Tejido epitelial

The uncanny episode in the cave is actually one of the first intimations that Grenouille might reach the sublime, for both experiences feed on fear: in one case the fear of something half recognized and not quite right, and in the other the overwhelming terror of an encounter with awesome power. As the story progresses it peels back layers of sublime experience and explores numerous dimensions of the category. Grenouille must pass through that uncanny period in the cave before he decides to create perfumes that will not merely smell beautiful and create the illusion of humanity, of belonging, but also connect with the divine.

Even in the eighteenth century, when the concept of the sublime had its heyday, opinions were not unanimous as to what exactly constitutes it. Süskind is, moreover, playing here with multiple forms: eighteenth-century ideas, particularly influenced by Immanuel Kant, and a somewhat more complicated postmodern sense (after all, he is writing in the postmodern era). Most theorists agree that the sublime is on a register far above that of mere pleasure in beauty. Beauty allows the subject to feel superior, even by the act of judging the beauty, but the sublime is humbling. We see that no- tion in Perfume: The girls who fascinate Grenouille, particularly Laure, are beautiful—though their lovely faces and bodies aren’t what attract him. Just as Humbert Humbert’s nymphets are otherworldly daemons rather than simply pretty little girls (Nabokov 1989, 17), Grenouille’s sublime virgins are more than merely good to look at. After he kills the Parisienne, it’s just a few hours before “he could no longer recall how the girl . . . had looked, not her face, not her body” (Süskind 2001, 44). What he remembers is “the best part of her,” her fragrance.

When he smells Laure and recognizes her sublimity, he meditates on the sensory confusion that comes from a heavenly odor: “People will be overwhelmed, disarmed, helpless before the magic of this girl, and they will not know why. And because people are stupid and use their noses only for blowing, but believe absolutely anything they see with their eyes, they will say it is because this is a girl with beauty and grace and charm. . . . And none of them will know that it is truly not how she looks that has captured them, not her reputed unblemished external beauty, but solely her incomparable,

splendid scent!” (Süskind 2001, 171–72). 6 _{Smell may be primal and therefore}

scarcely considered in contemplations of beauty; but it can also fool the other senses, and therein lies some of its otherwordly power.

Beauty is tied to the world, but the sublime elevates the person who experiences it. Edmund Burke wrote that we register aesthetic power and

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“know” objects through their effects on our bodies; aesthetic pleasure then arises from, as Frances Ferguson puts it, “the satisfactions that one can have in objects as extensions of one’s relations with other human beings” (1992, 4) Thus for the English theorist the sublime is empirical and tied to social relationships. In Germany, Kant took a different stance, arguing that since objects lack consciousness, aesthetic experience depends on communication with intentionlessness, as found in nature—so his is an asocial, antiempiri- cal vision: “It must be nature, or be thought of as nature” (Kant, Critique of

Judgment, quoted in Ferguson 1992, 38)—that is, beyond human control.7

It would seem natural to assume that since Perfume is a German book, rooted in the German tradition of pure reason, Kant’s model would be domi- nant in Süskind; and in fact, given Grenouille’s detachment from the world he inhabits, the antiempirical source of sublimity seems the most apparent. But it’s important to remember, as Ferguson points out, that while early critics saw sublime moments as a chance for the individual to become “a metonymy of his culture”—a representative of collective experience—modern critics posit the sublime as a moment in which subjectivity can be constructed (1992, 38). And, contradictory as it may seem, that is precisely how Süskind transforms Grenouille from a grotesque type into (occasionally) a modern rational creature: through experience of the irrational sublime.

In the movie the perfumer Baldini describes a fragrance’s potential for the sublime. Early in Grenouille’s apprenticeship Baldini tells him that most perfumes are made up of twelve notes or essences, though the ancient Egyptians believed in a thirteenth note that would “bring out and dominate the others.” He tells a story of an amphora in a pharaoh’s tomb that, when opened, released a scent “of such subtle beauty and yet such power that for one single moment every person on earth believed they were in paradise.” In that sample twelve essences were identified, but the thirteenth eluded everyone. Although Baldini dismisses the story as a legend, it serves as a model for the movie Grenouille’s own masterwork. We thus expect that he will slay thirteen girls to make his perfume in addition to the Parisienne with the plums.

