The Beauty of Brutality, a deep dive on 'Perfume' by Patrick Suskind

 

The human fascination with the entanglement between love, sex and cannibalism is one frequently explored in art and media. In ‘Bones and all’, we witness a modern tale of two lovers struggling to navigate the tension between affection and annihilation. To love someone so deeply, you feel compelled to consume them entirely. An ancient example can be taken from Dionysian ritual, ‘The bacchae’ by Euripides, in which ecstatic, frenzied women mistake King Pentheus for a wild beast and tear him limb from limb. It would seem as though love, in excess, can quickly tip into something much more malevolent and pushes the question: how can I have enough of this person whom I love, without simply consuming them entirely? 

 

A most beautiful expression of this theme is ‘Perfume’ by Patrick Suskind. A young French man, Jean-BaptisteGrenouille, is born with a superhuman sense of smell. But he himself has absolutely no scent, a symbolic absence of identity. His life becomes a search for essence. He begins to assemble perfumes in his mind, conjuring scents of pine bark, rose gardens, and damp stone. He sharpens this skill as he grows older. He eventually brings his ability to a Parisian perfumery where he works as an apprentice, leading the story to its dark turn; Grenouille discovers the most exquisite scent he’s ever encountered. His nose leads him to a virgin girl, whom he promptly kills with a blow to the head in an effort to somehow obtain this addictive scent. She is the first of many, and he refines his technique for distilling scent from human flesh, crafting a perfume so perfect it triggers uncontrollable lust in all who encounter it.

 

‘Suskind has developed this simple idea into a fantastic tale of murder and twisted eroticism controlled by a disgusted loathing on society’ says the Literary review. This story, in its writing and complexity, is stunning, a tale that seduces as it horrifies. Süskind writes with such lush, intoxicating precision that the horror takes on the quality of beauty, the passion turns a corner of brutality, and we are taken on a journey of acceptance in the name of art. When he first smells the girl, Süskind offers no grotesque detail, only poetry, her scent is described as "like cool water under apple trees, like nutmeg and gooseberries, like the bark of young trees.". He does not want her kindness, nor body, nor her mind. Grenouille possesses all those things, and yet he is nothing, scent, therefore, becomes everything. He extracts her essence, bottles it, and carries it as proof of meaning. This is not desire in the romantic sense, it is obsession at its most abstract and yet it echoes something disturbingly familiar… When we are most in love, we often want to be close, then closer, then closer still, until closeness becomes hunger. Grenouille’s violence is not an aberration, it’s the natural end of a desire that cannot be quenched, his desire for self-identity. 

 

Grenouille is eventually caught, but receives his verdict without emotion. He is sentenced to twelve blows to the joints and death by crucifixion. Come the day of his execution, he neither begs nor pleads. Instead, he wears a drop of his perfected perfume. The crowd, upon smelling it, is overcome by rapture and descend into orgiastic chaos. They see him not as a criminal, but as a God, “they all felt as if he had seen through them at their most vulnerable point, grasped them, touched their erotic core.”. He is adored, worshipped, but this sought after importance brings him neither relief nor joy, instead only hatred and disgust. They adore him for his “counterfeit aura”, a stolen scent, nothing more, the one thing he can never have, is the only reason he can be loved. The point only further proves to Grenouille that he alone, scentless- is nothing. 

 

A set of arms approach him and he believes his reprehension has finally come, it is the father of his last victim, but instead of anger, the man receives Grenouilles with awe and love. He is finally accepted by a parent, but for something he is not, he desires to matter despite his lack of identity. Once the crowd awakens they “unwound themselves in horror from intimate embraces”, so shocked by their actions- so completely inexplicable and incompatible with their genuine moral precepts, that they simply erase their actions from their memory the moment it happened. Grenouille is no longer recognisable or important to these people, his scent has passed so has his importance. He has discovered the secret to short term divinity, but instead of drawing it out, he decides to pour the entire concoction down himself, drawing a crowd that eventually collapses in on him, echoing The Bacchae tale, they tear Grenouille limb from limb and consume his flesh, each person clawing and scratching, needing urgently their piece of him. “They tore away his clothes, his hair, his skin from his body”, “the flash of knives soon followed, thrusting and slicing, and then the swish of axes and cleavers aimed at the joints”, “in very short order, the angel was divided into thirty pieces”.

 

It's interesting that, unlike you’d expect, the turning point of Jean- Baptiste Grenouille’s appreciation into brutalism is not out of extreme lust, or a perverted fantasy, it is in fact an extremely unsexual act for Grenouille, even when preparing his body the process is systematic; “He removed her clothes… spread her arms and legs… shaved off her hair and sprinkled her body with oil… he treated her with great care, like a craftsman preparing raw material.”. Each step is part of a distillation method used in perfumery called enfleurage, a real technique once used to extract scent from delicate petals. Suskind’s ability to write with such sensual energy, while managing to remove perverted fantasy from the subject of virgin murders, undressing, and obsessive brutalism, is exquisite.

 

This novel ends with the line “for the first time they had done something out of Love”.  Speaking of the ferocious mob’s descent upon Grenouille. What’s fascinating about this sentence is the capital ‘L’ on love, the main theme throughout the novel has been the beauty of brutality, but perhaps the theme isn’t a contradiction, it’s an exploration of love in its most dangerous, consuming form. His identity is eventually found, not as a man, not as a scent but as Love embodied through annihilation. He gifts the townspeople their first true act of love, and ‘Love’ is almost a god at this point, the one true arbiter. We as the audience are forced to leave our alliance with Grenouille during his death, leaving his narrative and entering the chaos of the violent crowd- we are always asked to sway with the actioner, there is no pain described in these deaths. The story collapses the boundary between hero, villain, and witness.