{"id":2612,"date":"2022-06-20T13:39:04","date_gmt":"2022-06-20T11:39:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.zflprojekte.de\/zfl-blog\/?p=2612"},"modified":"2025-02-28T17:16:11","modified_gmt":"2025-02-28T15:16:11","slug":"david-anderson-novel-seeming-goods-re-reading-salman-rushdies-midnights-children-and-patrick-sueskinds-das-parfum-40","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zflprojekte.de\/zfl-blog\/2022\/06\/20\/david-anderson-novel-seeming-goods-re-reading-salman-rushdies-midnights-children-and-patrick-sueskinds-das-parfum-40\/","title":{"rendered":"David Anderson: \u2018Novel-seeming goods\u2019: RE-READING SALMAN RUSHDIE\u2019S \u2018MIDNIGHT\u2019S CHILDREN\u2019 AND PATRICK S\u00dcSKIND\u2019S \u2018DAS PARFUM\u2019 40 YEARS LATER"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a 1984 essay, the American critic Fredric Jameson famously diagnosed postmodernism to be \u2018the cultural logic of late capitalism\u2019. Among its distinguishing features was a new mode of \u2018aesthetic populism\u2019 grounded in an<\/span><\/p>\n

effacement [\u2026] of the older (essentially high-modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture, and the emergence of new kinds of texts infused with the forms, categories and contents of that very Culture Industry so passionately denounced by all the ideologues of the modern.[1]<\/a><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A new alignment between the twin spheres of culture and the marketplace meant that \u2018aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally\u2019. Wherever one looked, one saw \u2018the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater waves of turnover\u2019 (Jameson, p. 56).<\/span><\/p>\n

This remark about \u2018novel-seeming goods\u2019 becomes particularly stimulating when the subjects of the discussion are, or at least seem to be, novels. Using the examples of E.L. Doctorow\u2019s American historical novels The Book of Daniel<\/em> (1971), Ragtime<\/em> (1975) and Loon Lake<\/em> (1980), Jameson argues that in \u2018a society bereft of all historicity\u2019, \u2018what used to be<\/em> the historical novel\u2019 (my emphasis) \u2018can no longer set out to represent the historical past\u2019 (Jameson, p. 66, 68, 71). The \u2018postmodern fate\u2019 of the historical novel is to be forced to come to terms with \u2018a new and original historical situation in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach\u2019 (Jameson, p. 68, 71).<\/span><\/p>\n

Salman Rushdie\u2019s Midnight\u2019s Children<\/em> (1981) and Patrick S\u00fcskind\u2019s Das Parfum. Die Geschichte eines M\u00f6rders <\/em>(1984) stand out as two hugely successful novels from this period that raise questions about historical representation within the space of the popular. They might therefore be used as test cases for Jameson\u2019s concerns. Midnight\u2019s Children <\/em>is a sprawling story of Indian and British imperial and post-imperial history across the twentieth century. Das Parfum <\/em>tells the tightly framed tale of a murderous perfumer in eighteenth-century France. Seemingly very different texts, they bear one curious similarity: both feature a protagonist with an unusually sensitive sense of smell.<\/span><\/p>\n

