Dead. Their ancient linkage of the nose with life finds an echo in the discovery, in modern times, which the brain evolved from a pair of primitive olfactory sensors at the upper end of the spinal cord, establishing the antecedence of scent over the now predominant sight and hearing. (Taschen, 2010. P.165.)

Among humans, the nose can detect 10,000 more flavors than the incorrectly credited tongue, the nose is nevertheless associated with highly nuanced instinctual and intuitive functions, like associating romance with a musky perfumed vapors to find “the right chemistry” or tracking down the scent of a crime. The Egyptians understood that the breath passing through a goddess’ nostrils to give eternal life to a deceased kind would impart a fundamental reality, for the nose is like a forgotten portal to the archeology of the psyche. (Taschen, 2010. P.362).

The nose of Jean Baptiste Grenouille is peculiar and one of a kind; it can smell almost anything and has the capacity of memorize the scent of whatever it smells. The way his early life is presented, odors that related to him were disgusting and sickening to the human nose, but not to Grenouille, recognizing them immediately, embracing them and actually incorporating them to his own memory. Symbolically, rotten smells are traditionally associated with the vaults of hell, the moral sewers of life, while paradise is scented with rose and lotus, and the mere memory of a past love, like Flaubert, preserving his lover’s perfumed slippers in his desk drawer, is fondly brought back to life by a single whiff.

Let’s begin with the meaning on the name “Grenouille”, which means frog in French. A frog is an ancient Egypt leaning forward in a balanced squat, its skin moist-looking, its head tilted upward, the protruding eyes focused, that it seems its tongue will suddenly dart out of its wide mouth and pull an insect in or the long hind legs, in a nimble leap, carry it to another part of the pond. Grenouille “leaps” from person to person on his journey to create the perfect perfume. Frogs are also the first to let us know when nature is drastically out of balance (one of the reasons why, perhaps, in fairy tales they bring in what’s missing). Currently one of the most threatened groups of animals on earth, they are an accurate indicator of a traumatized biosphere and of a future that might be woefully absent of their mosquito and fly-catching, their brilliant colors, their fervent forms of every size and knobby embellishment, and their raucous song of espousal. (Taschen, 2010. P.190). Frogs are cold-blooded, hibernate and survive on what they’ve stored within themselves, which hints at Grenouille’s surviving on his olfactory memories for seven years in that cave.

Only things that smell had meaning for Grenouille, language lacked this refinement for communicating the richness of his olfactory world. He created new smells in his mind by combining the ones that he already knew and he had the capacity to smell these through his own imagination. In a way he appears to effectively shut out the world he lives in, he has forgone love in favor of survival, and something he is very good at is surviving. He has made his decision “vegetatively, as a bean when once tossed aside must decide if it ought to germinate or had better let things be” (Suskind, 1986. P.25)

The author possesses a very keen and vivid awareness with the most elemental and basic emotional and sensory states, it is a representation of every significant aspect of the mind and it’s repercussions through the process of life. Odor is a powerful signifier of Grenouille’s earliest memories and perceptions; it’s primitive, archaic, almost invisible and totally neglected.

Grenouille’s birth and primal experiences have provided him a vulnerability to following environmental failures while at the same time giving him an exact and unique method of survival. The first part of the book presents Grenouille as an unwanted child, “dead meat”, an inconvenience to his mother and to society that must immediately be discarded and forgotten. Although his mother conceives him he is never actually conceived of by her. The perfume of decay in that marketplace is what first welcomed Grenouille into the world. His first contact wasn’t a caring and nurturing mother, but the smell of death. His identity is established right in that precise moment, in the very start of his existence, both within and immediately after the womb.

His mother’s own narcissistic desires became true, Grenouille was born to be inconspicuous around all these conspicuous odors, and he was without a doubt invisible, to her and to the world, in other words, odorless.

Grenouille starts to create a fantasy world primarily out of scent in it’s most primitive way in which he immerses himself, a form of protecting himself against this premature awareness of this great terror and intolerable psychological pain related with abandonment and neglect. That is why Grenouille is capable of surviving constant rejection and great traumatic experiences and abuse.

Grenouille finds no relief when he is with his foster mother, Madame Galliard. Although he is given some physical care, it lacks emotional value. He becomes a “tick”, abandoning all human relations; he emits nothing and is impenetrable. In the hands of Grimal, he is abused and suffers psychological traumas from which apparently makes him even more immunized against death.

Grenouille’s first encounter with the “perfume” that may be representing the essence of goodness and innocence occurs during these same days. This “goodness” is transformed into a smell of a virginal girl, which may seem as a cliché but it’s also purity and innocence and this women who have been with no one, untouched, unpolluted, unstained. There may be a strong implication that the “perfume” is related to the idealized maternal object and an innocent baby (Grenouille) in a symbiotic and undifferentiated early state.

But why death is the only answer to preserve the scent for himself? Perhaps experience has taught him that objects must be frozen or somehow immobilized in order to keep them from exerting their own will and eventually and inevitably abandoning him. For the first time, Grenouille experiences the bliss of atonement and discovers a reason to live, a desire to move on; the creation of beautiful scents. (the “essence” of the idealized mother)

Twice, with Grimal and Baldini, he experiences this psychosomatic breakdown that may be related to the extreme of physical abuse and psychic decomposition. After this two episodes he is “born again” with a growing sense of grandiose omnipotence. This grandiosity is represented in the relationship with Baldini, in scenes where he magically reproduces and invents scents surpassing those of his master’s imagination.

