10/09/2020

Dialogues across borders: Patrick Süskind’s

“Perfume” and its film and TV adaptations

Dr Malgorzata Bugaj

malgorzata.bugaj@ed.ac.uk

Lecture website:
Lecture website:
https://edin.ac/3hny6uS
https://edin.ac/3hny6uS
Lecture playlist:
https://media.ed.ac.uk/playlist/dedicated/1_s6bvu9cu/

Lecture playlist:
https://media.ed.ac.uk/playlist/dedicated/1_s6bvu9cu/

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Unfilmable books
(Elliott 2015)

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“Grenouille saw the whole market smelling. And he sniffed it more precisely than many people
could see it” (p. 36)

“For a moment he was so confused that he actually thought he had never in all his life seen anything so
beautiful… He meant, of course, he had never smelled anything so beautiful.” (p. 43)

“Then the child awoke. Its nose awoke first. The tiny nose moved, pushed upwards and sniffed … While the
child’s dull eyes squinted into the void, the nose seemed to fix on a particular target and Terrier had the

very off feeling that he himself, his person was the target… It seemed to Terrier as if the child saw him with
his nostrils, as it were staring intently at him, scrutinizing him, more piercingly than eyes could
ever do. The child with no smell was smelling at him shamelessly… He felt naked and ugly, as if someone
were gaping at him while revealing nothing of himself” (pp. 17-18)

(qtd in Popova 2003, 141)

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Close-ups

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Colour and light

“a scent so terrifyingly celestial that once it had “her scent floated down to him like
unfolded its total glory, it would unleash a perfume
a steady, gentle breeze.” (p. 197)
such as the world had never smelled before” (p. 177)

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Cosmic zoom (Barker 2009)

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“Grenouille made rapid progress. As Auribeau emerged on his right,

clinging to the mountain above him, he could smell that he had almost
caught up with the runaways. A little later and he had drawn even with
them. He could now smell each one, could smell the aroma of their
horses. At most they were no more than a half-mile west of him,
somewhere in the forest of the Tanneron” (p. 220)

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Sounds

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“The scent was so heavenly fine that tears welled into Baldini’s eyes. He did not have to test it,
he simply stood at the table in front of the mixing bottle and breathed. The perfume was
glorious. It was to Amour and Psyche as a symphony is to the scratching of a lonely violin. And
it was more. Baldini closed his eyes and watched as the most sublime memories were
awakened within him. He saw himself as a young man walking through the evening gardens of
Naples; he saw himself lying in the arms of a woman with dark curly hair and saw the
silhouette of a bouquet of roses on the windowsill as the night wind passed by; he heard the
random song of birds and the distant music from a harbor tavern; he heard whispering at his
ear, he heard I-love-you and felt his hair ruffle with bliss, now! Now at this very moment! He
forced open his eyes and groaned with pleasure. This perfume was not like any perfume
known before. It was not a scent that made things smell better, not some sachet, some toiletry.
It was something completely new, capable of creating a whole world, a magical rich world, and
in an instant you forgot all the loathsomeness around you and felt so rich, so at ease, so free,
so fine. . .” (pp. 89-90)

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“the book started a process in me that was working away

under the surface. I had to make the movie to complete this
process”

“One does not supplant the other; if you really want to do the
whole Crash experience, you should see the movie and read
the book”
(Cronenberg about his Crash, qtd in Elliott 87)

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“What is the book ‘Perfume’ about?”

Moritz: It's a book about the sensual pleasure of smell.

Elena: Grenouille, the main character, murders women and uses them to make the perfect
fragrance. The perfume is meant to give him power because he's afraid of people.

Roman: It's about love. Grenouille wants to be loved. Because he is someone one cannot
love. A monster.

Daniel: Grenouille... He doesn't smell. He has no body odour. And... He's a nothing, a nobody.
And now... bang... he wants to use the perfume to become somebody.

Thomas: The book is about a pretty nasty mother (…) A fishwife. Throws the kid into the trash
after it’s born.
(episode 3)

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“For Süskind's Grenouille, redheads were the most desirable creatures. Redheads are
genetically unlike most of us in these parts.” (episode 5)
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“Perfumes there are as sweet as the music of

pipes and strings,
As pure as the naked flesh of children, as full
of peace
As wide green prairies — and there are
others, having the whole
Corrupt proud all-pervasiveness of infinite
things,
Like frankincense, and musk, and myrrh, and
ambergris,
That cry of the ecstasy of the body and of the
soul”
Charles Baudelaire, “Correspondences” in Les Fleurs
du mal / Flowers of Evil (1857), trans. George Dillon

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“In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern
men and women. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of
mouldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat, the unaired
parlours stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet
aroma of chamber-pots. The stench of sulphur arose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes
from the tanneries, and from the slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood. People stank of
sweat and unwashed clothes, from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that
of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and
sour milk and tumorous disease. The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank, it stank
beneath the bridges and in the palaces. The peasant stank as did the priest, the apprentice as did his
master’s wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the King himself stank, stank like a rank lion,
and the Queen like an old goat, summer and winter. For in the eighteenth century there was nothing to
hinder bacteria busy at decomposition, and so there was no human activity, either constructive or
destructive, no manifestation of germinating or decaying life, that was not accompanied by stench. And of
course the stench was foulest in Paris, for Paris was the largest city in France” (pp. 3-4)

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“Tell me more about the sense of smell.

The sense of smell is extraordinary. All other senses are bound to the here and
now. We see what's happening in the moment, we hear what is being said. But the
sense of smell lasts a long time. It tells of before and after.”
(episode 4)

“They do absolutely notice odours, they just keep claiming they were feeling.
Rubbish. Feeling... Feeling is nothing.”
(episode 5)

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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barker, J. (2009) Neither here nor there: synaesthesia and the cosmic zoom, New Review of Film and Television Studies,
7:3, pp. 311-24.
Baudelaire, C. (1857/1936) Les Fleurs du mal / Flowers of Evil, trans. G. Dillon, NY: Harper and Brothers.
Corbin, A. (1986) The Foul and the Fragrant : Odor and the French Social Imagination, Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press.
Donahue, N. H. (1992) Scents and Insensibility: Patrick Süskind’s New Historical Critique of ‘Die Neue Sensibilität’ in Das
Parfum (1985), Modern Language Studies, 22:3, pp. 36–43.
Elliott, K. (2015) Unfilmable books, South Atlantic Review, 80:3-4, pp. 79-95
Gray, R. T. (1993) The Dialectic of ‘Enscentment’: Patrick Süskind’s Das Parfum as Critical History of Enlightenment
Culture, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 108: 3, pp. 489-505.
Popova, Y. B. (2003), ‘The Fool Sees with His Nose’: Metaphoric Mappings in the Sense of Smell in Patrick Suskind’s
Perfume, Language & Literature, 12:2, pp.
Süskind, P. (1986) Perfume. The Story of a Murderer, London: Penguin Books.

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