The oversized nose of Rushdie\u2019s hero Saleem Sinai descends from a literary tradition that takes in works like Tristram Shandy<\/em> and Cyrano de Bergerac<\/em>. Within the text it serves to link him to a grandfather, Aadam Aziz, to whom he turns out not to be related, having been swapped at birth by a Portuguese nurse named Mary in a parody of the Christian story. Saleem is born at the precise moment of India\u2019s independence on 15th<\/sup> August 1947; his confused parentage makes him more a child of \u2018history\u2019 than of his putative parents, and the coincidence of his birthday sees him invested with bizarre magical powers. His nose becomes the \u2018All-India Radio\u2019 that allows him to communicate telepathically with the other \u2018Midnight\u2019s Children\u2019, each of whom is themselves endowed with different powers. His picaresque travels through post-independence and later post-partition India \u2013 akin to the German odyssey of Oskar Matzerath in G\u00fcnter Grass\u2019s Die Blechtrommel<\/em>, which Rushdie named as a direct influence \u2013 include a period in which he works as a human sniffer-dog in the Pakistani army, and culminate in him finding employment at a pickle factory. In the narrative present he writes out his story and reads it to his illiterate partner Padma. The chapters of the text are imagined as distinctive pickles, each with its own particular flavour and nostalgic nuance; the pages emit \u2018the unmistakeable whiff of chutney\u2019.[2]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Patrick S\u00fcskind\u2019s villain Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born into the picturesque filth of pre-revolutionary Paris. Like Rushdie, S\u00fcskind provides an exact date \u2013 17th<\/sup> July 1738 \u2013 yet he explains away the fictionality of his creation by virtue of Grenouille\u2019s engagement with \u2018das fl\u00fcchtige Reich der Ger\u00fcche\u2019.[3]<\/a> Orphaned after the execution of his negligent mother, Grenouille is raised as a social outcast before making his way through a parody of the developmental stages of the Bildungsroman<\/em>. Failing to exhibit any real development <\/em>aside from becoming technically proficient at the task of manufacturing perfumes, he finally settles down in the perfume-making capital of Grasse. There, he commences a psychopathic killing spree, murdering young girls in order to create a perfect scent from their corpses. Each of these is left \u2018kahlrasiert und blendend weiss\u2019 (S\u00fcskind, p. 281) after Grenouille finishes soaking up their aura through a process known as \u2018enfleurage\u2019, which is described in detail. The resulting product is of such power that it enables him to turn public opinion at his eventual trial, which results not only in his acquittal but also provokes a mass orgy among the townspeople of Grasse. They never speak of this event again, \u2018da sie sich sp\u00e4ter allesamt sch\u00e4mten, \u00fcberhaupt daran beteiligt gewesen zu sein\u2019 (S\u00fcskind, p. 299).<\/span><\/p>\n

Both novels were critically and commercially successful: Midnight\u2019s Children<\/em> went on to win the Booker of Bookers; Das Parfum<\/em> was the first German novel to make a profit in the US since The Tin Drum<\/em>. Their use of scent as a key motif alludes to the vagaries of memory and nostalgia. Both texts dwell on the capacity of a specific aroma to impress the senses and evoke a precise constellation of remembered feelings. This might also be understood in relation to Rushdie and S\u00fcskind\u2019s interest in how their novels would be consumed and digested by readers: an awareness of the text as a \u2018product\u2019 that matches the prominence of manufacturing processes \u2013 whether of chutneys or perfumes \u2013 within each narrative. Finally, the motif of scent cuts through the postmodernist debate on depth and surface in a provocative way. Is smell, after all, the key to a deeper essence, or is it merely a seductive coating that gestures at a profundity it never incorporates?<\/span><\/p>\n

In keeping with this tension, each text fuses tropes from popular culture \u2013 Bollywood cinema in Midnight\u2019s Children<\/em>; the crime novel in Das Parfum<\/em> \u2013 with more \u2018serious\u2019 themes, risking the charge of frivolousness as they attempt to shape the historical novel\u2019s \u2018postmodern fate\u2019. Working within a basically comic framework, Rushdie gives his readers in Britain a glimpse of the bleak realities of the British Empire: specific moments such as the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, as well as the wider atmospherics of a land peppered by the \u2018roseate palaces built by pink-skinned conquerors long ago\u2019 (Rushdie, p. 388). Meanwhile, the closing scenes of Das Parfum<\/em> rehearse \u2018ein bekanntes St\u00fcck auf \u00fcberraschend neue Weise\u2019 (as S\u00fcskind describes the theatrical character of Grenouille\u2019s trial), revealing the text to be an allegory of German fascism. The description of scent as \u2018Aura\u2019 even suggests a subtle interaction with Walter Benjamin\u2019s Kunstwerk<\/em> essay and a nuanced internal discussion of the ability of art and the aesthetic to lead an ingenuous public astray (S\u00fcskind, p. 298).<\/span><\/p>\n

