54 pages • 1 hour read
Patrick SüskindPerfume: The Story of a Murderer
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1985A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Power of Smell to Evoke Emotions and Memories
One of the central themes of the novel deals with the power of smell to evoke memories and emotions. Smell acts, in this way, like a time machine, even in cases where scent is not something consciously acknowledged. At a very young age, Grenouille’s sense of smell evokes his memories involuntarily. His earliest experiences with chopped wood, for example, trigger his memory into helping him form some of the first words he speaks: “whenever the memory of it rose up too powerfully within him he would mutter imploringly, over and over, ‘wood, wood’” (26).
When Grenouille recreates Amor and Psyche, the perfume of Baldini’s competitor that perplexes Baldini, Baldini is astonished at the speed and ease with which he brings it into existence. Once he does, however, Grenouille boasts that he is capable of creating a perfume of exponentially greater quality and effect than Amor and Psyche, and when he presents his new perfume, Baldini is immediately transported through time and space to the days of his youth “as the most sublime memories were awakened within him” (89). With just a single smell, an explicit scene is conjured:
He saw himself lying in the arms of a woman with dark curly hair and saw the silhouette of a bouquet of roses on the windowsill as the night wind passed by; he heard the random song of birds and the distant music from a harbor tavern; he heard whisperings at his ear, he heard I-love-you and felt his hair ruffle with bliss” (90).
With this, the power of smell, especially in the form of the perfumes created by Grenouille, can create new worlds. This is a technique seen in other novels, like Proust’s Swann’s Way, in which the scent of a madeleine launches the narrator on his epic journey. Suskind uses lush, vivid imagery to convey these scents—roses, birds, and hair ruffling in this quote—transporting the reader along with the character remembering these scents.
Later in the novel, the scent of Laure—still unknown to him at the time by sight—evokes Grenouille’s memory of the girl with the plums: “[H]e sniffed more vigorously and tried to suppress the memory of the scent of the girl from the rue des Marais” (176-77), but he is unable to shake the correlation. As Grenouille goes on to note, this girl’s scent would one day be more powerful than anything he ever encountered, “a scent so terrifyingly celestial that once it had unfolded its total glory, it would unleash a perfume such as the world had never smelled before” (177). Other people would chalk this up to exquisite beauty or unmatched charm, but it would be her scent that would be the true magic. With this, Grenouille elevates scent above all other senses and logic, imbuing it with otherworldly power.
The most powerful displays of the absolute control that scent can have over others are in the final chapters. In the penultimate scene of the execution day, the perfume Grenouille crafted from the scent of Laure’s corpse overwhelms thousands of onlookers, driving them to love and liberate Grenouille instead of demanding his execution: “a miracle had occurred before their very eyes, the Lord God had personally stayed the executioner’s hand by disclosing as an angel the very man who had for all the world appeared a murderer” (246). Causing the crowds to descend into debauchery, Grenouille is able to simply walk away innocent, changing the memories and minds of the men and women who had only moments before desired his swift and painful death. Likewise, in the book’s finale, Grenouille manifests the other extreme in a crowd, using perfume to provoke such an intense desire that they literally eat him alive.
Alienation and the Search for Personal Identity
Grenouille is depicted throughout the novel as a man set apart. Accused of being possessed by the devil by the first man and woman to take charge of him—"away with this monster, with this insufferable child” (19) cries the priest into whose care he is given—he is marked from birth as one who will be rejected and left completely alone by any who have the choice and power to do so. When in the orphanage, the other children try to suffocate him to death multiple times, a feat that not even his own mother could achieve when she left him to die in a pile of fish guts on the dock in the market.
Once Grenouille reaches the age of reason, however—and once his room and board are no longer paid for—he is set into the hands of Grimal the tanner. From this point onward, he is alone in his life, his only social interactions coming through work, though his employers view him more as an object or a workhorse than a colleague or employee. The source of his alienation stems from the unique perspective through which he views the world and the vocation for which he thought he was destined because of it: “his exquisite nose, his phenomenal memory, and, most important, the master scent taken from that girl in the rue des Marais” (46). The irony is that his gift is also his curse; the means by which he is to fulfill his destiny is the cause of his complete removal from the world of humanity.
Grenouille finds his alienation to be a boon, however, and he craves isolation. When he removes himself from Paris to the mountain, he is almost incredulous that he finally finds a place that human beings have not infested. “He was truly completely alone! He was the only human being in the world! He erupted with thundering jubilation” (125). Even when he eventually returns to society and works as the second journeyman in Madame Arnulfi’s house, he is willing to take on double the work for the opportunity to be alone, experimenting with the final process of scent extraction.
When he finally creates the perfume that allows him to blend in with the crowds, as any other human being, he achieves the status quo in which he can be in the midst of the community and yet entirely overlooked: “He succeeded in being considered totally uninteresting. People left him alone. And that was all he wanted” (188). The fulfillment of his destiny—acting in perfect accord with his identity as the lone master of scents and perfumes in the world—is founded on the alienation he experiences from the very moment he is born.
A Thing’s Scent is Its Soul
Grenouille sees the world through scent. From his first days when he sniffs the priest, he judges and dissects the world through its scents. The identity of every single thing he encounters is defined by how it smells, and so its scent becomes its identifying form. When Grenouille finally becomes a perfumer and learns the art of extracting the scents from various items, he speaks of it in terms of “snatch[ing] the scented soul from matter” (100). Thus, the process of creating a scent is, for Grenouille, a kind of murder, by which the soul is severed from the body. When creating a perfume from flowers and other plant material, the vivid imagery of the process is tempered due to the fact that nobody thinks twice about plucking a flower or making use of it in perfumes or decorations.
For human beings, however, this process takes on a gruesomely literal sense whereby Grenouille hunts down the most desired of scents and proceeds to snatch this soul from the victim to whom it is attached. Practicing first on animals, Grenouille practices until he feels like an expert in “robbing a living creature of its aromatic soul” (193). While the visual form of a creature is most often considered its essential feature, Grenouille’s unique trait transposes identification onto scent. In short, for Grenouille, the scent is the soul.
It is no wonder, then, that he is thrown into an existential crisis when he realizes that he himself has no smell. He first realizes this when he has a nightmare in the cave beneath the mountain. In his nightmare, he realizes that he is surrounded by a fog of his own odor, but “although he knew that this odor was his odor, could not smell it. Virtually drowning in himself, he could not for the life of him smell himself!” (138). Since Grenouille judges the world by smell and truly sees objects in the external world as receptacles for scent, the idea that he does not have a scent is too much for him to bear. “What he now felt was the fear of not knowing much of anything about himself” (142). Without a scent, there is nothing for him to know about himself since that’s the only thing in the world worth knowing in the first place.
