The
article below is a long, but interesting analysis of Patrick Suskind’s Perfume (originally published in German as
Das Parfum). Immediately below is a citation for the
article. I hope you enjoy it.
The
Germanic Review, Fall 2000 v75 i4 p259
Narcissism
and Creativity in the Postmodern Era: The Case of Patrick Suskind's
Das Parfum. (Critical
Essay) JEFFREY ADAMS.
Full
Text: COPYRIGHT 2000 Heldref Publications
The
Poetics of Melancholia and Mourning
One of the most celebrated younger writers in
contemporary German literature, Patrick Suskind owes
his fame mainly to his literary debut, the monodrama Der
Kontraba[Beta],
an overnight success and the darling of the German stage in the 1980s, and to
the novel Das Parfum: Die
Geschichte eines Morders,
an international best seller that quickly became one of the most read German
novels since Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks and Erich
Maria Remarque's Nichts Neues im Westen.
Suskind's literary fame stands in sharp contrast to
his secretive personal life. An ascetic recluse who rejects public recognition
for his success, Suskind does not grant interviews
and almost never comments on his work. When he does, as in a rare
self-reflexive essay entitled "Amnesie in litteris," he
remains evasive about his identity, especially his literary persona. Addressing
the question of literary influences, Suskind claims
to be a blissfully ignorant epigone whose memory is so poor that he barely
remembers what he has read, much less who wrote it, which, it seems to him, is
a fortunate handicap for a creative writer since it frees him from the anxiety
of influence and creates an uncomplicated relation to plagiarism, without
which, he paradoxically insists, nothing original can be written.
In what has become a definitive example of
German literary postmodernism, Suskind projects his
concern with personal identity and literary persona onto the themes and
characters of Das Parfum.
Set in eighteenth-century
The novel has been read variously as an
indictment of Enlightenment rationality, as an allegory of the fascist mind, or
simply as a cynical postmodern pastiche that serves the reader titillating but
derivative kitsch. Whatever their view of the novel's
thematic intentions, all critics agree that Das Parfum's rich intertextuality
invites a search for the novel's literary sources. Despite its immense
popularity among an international readership, the response to Das Parfum in
Given the tyrannical insistence of
traditional literary aesthetics that the author be identified as the voice of a
singular and unified subject, it was predictable that the shell game with
authorial identity played out in the ostentatious borrowings of Das Parfum would be considered a
Germanic version of the deconstructive ecriture that
Roland Barthes had defined decades ago as a
"neutral, composite, oblique space" where conventional notions of
human subjectivity slip away and identity is lost (Barthes
142). Barthes's reduction of the author's identity to
an effect of literary discourse found little resonance among German
intellectuals, especially in the years immediately preceding Das Parfum's publication in 1985.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, the counter-Enlightenment impulses that fed
deconstructive theory were considered suspect and their influence was limited,
in particular by the philosophy of Jurgen Habermas, who called for a completion of the unfinished
project of modernity grounded in the Enlightenment ideal of individual
autonomy. To dismiss the author as an effect of
literary discourse, especially for postwar German intellectuals, is to subvert
the Enlightenment ideal of autonomous selfhood needed to construct and maintain
liberating social institutions. Certainly, the Germans have good historical
reasons for fearing a counter-Enlightenment that, in its philosopical
attacks on the "myth" of the autonomous subject, encourages dangerous
backsliding into the Romantic irrationalism often cited as the precursor of the
amorphous collective identity of fascism. After Hitler's exploitation and
contamination of the German cultural tradition, vast portions of its
intellectual heritage, especially those relating to Romanticism, were
disavowed, leaving
Less anxious critics, most notably the
American Germanist Judith Ryan, have argued that the
novel's pastiche implies a critical strategy that forces an overdue
reassessment of established literary values, especially of conventional notions
of creativity. As such, the pastiche citationality of
Das Parfum challenges the
notion of artistic autonomy that had emerged in the Enlightenment aesthetics of
Kant and Schiller and was elaborated by certain Romantics and their modernist
successors. Indeed, by this late date it ought to be clear that our perception
of creativity has changed substantially. Increasingly, we witness the emergence
of writers who construct their texts as hybrid reproductions of prior texts
assimilated into a synthetic pastiche. Moreover, not all such writing can be
dismissed as meaningless epigonal play across the
textual surfaces of anteriority. Even though the parodic
qualities of a novel like Das Parfum
tend to obscure its critical function, its pastiche still effectively exposes
illusions of creative mastery and textual ownership encoded in the precursor
texts that it seems to exploit. More than a parasitic parody that feeds on dead
poets, Das Parfum can be
productively interpreted as an enactment of literary anamnesia
that contributes to a working through of complex psychic and social issues.
In this respect, several critics have
usefully explicated the novel's allegorical critique of the epistemic
mechanisms of the Enlightenment. Following early Foucault and the
proto-deconstructive thought of Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialektik der Aufklarung, these analyses
treat the novel as a cautionary fable revealing how the Enlightenment ideal of
individual autonomy is all-too-easily subverted by instrumental reason to
produce the ego pathology that increasingly infects modern society
(Butterfield; Grey). Grenouille's coldly rational
plundering of the human body to create an ideal perfume is undeniably an
allegory of the "murder" that instrumental reason commits on the
objects of its reifying analysis and thus also a parable of the perversion of
reason that led Germany into the horrors of the Holocaust. At the same time, Suskind's alleged plundering of what is to a large extent a
Romantic canon suggests that the narcissistic ego spawned by Enlightenment
reason infected the aesthetic imagination as well, extending the perverse myth
of autonomy to the artistic realm and producing the aberration of
"original genius." A principal aim of this essay will be to trace Suskind's recourse to certain Romantic and neo-Romantic
precursor texts that present the artistic genius as an aesthetic avatar of the
Enlightenment's pathological tendencies and to elucidate them as case studies
of ego pathology in allegorical disguise, rather than, as is often thought,
depraved glorifications of aesthetic narcissism. As such, these precursors
provide constructive models for a redefinition and restitution of a disavowed
Romantic tradition without which, Suskind seems to
say, the contemporary creative mind is incapable of self-comprehension and
therefore also of useful self-criticism.