In the novel Grenouille’s first explicitly acknowledged sublime expe- riences come in the mountain cave where he lives alone for seven years, uncorking imaginary bottles of remembered scents (remember, the novel does not use the word sublime to describe his encounter with the plum girl). While his first memories are eminently nasty—for example, “the stench of raw, meaty skins and tanning broths” or “the collective effluvium of six hundred thousand Parisians” (Süskind 2001, 124), he avenges the assault on his “patrician nose” with the memory of distilled water. The first time the

“Hot with Rapture and Cold with Fear” 189

word sublime is used it comes in a context of highly pleasurable violent rage: “Ah! What a sublime moment! [“Ah! Welch sublimer Augenblick!” (Süskind 1985, 142)]. Grenouille, the little man, quivered with excitement, his body writhed with voluptuous delight and arched so high that he slammed his head against the roof of the tunnel, only to sink back slowly and lie there lolling in satiation. It really was too pleasant, this volcanic act that extin- guished all obnoxious odors, really too pleasant. . . . It imparted to him the wonderful sense of righteous exhaustion that comes after only truly grand heroic deeds” (Süskind 2001, 124–25). The orgasmic nature of the experi- ence needs no comment. Significantly for this discussion of the sublime, it combines “voluptuous delight” and pain, an overabundance of pleasure and a sense of heroism. Although banging his head against the tunnel roof might remind Grenouille of his physical limitations—and thus the boundar- ies of his own existence—he has an overwhelming physical experience that produces a sense of mental and emotional expansion. If this is how he feels when rehearsing scents all by himself, imagine what creating new scents for an unsuspecting world can make him feel.

When he encounters his next and most sublime virgin, Laure, Grenouille is more open to the experience than in Paris, and even more frightened because he partially recognizes it. Standing in the streets of Grasse, he catches “a fatally wonderful scent,” one that turns him “hot with rapture and cold with fear” (Süskind 2001, 169) because “to have found that scent in this world once again brought tears of bliss to his eyes—and to know that it could not possibly be true frightened him to death” (170): Laure’s aroma is not yet ripe, but already it is “terrifyingly celestial” (171). This is a trans- formative experience with a world beyond nature as he knows it—beyond civilization, too; for if finding the scent a second time is impossible, then he must be in touch with something beyond the possible. Hence the fear: there is something greater at work than Grenouille himself. And hence, too, the final inspiration for his angel’s scent.

Up to this point the sublime has been found in nature, particularly the girls’ natural smells. As we’ve seen, this is typical of philosophical concep- tions. Even as he undergoes that sublime experience with Laure, Grenouille feels himself capable of dominating it and becoming the “omnipotent god of scent” of which he dreamed upon coming down from the mountain (Süskind 2001, 155). “No,” he thinks, “he wanted truly to possess the scent of this girl behind the wall; to peel it from her like skin and to make her scent his own” (172). That is, his original experience may be sublime, but he hopes to gain mastery over human souls by breaking his own bliss down into the merely beautiful, then rebuilding it as something apparently natural

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but even better than nature. And in this he succeeds—though not in the way he first envisions.

Before Laure, the novelistic Grenouille kills two dozen other virgins of Grasse and perfects his technique for acquiring their scent. With all those odors blended together in a “diadem of scent” and Laure’s odor “at its sublime acme” (Süskind 2001, 193), his careful creation of the one ultimate perfume enables him to wield power over human response and even human nature. Those who smell this concoction experience it not as a heady artificial scent, like the elixirs he makes for Baldini, but as a natural phenomenon, a body odor that belongs to him and changes according to emotion and situation. He thus composes or “writes” an apparently authentic but actually fictive body through his perfume, and those who catch a whiff fall in love. But he remains himself, the malevolent, ugly little tick, and ultimately he will want to destroy himself as a hateful example of grotesquerie.