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The Dialectic of “Enscentment”: Patrick Süskind's Das Parfum as Critical History of Enlightenment Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Richard T. Gray
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Abstract

Patrick Süskind's best-selling novel Das Parfum applies the postmodern literary practice of pastiche and playful allusion to pursue a critical purpose: an adumbration of the destructive logic that underpins the instrumental reason of Enlightenment culture. Süskind's critique is informed by ideas put forward by Horkheimer and Adorno in their Dialektik der Aufklärung and by the sociohistorical methodology of the Annales historiographers. In the Active history of Grenouille, the monstrous master perfumer who murders young women to capture and exploit their aromatic “essences,” Süskind depicts the will to power and overpowering fundamental to enlightened reason. This parabolic histoire des mentalités of Enlightenment culture is thrown into relief by two strategic moves: the transposition of the Enlightenment's visual prejudices into the olfactory domain and the contextualization of Grenouille's development as perfumer in the history of Western aesthetics. Süskind thereby implicates modernist aesthetic sensibilities in the dialectic of Enlightenment.

Type
Cluster: Readings of Narrative, 1937-87
Information
PMLA , Volume 108 , Issue 3 , May 1993 , pp. 489 - 505
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1993

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