To formulate the terms for such a
redefinition of creativity it is instructive to revisit the psychopoetics
of Harold Bloom, whose theory of intertextuality has
altered our conceptions of the literary imagination in important ways. Because
he has argued against the notion of an autonomous creative imagination, saying
that "there are no texts, only relationships between texts" (Map of
Misreading 3), Bloom is often associated with the deconstructive aesthetics of
literary postmodernism. Yet, while Bloom concedes the primacy of textuality in the formation of the writing subject, he
still struggles to rescue the human(ist) subject from complete absorption into the vortex of ecriture. Agreeing with the deconstructive idea that all
creative writing is an instance of Freudian Nachtraglichkeit
or retroactive meaningfulness, by which an "afterpoet"
creates identity from the traces of prior poetry, Bloom also insists that the
creative writer in the modern tradition can still achieve the illusion of
originality by repressing influential precursors, even if there can never be an
absolute autonomy of poetic meaning. Bloom envisions the literary text not as a
mere "gathering of signs on the page" that marks the vicissitudes of ecriture, but as a "psychic battlefield upon which
authentic forces struggle for the only victory worth winning, the divinating triumph over oblivion" (Poetry and
Repression 2). Incorrectly identified as a deconstructive critic, Bloom has
always sought to reassert the essential validity of Romantic conceptions of
original genius, even if what actually survives the agon
of creativity is a skeletal post-Freudian subject, rivaling, as one critic
remarks, "a Giacometti figure in severity of
diminishment" (Leitch 132). Nevertheless,
against the "serene linguistic nihilism" of deconstruction Bloom
declares poetry to be "an art that will not abandon the self to
language" ("The Breaking of Form" 37).
In the wake of the Enlightenment's demand for
self-legislating subjectivity, so Bloom argues, the Romantic poet could no
longer unquestioningly imitate previous models to develop a literary identity.
Thus Bloom casts the Romantic poet as a version of the oedipal son who contests
the father's priority, not in direct conflict, but by a defensive repression of
the precursor's voice. To achieve authentic identity, the artistic imagination
must define itself by rejecting anterior discourse and narcissistically seeking
its own voice, constituting an ego by love of its own figurations. Unlike the
Freudian oedipal son, however, who resolves his conflict by incorporating
paternal authority as superego, the Bloomian epigone
dare not identify fully with the ancestral poet. Instead, the paternal element,
the parent-poem, must be drained of its authority. Freud considered the oedipal
reconciliation a crucial step in the ego's progression toward the goal of
psychic individuation and wholeness; the resolution of the son's incestuous
fixation on the mother must be enforced by the paternal threat of castration.
But the Romantic poet, thinks Bloom, cannot complete such a development and
remain a poet since "a poet's stance, his Word, his imaginative identity,
his whole being, must be unique to him, and remain unique, or he will perish,
as a poet" (Anxiety of Influence 71). Instead of a progressive model of
identification, culminating in the formation of a superego, Bloom posits the
necessity of creative regression: "Freud humanely saw the Oedipus complex
as only a phase in the development of character, to be superceded by the uberich (superego) as mock-rational censor. Yet no
poet-as-poet completes such a development and still remains a poet. In the
imagination, the Oedipal phase develops backwards, to
enrich and make yet more inchoate the id" (Anxiety 109-110). In Bloom's
scheme, then, the authentic or "strong" poet must return to an
"antecedent stage of psychic organization" where it is possible to
limit the precursor's presence and clear imaginative space for a new creative
identity. What Bloom describes is, in psychoanalytic terms, the illusory self-cathexis of primary narcissism, in which the infant has not
yet emerged from a maternal symbiosis to begin the process of individuation.
For the Bloomian poet the literary equivalent of this
narcissistic symbiosis is an initial affiliation with a central precursor:
"the strong poet's love of his poetry, as itself, must exclude the reality
of all other poetry, except what cannot be excluded, the initial identification
with the poetry of the precursor." Thus, "the mystery of poetic
style" is reduced to the "mystery of narcissism" (Anxiety
146-147).
The result of this imaginative narcissism is
a creative melancholia that promotes a literary amnesia. Because originality
becomes the post-Enlightenment law of creativity, Bloom argues that writers in
the Romantic tradition (which he interprets broadly to include most canonical
literature since the late eighteenth century) must refuse to mourn the loss of
the idealized precursor by a process of self-defensive repression.
"Poets," Bloom contends, "do not exist to accept griefs" (Yeats 5). Inevitably, such repression leads
to an enormous diminishment of the creative ego, making Romantic poetry
"the result of a more prodigious sublimation of imagination than Western
poetry from Homer through
In the ongoing assessment of postmodern creativity,
Freud's distinction between mourning and melancholia has been largely
overlooked. Based on Romantic aesthetics and a canon of modernist literature
that opposes the implied agenda of postmodern art, Bloom's widely acknowledged
theory of intertextuality constructs the writing
subject as a melancholy narcissist. Postmodernism, on the other hand, redefines
creativity as a variant of the therapeutic Trauerarbeit
advocated by Freud. By means of a desublimated
reincorporation of parodied precursors, postmodern texts such as Das Parfum create an intertextual transference in which the self-destructive
Romantic dream of creative omnipotence is subverted. Undoing melancholic
repression, citational play creates a discourse of
mourning that undergirds and sustains both the
philosophical and aesthetic practices of a postmodern culture confronted with
the disintegration of Enlightenment master codes of unity and totalization. Shifting the focus from Bloom's repressive
melancholia to a mode of commemorative grieving, I hope to show that the
postmodern work of mourning has important antecedents in Romantic literature.