Even as he is exploited, Grenouille is able to achieve something similar to a life of his own. When he leaves Baldini, he stays isolated in an inhabited cavern for seven years, which symbolically represents a “womb like” environment and this ideal of an olfactory peace. He recovers his primal experience, this pre birth experience of “being the only human being in the world” of the maternal body. There are many symbols of fetal existence from the “virgin” tunnel, to the umbilical snakes that nourish him and the uterine wall (rocks) that he licks to obtain moisture. He is re-living the smells of his past as a way of protecting himself from the terrifying awareness of his vulnerability.

Finally, a dream penetrates Grenouille’s mind, making him feel sick and suffocated. “He was deathly afraid, his whole body shook with a raw fear of death…he sat there shivering and trying to gather his confused, terrified thoughts, he knew one thing for sure: he would change his life, if only because he did not want to dream such a frightening dream a second time. (Suskind, 1986. P.164) This is just a reaction to this long process of introspection, a reaction to this awareness that he was nobody.

He leaves the cave; he wants human contact once again. He now has a new obsession: creating and possessing a “superhuman scent” in order that he might inspire love. An important part is that Antoine Richis (Laura’s father) provides the necessary insight for understanding Grenouille’s motivation. He believes that the murderer’s aim is not to destroy but to collect, and he is not trying to attack beauty but to conserve beauty for himself.

Grenouille’s triumph is empty, as always he couldn’t find reciprocity for his emotional states. Just as his overflowing love and his craving for attachment have been met in the past with hatred, so now his overwhelming hatred begets only love. Once again, was overcome by the “fog of his colorlessness”; the feeling of desintegration. He is filled with terror that constitutes the final and devastating realization of the agreement between his internal and external realities.

In the end, Grenouille grows increasingly maddened by this uncaring world, he is defeated by despair by this painful realization that he might never been seen and loved for himself: that he might never become himself. Once again he seeks an experience of being “one” with the body of the mother.

Toward the end, he provokes the band of homeless people to a cannibalistic ritual and is finally “taken in”, eaten in an act of “love”. Of course, this is the ultimate act of love; in concrete terms is the baby’s experience of being introjected by the maternal object; an experience, which the baby must have in order for him to be able to incorporate a sense of a containing object.

All the deaths of all those beautiful innocent girls, with their hair shaved off, stripped of their clothing and robbed of the very “essence” of their being is a reenactment of Grenouille’s infancy. He had also been robbed of his own essence; his innocence, long ago sacrificed for the sake of his own human survival. All this deaths represent those horrible experiences of an abandoned and dying baby.

The story of Grenouille conveys the purest form of trauma, maybe it is an extreme personification but it reflects how society and human beings mold themselves in order to persevere. Perfume is the story of a murderer, but it is also the story of an artist. There is something luring in the dissonance between the evil deeds Grenouille commits and the beauty he ultimately created. He can’t be dismissed as a moral failure: he is also an artist of precise dedication, passion and skill. He is obsessed with maintaining and possessing beauty for all time, and not concerned with transitory life, not even his own. He is not terrifying because he is evil, but because his evil deeds just slide off him as though he were coated with Vaseline. If we cheer for his artistic success, even just out of curiosity, we are being part of his crimes. Do we all have a Grenouille-like coating that keeps us from feeling the pain? Is the passion that drives this murderous artist alive in us as well?

The ending is really what makes the book a masterpiece. It becomes clear then that what Grenouille was trying to do was create a physical distillate of love. Neither sex nor beauty; Love. He made the perfect match of feelings of love, both emotional and physical; a love with perfect eroticism. They absorbed him entirely; he became part of them, just as a person in love wished to become part of his lover. But this is the omnipotent part, he represented the very concept of love and his physical absorption by the people represents their ultimate adoption and understanding of that concept.

Another important aspect is the objectification of women. Of course in reality “beautiful” women, whether young or not, virgin or not, don’t necessarily smell any better than anyone else. The reason to make them represent this perfect scent is related to this long societal tradition based on puritan male fantasies. Objectification of women is all about reducing them into objects to be used in fantasy. Grenouille does this literally in creating his perfume from them that induces fantasies. The metaphor for his dehumanization in the book is death since it’s the only way to reduce them to the essence of their scent.

Since the moment of Grenouille’s birth, survival skills and his relation to society evolved and fought in opposite directions. He survived this very hard adolescence, without any sexual discovery of this awkward phase. He inhaled the scent of more than 20 women. He was a despicable, emotionless and heartless scoundrel capable of producing artistic works of sublime beauty. There are many unanswered questions about Grenouille, and about the book itself. What is beauty worth? And should we place greater value on transitory life or lasting art?

Perfume is a story about identity, communication and the morality of the human spirit, it can be seen as an allegory, expressing the most basic realities about human existence and also a parable, separating and highlighting certain attitudes and characteristics that are very relevant to conform a clinical study.

So, what is the scent of love? It may be too costly to gain that secret unless there’s an appreciation of love first.

Embrace our Madness.

Reference.

Taschen. (2010). The Book of Symbols. Cologne, Germany: Florian Kobler.

Suskind, P. (1986). Perfume: the story of a murderer. New York: Random House.