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of the conventional detective novel” (Durrani 1999, 228). But it is so much more. Both the 1985 novel and the 2006 movie undertake a philosophical meditation on expression and perception, using as their subject the ineffable (to some people trivial) sense of smell rather than the more often privileged sense of sight. Smell is particularly suited to the horror genre, which depends on shaking up the innermost part of our beings. It is the most primal sense, the one that develops first and stays with us; it can provoke visceral experi- ences—vomiting, shudders, joy—even more immediately than sight and sound, for example, can do. Grenouille himself thinks of it as an ultimate power: “For people could close their eyes to greatness, to horrors, to beauty, and their ears to melodies or deceiving words. But they could not escape scent. For scent was a brother of breath” (Süskind 2001, 155). If we live, if
we breathe, we find it almost impossible not to perceive odors.1
All-pervasive and inevitable, able to disgust, amuse, and delight, smell is fertile territory for both the disgusting grotesque and the uplifting sublime, two categories that have intertwined during the postmodern era. Through a misshapen, eerie character who both undergoes and provokes sublime olfactory experiences, Süskind explores the nature of aesthetics and artis- tic creation. In this way, as Edith Borchardt has noted, “Süskind parodies Kantian theories of the origins and nature of knowledge by exploring the idea that the highest aesthetic abstraction can be achieved through the most primitive of the senses” (1992, 99). Ultimately, Grenouille’s crimes are the transgressive acts of an artist and a sort of unwitting natural philosopher attempting to forge a subjectivity. That his crimes destroy and deconstruct beauty in order to create something sublime is part of the book’s ultimate horror, as Perfume’s readers (or moviegoers) hover between feelings of re- vulsion and the hope inspired by beauty.
Both horror and the sublime put us in touch with something beyond our ordinary lives. In her influential book Solitude and the Sublime, Frances Ferguson notes that any aesthetic experience involves an interplay between internal and external stimuli, with the effect registered on the body (1992, 6). That effect is perhaps most intense with the sublime, a category of experience that strikes wonder and terror into the beholder; it so palpably approaches the divine that it transcends physical form and leaves the perceiving sub- ject. A response to a phenomenon beyond mere beauty, it is usually located in nature: a mighty waterfall, the Grand Canyon, a mountain range. The sublime was of particular interest during the Age of Reason, which (much like our own period) sought to define and explain what lies beyond reason itself. Describing the postmodern version of that experience, Jean-François
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Lyotard elaborates: “The soul is . . . dumb, immobilized, as good as dead” (1993, 251). In any era the sublime is shocking.
Here is Grenouille’s first encounter with the sublime, embodied in a young Parisian girl discovered cleaning plums:
The scent was so exceptionally delicate and fine that he could not hold on to it; it continually eluded his perception . . . his very heart ached. He had the prescience of something extraordinary—this scent was the key for ordering all odors, one could understand nothing about odors if one did not understand this scent, and his whole life would be bungled, if he, Grenouille, did not succeed in possessing it.
He was almost sick with excitement. . . .
Grenouille felt his heart pounding, and he knew that it was not the exertion of running that had set it pounding, but rather his excited helplessness in the presence of this scent. He tried to recall something comparable, but had to discard all comparisons. (Süskind 2001, 38–39)
Though the novel doesn’t say so explicitly, this is a textbook description of the sublime experience, whether from the Enlightenment or the postmodern era. The encounter is extraordinary, unlike anything else; it makes him feel sick and helpless. It is, in a word, overwhelming, and it hints at some realm beyond our mortal earth; by touching the divine, it provides a potential organizing principle for our entire world. So when Grenouille strangles this girl and sniffs to heart’s content, experiencing “pure bliss,” he feels as if he has finally been born: “for until now he had merely existed like an animal with a most nebulous self-awareness. But after today, he felt as if he finally knew who he really was: nothing less than a genius” with a “higher destiny: nothing less than to revolutionize the odiferous world” (43). It is through the sublime that he begins to develop both an inkling of a self and an aspira- tion to be more than that little self alone, and the category will continue to organize his attempted transformation.
The movie version (directed by Tom Tykwer) takes this passage a step further and, in a voice-over, explicitly calls the scent emitted by this first vir- gin “sublime.” Courting its audience, the film also uses more conventions of traditional horror: an early murder of a household pet, Baldini’s cat; a display of dead bodies; a torture scene after Grenouille’s arrest; and attempts to make us sympathize with Grenouille. Tykwer softens Grenouille’s criminality and
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makes the strangling an accident, coming about as Grenouille tries to hush the girl. In either case, sublime bliss—or the awareness of its potential—leads to a crime in which Grenouille will attempt to create himself first as a being conscious of itself, then as a god conscious of all things. The sublime will frighten Grenouille more deeply later on; for now it is dangerous primarily for the person who evokes it.
The grotesque is often a jollier category, though it can invoke a shudder of its own. It depends almost wholly on the physical—the ugly, misshapen, scatological—and produces a feeling of comedy as often as one of revulsion. As we’ll see, in Süskind’s eighteenth century everyone and everywhere, from palace to marketplace, is grotesque. That’s because everyone stinks—hy- perbolically, exaggeratedly, superabundantly, amusingly. Everyone, that is, except for the misshapen main character, Grenouille, and the virgins on whom he preys. Grenouille, who is capable of sublime perception, is a grotesque figure par excellence: small, scarred, ugly, and freakishly without odor. He is variously compared to a toad (that’s what his name means), a tick (for example, Süskind 2001, 21, 33), a monster (17), and a mere thing (13). He can eat next to nothing—spoiled meat (20), bats (132)—and is able to survive all manner of diseases, including dysentery, cholera (20), and a near-fatal bout of anthrax (32). His very abhorrence allows him to become the greatest artist who ever lived, and his various apprenticeships to a tanner, a perfumer, and a distiller of essential oils give him the science he needs to create complex emotional responses.
Postmodernists love the grotesque body because it doesn’t fit precon- ceived ideas of perfection—it keeps changing, becoming something else. Flowing through much postmodern art is a mortal fear of everything falling into place; hence the pastiche and bricolage that are hallmarks of the era. If an artist were to find the perfect form, he or she would have nothing more to express. The grotesque fascinates because it offers contact with another plane of existence. It is one way of reaching beyond ordinary, anodyne life, as it stirs the senses and creates excitement. Geoffrey Galt Harpham has written that the word itself “designates a condition of being just out of focus, just beyond the reach of language. It accommodates the things left over when the categories of language are exhausted” (1982, 3).
In designating the unrepresentable, in eluding language and definition, the grotesque is related to the sublime. What the two categories have most fundamentally in common is excess. Both transgress boundaries, whether through an exaggeration of body or a surplus of beauty; they bring us into contact with something beyond our ordinary experience. In Perfume that something beyond consists in the systematic crimes that Grenouille commits
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in order to make one transcendent perfume, an “angel’s scent” (Süskind 2001, 154) that will make him universally loved. Coldly cunning in their use of the perfumer’s science, horrifying in their apparent purposelessness, these murders produce the greatest and most ephemeral experience of divinity our little world has ever known, bearing out Lyotard’s claim that sublime art makes “a world apart . . . in which the monstrous and the formless have their rights because they can be sublime” (1993, 249). The two categories braid together here and produce a story unsettling in its own genius, ask- ing and answering a question particularly relevant to the postmodern era: How is it possible for an artist such as Grenouille (or Süskind) to reconcile revulsion, awe, and uplifting beauty?