Subverting notions of mastery, purity, and originality associated with the
Enlightenment genius, Romantic ironists who favored hybrid texts, shared authorship,
and plagiaristic play contributed heavily to an aesthetic philosophy that is
revived by contemporary writers like Suskind.(2) As
openly acknowledged and thus mourned antecedents, Romantic stories of genius
can be incorporated or ingested by the creative writing subject to reformulate
identity, strengthening the ego, rather than as Freud and Bloom think,
poisoning it.
In this sense Suskind
can be included in a larger constellation of postmodern artists whose creative
projects seek to recuperate aspects of Romantic discourse as a part of a
contemporary revision of German cultural identity. German visual artists have
addressed this issue most directly, possibly because, as Andreas Huyssen notes, "Nazi culture had most effectively
occupied, exploited, and abused the power of the visual" (Huyssen 217). A notable example is the German filmmaker
Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, who
contends that post war German intellectuals used rationalism to repress the
Romantic tradition, blaming modern fascism on the Romantic glorification of the
irrational.(3) Some critics remain skeptical of efforts to reclaim German
Romanticism because, as they insist, the grieving in much neo-Romantic art is
merely melancholic nostalgia which compulsively repeats regressive fantasies
rather than geniunely working through the
psychological and social wounds that created the fantasies (Brockmann;
Kaes 66-72; Santner 147).
To cite Romanticism as the source, rather than a symptom, has thus far been the
error of such criticism, which (like Bloom's) defines Romantic creativity as a
pathological melancholia and neglects its attempts to mourn and to reinterpret
the image of original genius as a symptom of psychic illness in Enlightenment
culture.
Mourning a Romantic Antecedent
Das Parfum's popular success
owes much to its wicked protagonist, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a compelling character designed to exploit a
deeply embedded cultural fascination with the criminal genius extending back to
the Romantic period. Certainly, Grenouille's appeal
derives from the similarity of this homicidal predator of eigtheenth-century
Many of the novel's numerous citational allusions, particularly the one that emerges in
the very first sentence, signal Suskind's
incorporation of Romantics who authored allegories linking artistic genius with
the criminal mind. When Grenouille, a child of the
Enlightenment, is profiled as "ein Mann, der zu den genialsten
und abscheulichsten Gestalten dieser
an genialen und abscheulichen Gestalten nicht armen Epoche gehorte"
(5), the schooled reader hears echoes of Kleist's
Michael Kohlhaas, described as "einer der rechtschaffensten
zugleich und furchtbarsten
Manner" of the sixteenth century (Kleist 9). The
wording of Grenouille's initial profile is also very
close to the description of Rene Cardillac, the mad
genius of E. T. A. Hoffmann's tale Das Fraulein von Scuderi, who is characterized as "einer
der kunstreichsten und zugleich sonderbarsten Menschen seiner Zeit" (Hoffmann 179). Like Grenouille,
Kohlhaas and Cardillac are
Promethean individuals, geniuses of their respective eras, but also criminals
whose excessive and transgressive acts are the
by-products of a disintegrating and defensive ego. Since Kleist's
Kohlhaas has already been identified as an allegory
of antisocial aggression resulting from a weakened self-structure (Kohut 531; Dettmering), I will
focus on Hoffmann's Cardillac, whose strange acts of
aesthetic terror offer a useful point of entry into a discussion of narcissism
and creativity.
Like Kleist, but
also Tieck and Jean Paul, Hoffmann's predilection for
depictions of abnormal psychology addresses psychic conflicts with an
allegorical technique that prefigures contemporary texts like Das Parfum. Furthermore,
Hoffmann's satirical critique of Enlightenment ideals and his predilection for parodic citationality also
suggest him as a precursor of literary postmodernism. Citing postmodern parody
as a productive and transformative return to precursor texts, critics have
interpreted Suskind's global allusion to Hoffmann's Das Fraulein von Scuderi as a
homage that subsumes and heightens themes and effects of its model with ironic
deference (Whitinger and Herzog). Indeed, this parodic stance, along with Hoffmann's precocious intuition
of art's relation to psychopathology may best explain Suskind's
attraction to the story.
Of particular interest is the prefiguration of modern theories of art suggested by the
homicidal jeweler, Rent Cardillac. In a brief
digression at the heart of Das Fraulein von Scuderi we learn that Cardillac's
artistic talent and criminal tendencies are both linked to a prenatal trauma.
According to Cardillac himself, during the first
month of his mother's pregnancy with him she encountered a former suitor whose
previous amorous advances had been denied. This time, obsessively attracted to
a bejewelled chain around his neck, the cavalier
seems to represent to Mme. Cardillac "ein Wesen hoherer
Art, der Inbegriff aller Schonheit" (211) and
she allows him to seduce her. As she grasps for the jewels in the moment of her
desire, the suitor dies of unknown causes, throwing Cardillac's
mother into a disabling hysteria which is then mysteriously communicated to the
in utero fetus. The implication is that the mother's
erotically charged desire for the sublime beauty represented by the gems is
transmitted to her son, whose resulting prodigious talent for the artistic
creation of jewelry elevates him to the "der erste Meister" of this art form (212). As a result of
this trauma, Cardillac comes into the world with a
congenital compulsion to steal gold and jewels, an antisocial tendency that
later alienates him from his father, who must subject him to cruel punishments
to suppress this instinct.
The prenatal trauma and the resulting
conflicts with the father and his societal agency, the law, are tantalizing
clues to the mystery of Cardillac's violent acts,
suggesting that the mother's infidelity breached not only her relationship with
her husband but also, and in a far less mediated way, the emotional attachment
with her unborn child. According to this logic, the intervention of a rival for
maternal affection at such an archaic juncture preconditions Cardillac to act out an unconscious oedipal conflict with
his male clients. Compelled to repossess the masterpieces of jewelry he creates
for handsome suitors, Cardillac's homicides can be
construed as revenge on a paternal order and as reappropriations
of precious self-representations invested with incestuous libidinal energy.(5) The unmediated loss of the maternal symbiosis,
exaggerated by the in utero trauma, triggers the
formation of a creative imagination obsessed with fetishized
works of art whose violent retrieval compensates a primal narcissistic wound.
