Identity In Parfume

The Science of Olfaction and Identity in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

The critical history of Patrick Süskind’s Das Parfum/ Perfume is a lively and varied one, suggestive of a text with multiple interpretations, passionate reader responses and ambiguous literary status. Das Parfum has been analysed as being a critique on Enlightenment culture with a ‘sociohistoriographic thrust’ (Gray 490) which sees Süskind dramatizing ‘the consequences of enlightened reason’s destructive dialectic’ (Gray 492); it’s also a critique of ‘Die Neue Sensibilität’, says Donahue, of the type found in German literature of the Seventies (Donahue 36). Jacobson, on the other hand, sees Das Parfum as Künstlerroman (Jacobson 201-210), and Fleming also explores Das

Perhaps the most enduring and oft-quoted analysis of Das Parfum is Ryan’s critique of the text as pastiche-parody, which sees Süskind ‘masterful[ly] blending’ (Ryan 397) allusions from its literary past into an intertextual web which becomes the very body of the text. Ryan’s argument that this Frankensteinian text is original in its imitation sees her finding allusions to Goethe, Baudelaire and Rimbaud (Ryan 398), but also to Euripides’ The Bacchae (400). Rarick is rather cynical about Ryan and other critics engaging in a ‘frenzy of allusion-finding and precedent-identifying’ (Rarick 208) and argues that these critics have ‘colluded to reduce [Das Parfum’s] murderous narrative to literary vignette’ (208). Rarick instead explores Das Parfum as a text about serial killing, seeing it in relation to previous novels of murder (Rarick 212). What most of these critics and analyses have in common, however, is an impulse to locate Das Parfum as a

These theories about scent come not from a pure anecdotal background but can be found in the kinds of olfactory questions that were being asked and answered through lab-based scientific research, not just about animals, but humans also. The relationship between human behaviour and scent was a topic of serious scientific enquiry even in the late 1960s; Schneider’s 1967 and 1971 papers on the link between human sexuality and sense of smell are some of the earliest scientific papers on the interplay between scent and human behaviour. That this new revival of interest in scent science had no impact on Süskind’s Perfume is highly unlikely. That is not to argue that Süskind necessarily read these exact papers; as Gray points out, Süskind refuses to make statements about his work or inspiration (504) and so it’s almost impossible to document what exactly he had access to whilst writing Das Parfum. The revival of scent science, however, was important enough for one to suggest that Süskind was aware of some of it at least, especially when Perfume is read against the backdrop of the growing body of olfactory theories, predominantly around animals, but later around humans too. The research done in the Western world on scent theories in the 1970s and 80s has now become part of our cultural understanding about smell and its impact