Such an allegory implies a vision of creativity that exceeds Freud's sense of
art as a sublimation of drives, bringing it closer to Bloom's image of the
artist as oedipal murderer. The crucial element in Hoffmann's portrait of the
artist is a compensatory mechanism: Cardillac creates
works of art precisely so that he can take them back. His artistry is thus a
perpetual recreation of a lost narcissistic unity for which there is no
liberating Trauerarbeit. The regressive nature of Cardillac's art fetish makes him a textbook example of
Bloom's Romantic genius: To satisfy his infantile urge to be merged with the
maternal element and possess it exclusively, the mad goldsmith must develop
backwards toward an antecedent stage of psychic organization. Cardillac identifies himself with his jeweled masterpieces,
which simulate the gems that his mother had idealized. He cannot accept an ego
ideal because the idealized maternal object is still fused with a primitive
grandiose self.
The account of Grenouille's
birth and the genesis of his creative genius in Das Parfum reiterates both the
physical circumstances and the emotional logic of Cardillac's
trauma, but with certain important modifications that heighten the significance
of loss and compensation for the creative process. Although the novel's opening
scene seems to situate Grenouille's abandonment
trauma at the moment of his birth, when his mother discards his newborn body on
a pile of rotting fish, the narrative subsequently informs us that he has been prenatally conditioned for this rejection by an
intrauterine hostility that was emotionally just as traumatic as his appalling
rejection at birth. In a later chapter, suffused with images of regression to
prenatal existence, Grenouille, curled up like a
fetus in the womb-like depths of a mountain cave, claims that he has neve elt so secure, "schon gar nicht im Bauch seiner
Mutter" (156). Following Hoffmann, who implies that the mother's fixation
on the idealized gems contributes to the formation of Cardillac's
superhuman talents, Suskind invokes an idealized
feminine scent the "master scent" of Grenouille's
first murder victim, to trigger his grandiose self-perception as revolutionary
genius: "Mit dem heutigen Tag aber schien ihm, als
wisse er endlich, wer er
wirklich sei: namlich nichts anderes als ein
Genie; und da[Beta] sein Leben Sinn und Zweck und hohere Bestimmung habe: namlich keine
geringere, als die Welt der Dufte zu
revolutionieren" (57).
In Hoffmann's tale the psychic catastrophe
caused by the mother's erotic desire transcribes her optical fixation onto the
fetus, resulting in Cardillac's obsession with
glittering gems. While Suskind changes the sensory
modality, investing his wunderkind with a superhuman sense of smell, the primal
cause of the artist's "genius" remains the same: Grenouille's
instinctive olfactory talent is linked to the site of his traumatic wounding,
the profoundly odiferous environment of eighteenth-century
The essence of Suskind's
primal scene of the artist is of course already embedded in Hoffmann's story:
the intruding male rival who upsets Cardillac's
prenatal environment causes a catastrophic separation from the mother, sensed
by the in utero embryo as a rupture of fetal
symbiosis. Enlarging Hoffmann's interlude to epic proportions, Suskind builds his entire novel around a detailed narration
of Grenouille's postnatal ego development, which is
played out in a repetitive series of abandonments and
betrayals by primary caretakers that reinforce the traumatic consequences of
primal wounding. As the events of Das Parfum make clear, Grenouille's
genial fixation results from a defect of primary identity caused by a traumatic
separation from the maternal matrix, a loss repeated and underscored by the
grossly unempathic treatment he receives from all
subsequent caregivers. Not only is Grenouille unable
to bond with his biological mother, but all his surrogate parents are
themselves narcissists incapable of emotional bonding. Mme. Galliard, the
mistress of the orphanage, is a particularly obvious example. As a child her
father had struck her across the forehead with a poker, thus robbing her not
only of all sense of smell but also of all human warmth and passion. More than
mere physical harm, that traumatic blow leaves its recipient emotionally
disabled, without empathy and without the ability to mourn. Her numbness and
olfactory deficiency are a metaphorical mirror-opposite of Grenouille's
powers. Parodying the Enlightenment conception of Bildung
as a progression toward an autonomous ego, Grenouille's
formative relationships promote only regressions to primitive ego states in
which compensatory fantasies of infantile omnipotence replace the mature
resolution of dependency issues.
Though it is less obviously worked out in
Hoffmann's tale, the compensatory aspect is apparent in both stories: The
artist creates as a result of a deeply rooted need to restore structural
deficits in the core self. On this point Suskind's
text is unambiguous: To tame and structure his incoherent internal universe, Grenouille must assimilate an idealized feminine scent. His
most urgent need is to reinscribe a feeling of
symbiotic unity into his disintegrating self-structure: "Er wollte wie
mit einem Pragestempel das apotheotische Parfum ins Kuddelmuddel seiner schwarzen Seele pressen" (55). In this
way he can erect "planvoll[el Geruchgebauden" in his
psyche, "eine taglich sich erweiternde, taglich sich verschonende
und perfekter gefugte innere Festung der herrlichsten Duftkompositionen" (58). Unable to mourn the loss of
the maternal symbiosis, Grenouille remains trapped in
a state of melancholic depression, which produces an idealizing fixation on the
maternal. Like Cardillac, whose mother perceives the
cavalier as the embodiment of ideal beauty and transmits this idealization to
her son, Grenouille seeks the ultimate scent, which
he first discovers in the pure, unviolated body of
the girl in the rue des Marais. This one scent,
thinks Grenouille, "dieser
eine war das hohere Prinzip, nach dessen Vorbild
sich die andern ordnen muBten. Es war die reine Schonheit"
(55).
In such an allegory of creativity, regression
to an antecedent stage emerges as a psychopoetic
metaphor consistent with the Bloomian notion of the
creative genius who unconsciously reactivates a primal affiliation with a
central precursor and imaginatively regresses to a state of primary narcissism.
Although Bloom seems unaware of it, his idea finds support in the aesthetics of
object relations theory, which shifts the conception of creativity from
classical Freudian sublimation to a compensatory idealization of the self. In
post-Freudian psychoanalysis it has long been the consensus that artists work
to restore a lost beauty and perfection that was once their own. By inventing
an idealized object onto which primitive fantasies of omnipotence are projected,
artists enact a mourning of the lost omnipotence of the primitive grandiose
self (
According to Julia Kristeva,
whose view of art as an imaginative conquest of melancholia provides a useful
complement to Bloom's more orthodox Freudian psychopoetics,
the depressive symptoms of narcissistic self-disorders result from the failure
of a primary identification in the pre-oedipal stage. Revising Freud, Kristeva argues that the bedrock of personal identity
develops when the emotional matrix of child and primary caretaker is
triangulated by a mediating ideal (usually personified as a paternal metaphor).(6) If the matrix is broken without the assistance of a nurturing,
rather than castrating, parental agent, the core self fails to develop
sufficiently, resulting in a "borderline" personality prone to
psychic fragmentation. Without such pre-oedipal triangulation, the child
remains suspended in a regressed state of primary narcissism. In Das Parfum the image used to
convey this emotional stunting is the tick, a parasite that withdraws into
itself and survives on a single drop of blood for years. Like the tick, Grenouille requires only a minimum of nutriments, especially
in the psychological sense: "Fur seine Seele brauchte er nichts.
Geborgenheit, Zuwendung, Zartlichkeit, Liebe--oder wie die ganzen
Dinge hieBen, deren ein Kind angeblich bedurfte--waren dem Kinde
Grenouille vollig entbehrlich" (28). In the total absence of empathy and
love, the narcissistically wounded child becomes, according to Kristeva, "an amphibian being of boundaries," a liminal creature bereft of "sexual, subjective, or
moral identity" (Moi 207). In this metaphorical
description of the regressive borderline personality the psychoanalytic
significance of Grenouille's name emerges: Grenouille (French for frog) is Suskind's
metaphor for the liminality and failure of
identification that characterize the narcissistic condition.
Unlike Freud, whose patients suffered
neurotic symptoms thought to result from unresolved oedipal guilt (like the
hysterical reaction of Cardillac's mother to the
intruder), contemporary psychoanalysts typically
confront a depression signifying wounds to a primitive ego preceding the
Oedipus. According to Kristeva, this profound
sadness, the melancholia of the borderline personality, is perceived by its
sufferer, as a "fundamental lack," or "congenital
deficiency" ("On the Melancholy Imaginery"
107; my italics). In both Das Parfum
and its Romantic antecedent, the key moment in the formation of genius is just
such a congenital deficiency. As psychopoetic
allegory, Suskind's parodic
recreation of Hoffmann's Cardillac generates an
implicit critique of Bloom's theory of Romantic repression and originality.
When Bloom claims that the original and therefore authentic poet must return,
via repression, to a state of primary narcissism, he is in effect saying that
the illusion of creative priority is purchased by an imaginative regression to
pre-oedipal melancholy, a phase in which the ego is not yet formed because it
has not successfully mourned the loss of narcissistic Alleinheit
by entering the paternal order of a cultural tradition. Bloom's version of the
Romantic genius, so Suskind seems to imply, is based
on a narcissistic urge for perfection that has dire consequences in the social
as well as the artistic sphere. Thus, a progressive view of
creativity, one that uncomplicates the artist's
relation to precursors and allows for the reformation of creative and cultural
identity, is an implicit agenda of Suskind's
allegorical novel. By means of an openly citational
reincorporation of Romantic precursors, Das Parfum sets up an intertextual anamnesia that not only deconstructs the Romantic fantasy
of creative omnipotence, but also assists a working-through of complex sociocultural issues.
Citationality as Alchemical Transmutation of Creative Identity
As the organizing allegory of a postmodern Kunstlerroman, the metaphor of perfume is particularly well
chosen, for what would be a more appropriate trope for the self-deconstructing
text than a composite mixture distilled from canonical essences, a parodic blend of the tradition's master codes and most
seductive stylistic voices? Hoffmann's Das Fraulein
von Scuderi, itself a synthesis of artist's story,
crime narrative, and psychoanalytic case history, is only one of numerous intertextual constituents that Das
Parfum comprises. Indeed, given the seemingly
innumerable citational traces in the novel, it is
tempting to imagine that Das Parfum
is nothing but a complex construction of parodied codes and citations by means
of which the author is able to write himself out of the text, an aesthetic ploy
that is consistent with Suskind's public (and presumably
philosophical) self-effacement. To analyze such acts of creative
self-abnegation Harold Bloom proposes the concept of kenosis, which in Bloom's
gloss means the belated poet's attempt to empty himself of his own
"imaginative godhood," so that the precursor, whom the belated poet
has introjected to achieve creative identity, is also
emptied of his creative divinity (or originality) (Anxiety 77-92). By so
de-idealizing the precursor who inhabits the belated poet's imagination, the
later poet can overpower the precursor and establish the illusion of creative
priority. In postmodern writing this ebbing of the creative ego undergoes a
crucial revision. As the blatant citationality of Das Parfum shows, in postmodern
kenosis the creative psyche is diminished not to clear space for a narcissistic
genius who represses fetishized precursor texts but
to dissolve the fantasy of omnipotence and redefine imaginative subjectivity as
the fluid space of ecriture where singular authorial
identity disappears and its repressed other, the citation, emerges in a hybrid intertextual construct. Troping
multiple precursors, Suskind's pastiche foregrounds
the creative process as an evacuation of literary identity and its
reconstitution as a plurality of voices.
Such postmodern kenosis also offers the
reader an opportunity to reconsider, perhaps redefine, previously fixed
identities. As Freud theorized, an effective mourning
of ideals and the ensuing self-reconstitution must take place in an intersubjective context--there must be a public
acknowledgement of pain and loss. In the psychoanalytic session, the
emotionally secure environment created by the therapist's empathic response
serves this function, but in literary transactions such a confrontation and
resolution of trauma is enabled by the distance created by parodic
pastiche, which allows the reader to decathect fetishized cultural artifacts and reappropriate
them as part of a Trauerspiel, a playful enactment of
bereavement.(7) Portraying Grenouille as a
psychopathic genius capable of mesmerizing the masses and whipping them into a
depraved frenzy, for instance, evokes in contemporary readers the image of
Hitler as the collective ego ideal of a society deluded by narcissistic dreams
of purity and mastery, allegorically uncensoring the
psychopathology of National Socialism and inviting a recognition of its
lingering traces in various cultural practices of the present. In this sense Das Parfum can be said to
elaborate the allegorical technique of Gunter Grass's novel Die Blechtrommel. The fairy-tale image of Grenouille
as a regressive life-form (tick or frog) is a self-conscious variation of Oskar Matzerath, the stunted
child of Grass's popular novel, whose refusal to grow up parodies the political
retardation of postwar Germans who repressed all memory of the fascist period
(cf. Hoesterey 173; Donahue 37).
In a German novel such as Das
Parfum such Trauerspiel
represents an aesthetic elaboration of the social Trauerarbeit
called for by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, whose 1967 study Die Unfahigkeit
zu trauern examined postwar
Germans' refusal to remember and mourn the National Socialist period. The Mitscherlichs' central idea is that the Germans experienced
the fascist period not as politically oppressive, but rather as a phase of
intense societal narcissism. The grandiosely staged public spectacles and the
idealization of the Fuhrer, so obviously parodied in the final chapters of Das Parfum (cf.
The restitutive
effects of the novel's pastiche technique also apply to the dilemma confronting
the contemporary German-speaking writer who must reconcile the avoidance of a
politically contaminated tradition with the need to preserve connections with
viable cultural antecedents. If, as Kristeva
maintains, genuine mourning is achieved by a process of triangulation, which in
the contemporary literary imagination implies an
identification with the patriarchal canon, how is this possible in what
Alexander Mitscherlich has called the
"fatherless society" of post-Nazi
This bonding of multiple precursor-texts to
create a hybrid authorial identity has its analogy in the special alchemical
process Grenouille requires to produce perfumes.
According to the premodern science of alchemy,
natural materials can be distilled to their essence and combined to create a
synthetic substance, transmuting lower materials into higher ones, lead into
gold for instance. Psychologically, Grenouille's
fascination with capturing the "soul" of corporeal matter by
distilling its olfactory essence signals his unconscious desire to create a
human essence or core identity. Intertextually, the
transmutation of pre-existing materials to create a new substance mirrors the citational process of the novel itself, which, distilled
from myriad canonical essences, produces the literary equivalent of a perfume.
In Das Parfum this alchemy
of decomposed citations is initiated in the novel's opening sentence, which
describes Grenouille as one of the "most
gifted" yet "most abominable" men of his era. As previously
discussed, this is a double citation of Das Fraulein
yon Scuderi and Kleist's
Michael Kohlhaas. Significantly, Hoffmann's phrase is
already a self-conscious citation of Kleist, marking
Hoffmann's appropriation as an example of postmodernism avant
la lettre. By reduplicating Hoffmann's citation of Kleist, Suskind shows that ironic
citation of pre-existing literary materials is hardly a new phenomenon. Even in
the Romantic era, when according to Bloom the demand for creative authenticity
was pervasive, parodic citation was common practice
among Romantic ironists. Like the vampiric Grenouille, Hoffmann grafted himself onto precursors.(9) Moreover, by double-voicing the citation, Suskind avoids an exclusive identification with either
precursor and so preempts the oedipal conflict.
In a similar fashion, the novel's concluding
image of self-extinction mirrors the postmodern kenosis of subjectivity. After
achieving his highest ambition of being loved unconditionally and then
realizing that this love is only a manufactured illusion, Grenouille
commits suicide by drenching himself with his ideal perfume and throwing
himself to a crowd of riffraff, who tear him to pieces and consume his body in
an act of "love." The corporeal sacrifice and redemptive
reincorporation suggested by this cannibalization is amplified by a cluster of
allusions including, most obviously, the Christian crucifixion, as well as the Euripidean dismemberment of Pentheus
by the Dionysian maenads, the latter representing the defeat of the rational
ego in both the classical text and its postmodern adaptation. Additionally, the
image resonates with Kleist's Penthesilea,
which also ends with the devouring of a wounded hero (Achilles) in an orally
sadistic Liebestod. Reinhabiting
ancient and sacred myths, these images of ingestion, communion, and redemption
converge with the psychic necessity of introjective Trauerarbeit as a cure for wounded cultural identity. Grenouille's Christian name, Jean-Baptiste,
further reinforces the interpretation: John the Baptist preached the gospel of
redemption achieved by an identificatory communion
performed in the name of the Father.
In the middle chapters of the novel the image
of John the Baptist resonates in another, especially dense, citational
cluster. After a seven-year hibernation in a mountain
cave, Grenouille emerges looking like a fantastic
mixture of man and bear:
Er sah furchterlich aus. Die Haare reichten ihm bis zu den Kniekehlen, der dunne Bart bis zum Nabel. Seine Nagel waren wie Vogelkrallen, und an Armen und Beinen, wo die Lumpen nicht mehr hinreichten, den Korper zu bedecken, fiel ihm die Haut in Fetzen ab (176).
Not only does his wild appearance suggest
descriptions of the biblical John, who lived the crude existence of a penitent
in the desert, it is also reminiscent of the Barenhauter
of Grimms' folktales, whose story resembles Grenouille's in important particulars. Like Grenouille, Bearskin is rejected by bis family and wanders as a social outcast. A
Faustian figure, Bearskin wagers with the devil for his soul and (like the
titular figure of Chamisso's tale Peter Schlemihl Wundersame Geschichte)
must forfeit his shadow (a token for his soul or personal identity). In the end
(like the fairytale frog-prince and Faust) Bearkskin
is redeemed by the empathic mercy of a maternal figure. Without love and
therefore without soul or identity, these fairytale creatures are, to borrow Musil's phrase, "men without qualities," liminal beings who wander the borders of society. What
binds these figures together, generating the resonance that holds them in the
constellation of pastiche, is precisely the liminality
of their identity, a result of the traumatic abandonment that each of their
stories records. Largely derived from the folktales favored by the Romantics,
these figures of narcissistic loss and failed identity coalesce here to extend
the lengthy cultural history of the borderline personality.
The literary history of the narcissist can be
said to reach one of its high points in the Symbolist aesthete, whose
characteristic fantasies of self-origination provide the literary-historical
context for understanding the hibernation chapters of Das
Parfum. In a remote cave at the uninhabited peak of
the highest mountain in France, "Grenouille der GroBe," as he calls
himself, withdraws into a radically autistic dream world, a paradis
artificiel of the imagination, over which he reigns
with god-like omnipotence. In fantasies of perverse grandiosity he conjures a
race of slaves whom he dominates tyrannically and destroys with infantile rage.
In his "purple castle" he indulges himself in drunken debaucheries by
flooding his imagination with scented recollections of personal experience
recalled from the storehouse of his vast olfactory memory. He refers to these
regressive reveries as vintage wines, which he addictively imbibes to fortify
himself against the painful emptiness of his depleted psyche. Sometimes these
scented memories are called "books," which his servants retrieve from
a "great library" implying that he, the aesthete, intoxicates himself
with an excessive consumption of literary art. Ironically, despite this retreat
from reality into the inner sanctum of his imagination, he is unable to defend
himself against external influences, least of all from painful memories of
rejection and abuse, which return in the scented memoirs he obsessively
peruses. Similarly, the return of repressed Romantic and Symbolist texts is so
pervasive in these chapters that many passages seem to consist of almost
nothing but blatant plagiarizations (Ryan 399). Thus
the aesthete's narcissistic fantasy of a self-enclosing realm is defeated by an
underlying web of citations, commenting parodically
on the perverse impossibility of self-origination.
Although scholarly assessments of Das Parfum have mentioned
Baudelaire only in passing, the significance of his poetics for an
understanding of Suskind's citational
technique is of more than passing interest. Here a reference to Kristeva's psychoanalysis of Baudelairean
metaphor is useful. According to Kristeva,
Baudelaire's intoxicating lyricism, achieved in his hallmark metaphorical synesthesia, is the poet's attempt to merge disparate
representations into a constellation of correspondences. In the context of the
present analysis, synesthesia's destabilization and remixture of conventional signifiers represents a poetic
regression to the symbiosis of primary narcissism. For this reason, perfume is
Baudelaire's premier trope, representing as it does the dissolution and
blending of metaphor in the poet's imagination. In Kristeva's
analysis, synesthesia is the infrastructure of
Baudelaire's conception of lyric style, producing a liminal
semiosis of language that evokes the fluid
subjectivity of primary narcissism rather than the fixed meanings of a symbolic
discourse produced by the inflexible rational ego. Kristeva
suggests that the fundamental significance of perfume in a discussion of
narcissism and creativity is its psychosomatic connection to the maternal body:
Perfume has "fusional connotations that condense
the intoxicated memory of the maternal body" (Tales of Love 329). Smell is
the sensory apparatus that best mediates the recollection of primary merger
with the mother's body that precedes the acquisition of other symbolic codes.
As smell's artificial or aesthetic representative, perfume is a metaphor for
the earliest recognition of the (m)other and thus,
according to Kristeva, "the most powerful
metaphor for that archaic universe" (Tales of Love 334).
In view of Kristeva's
analysis, Grenouille's olfactory genius and his
obsession with creating an ultimate perfume from the distilled fragrances of
idealized women emerges as a potent allegory for the pathological narcissism of
the borderline personality. Presenting Grenouille as
a parody of the aesthete deepens this allegory, for as Kristeva
theorizes, such bizarre expressions of individuality manifest the dandy's
exaggerated need for autonomy. The aesthete asserts himself in such strident
style precisely to defend his fragile ego against the loss of identity
constantly threatened by a regressive merger with the maternal. Beyond that,
however, the conception of perfume as a metaphor for a synaesthetic
writing also applies to Suskind's style. Translating Kristeva's thinking into intertextual
terms, one can say that, like Baudelaire's alchemical play with metaphor, Suskind's citational play
promotes a dissolution and reformulation of authorial identity. Like the decompositional process of synesthesia
that displaces figural elements from one domain to another, mixing and fusing
them to create new imaginative structures, the bonding of citational
composites in Das Parfum
suggests the possibility of restructuring the writing subject. To avoid the
self-fetishizing tendency of the melancholy creative
ego (personified by atavistic geniuses like Grenouille
and his precursor Cardillac), the postmodern writer
must revisit the canon of narcissistic literature and, supported by the ironic
mediation of parody, reinvent such discourse as an alternative identificatory object. In this sense, Suskind
assimulates Baudelaire's practice of alchemical
writing, and, amplifying its psychological connotations, applies it to his
version of postmodern pastiche. By so inhabiting the literary other's
imagination, the belated writing subject dissolves fixed authorial identity
while regenerating a Romantic conception of psychopoetological
writing.
The analogy of transmutation is also
suggested by recent advances in psychotherapeutic treatment of the borderline
personality. In the clinical theories of Heinz Kohut,
for example, the narcissistic personality is restored to healthy functioning by
a psychic transmutation in which the analyst becomes the patient's transitional
ego ideal, sustaining the weakened identity-structure of the patient who
undergoes a healing change of personality during the therapeutic process.
Expanding his theory into aesthetics, Kohut argues
that creativity cannot be the affair of a radically isolated imagination, but
is sparked by the affirming presence of an ego ideal. Identifications with
mentors, in a so-called transference of creativity, provide cohesion for the
"fluid" subjectivity common to creative persons ("Creativeness,
Charisma, Group Psychology"). This transitory
attachment to ego ideals assists the artist's retrieval of the lost omnipotence
of primary narcissism, recreating a liminal psychic
condition in which identity and creative impulses are thought to originate. The
narcissistic wound is best healed at the irrational level of affect, where
substantive changes in psychic structure are possible. It is perhaps in this
sense that we must undertand the plea by German
artists such as Syberberg for a return to Romantic
irrationalism as a way of restoring identity to a culture without a Heimat (cf. Kaes 68).
Situated in a discussion of intertextual creativity, such concepts can clarify the
difference between the perceived plagiarism of postmodern art and a new
psychology of creativity. Taken in aggregate, the global pastiche of a novel
like Das Parfum provides a
"facilitating environment" where creative identity can be reformed (Winnicott). Rereading Bloom through Kristeva
and Kohut supports the hypothesis that, much like the
restoration of depleted ego structure in psychotherapy, authorial identity,
though dependent on primary identifications with precursors, can be modified by
the incorporation of clustered citations. In the artificially induced
regression and fluid kenosis of the citational
imagination, a transmuting internalization of precursor texts can contribute to
a reconstruction of authorial identity, which may also suggest to the reader an
alternative social subjectivity. This revision of the creative imagination
implies a reassessment of certain Romantic and Symbolist texts as explorations,
and not merely nostalgic glorifications, of the narcissistic condition, and
thus as models for a critical rehabilitation of Romantic discourse rather than
as compulsive repetitions of the pathological state that Harold Bloom
describes. Such a revision is at odds with a conception of the Romantic poet as
a melancholy genius who refuses to mourn the separation from tradition
resulting from Enlightenment aesthetics and fixates on the grandiose illusion
of self-divination. Rather than repressing the ancestral voice blocking the
epigone's access to some imagined Ursprache of poetic
language, the postmodern imagination liberates itself from the narcissistic
delusion of originality, converting creative anxiety into intertextual
productivity. Thus, the postmodern writer, no longer the mythic,
self-aggrandizing genius, is restored to the status of virtuoso, a term that in
the premodern era signified a collector of art and
highly skilled player. This is, in a productive sense, what the writing subject
appears to become in the intertextual artistry that
distinguishes Das Parfum as
an allegory of postmodern creativity.
NOTES
(1.) Joachim Kaiser compares Das Parfum with Thomas Mann;
Marcel Reich-Ranicki reads Das
Parfum in relation to E.T.A. Hoffmann's writings;
Michael Fischer comments on the influence of Balzac, Baudelaire, and Flaubert.
(2.) As Kathleen M. Wheeler notes:
"Contrary to received opinion about romantic poets, authors were not seen
as essentially discrete individuals originating new and individual works of
art; individuality was seen as `portions of one great poem' (to use Shelley's
words)." "Like Derrida," Wheeler adds, "the ironists were
reminding their readers that influence and tradition permeate even the most
apparently original texts" 31. For a discussion of German Romantic irony
in relation to deconstructive thought see 26-49.
(3.) Syberberg
asserts that without irrationalism
(4.) The homicidal psychopath is, however,
only the most extreme form of a sociopathic type now
considered by many to be pervasive. See Christopher Lasch,
The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Warner Books, 1979). Also interesting in
this context is the fact that Kurt Cobain, grunge rock icon and spokesman for
the alienated youth culture of the 90s (who committed suicide for apparently
the same reasons as Grenouille), had read and
idealized Das Parfum. He
wrote a song alluding to the novel entitled "Scentless Apprentice"
for the album In Utero.
(5.) Cf. Peter Schneider, "Verbrechen, Kunstlertum und Wahnsinn. Untersuchungen zur Figur des Cardillac
in E.T.A. Hoffmanns Das
Fraulein von Scuderi," Mitteilungen
der E.T.A. Hoffmann-Gesellschaft
26 (1980): 34-50.
(6.) Following Freud, Kristeva
calls this agent the "father of individual prehistory." Tales of
Love, 33-34.
(7.) The reference here is to Walter
Benjamin's Ursprung des deutschen
Trauerspiels, a work in which Benjamin analyses the
"melancholy gaze" as an allegorical vision that empties the object of
artistic representation of its meaning, making it available as a vessel for
transmitting renewed meaning.
(8.) Harold Bloom calls this apophrades, a Greek word meaning "dismal or unlucky days
upon which the dead return to reinhabit the houses in
which they had lived." The Anxiety of Influence, 15.
The final chapter of The Anxiety of Influence treats this concept (138-155).
(9.) Kater Murr is a particularly good example of Hoffmann's playful citationality. See Kropf,
201-210. Hoffmann's story "Die Rauber" is a
prose remake of Schiller's famous play of the same title, and story "Das Gelubde" feeds off Kleist's Die Marquise von O. There are numerous other
examples.
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Full
Citation For This Article
The
Germanic Review, Fall 2000 v75 i4 p259
Narcissism
and Creativity in the Postmodern Era: The Case of Patrick Suskind's
Das Parfum. (Critical
Essay) JEFFREY ADAMS.
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Text: COPYRIGHT 2000 Heldref Publications