The differences between the two texts are also instructive. Next to the sheer chaos of Midnight\u2019s Children<\/em>, the sense of Das Parfum<\/em>\u2019s narrative closedness stands out. As a historical fable dressed as a period piece that simply evaporates into the fleeting realm of scent, it matches the chamber piece feel of S\u00fcskind\u2019s other writing (the one-act play Der Kontrabass<\/em> from 1981, or the 1988 novella Die Taube<\/em>, for example). The hybridity of Rushdie\u2019s text, by contrast, where the \u2018MCC\u2019 is the \u2018Midnight\u2019s Children Conference\u2019 and<\/em> \u2018Marylebone Cricket Club\u2019, where Saleem\u2019s putative grandfather Aadam Aziz is also \u2018Dr Aziz\u2019 of E.M. Forster\u2019s A Passage to India<\/em> (1924), reveals a complex set of conjunctions concerning imperial history and cultural traditions, addressed at a level of prominence not to be found in either Germany at this time. At the same time, the presence of Alec Guinness in blackface in David Lean\u2019s 1984 cinema adaptation of A Passage to India<\/em> points to the uneasy position of imperial narratives within British culture, something which Rushdie also makes clear in his essays of the period (like 1982\u2019s \u2018The New Empire Within Britain\u2019).<\/span><\/p>\n

For Fredric Jameson, postmodernism came in tandem with \u2018an inverted millenarianism, in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that\u2019 (Jameson, p. 53). In part by placing the emphasis on \u2018senses\u2019 \u2013 that is, the sense of smell \u2013 Midnight\u2019s Children<\/em> and Das Parfum<\/em> each represent an \u2018end\u2019 in strikingly similar ways. The protagonists Saleem Sinai and Jean-Baptiste Grenouille are each rendered as individuals overcome by the masses. In Midnight\u2019s Children<\/em>, Saleem is haunted by perpetual anxiety about his ability to act as a vehicle for all of India. Writing in his \u2018pool of anglepoised light\u2019, Saleem constantly fears breaking apart under the pressures placed on his body by the \u2018crowd\u2019 pouring through him as he becomes his nation\u2019s consciousness. The \u2018cracks\u2019 that appear on his body \u2018widen within\u2019 as he is transformed into \u2018Six-hundred million specks of dust, all transparent, invisible as glass\u2019 (Rushdie, p. 535). In the closing pages of Das Parfum<\/em>, Grenouille slips back to Paris, where he douses himself in his perfume and is consumed by a rabble at the site of his birth. Having mastered the crowd in Grasse, he has nothing left to prove and allows himself to be destroyed by its Parisian analogue. In each case, the tension between the individual and the mass is resolved in the bodily fragmentation of the artist-protagonist. Yet if this appears to represent the impossibility of a compromise between the one and the many, the texts themselves successfully navigate Jameson\u2019s \u2018frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture\u2019 while still retaining a complex approach to \u2018historicity\u2019. As literary novels in a marketplace saturated by \u2018novel-seeming goods\u2019, they suggest ways in which the space of the popular can form a basis for meaningful interrogation of history and tradition, moving between levity and seriousness while raising difficult questions about historical reckoning and representation.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The literary and cultural scholar David Anderson<\/a> is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of London currently working at the ZfL on his project \u201cRepresentations of History in British and German Popular Culture Since the 1980s<\/a>.\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Fredric Jameson, \u2018Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism\u2019, New Left Review<\/em> I, 146 (July\/August 1984), p. 54.<\/span><\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Salman Rushdie, Midnight\u2019s Children<\/em> (London: Vintage, 2013), p. 24.<\/span><\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Patrick S\u00fcskind, Das Parfum: die Geschichte eines M\u00f6rders<\/em> (Z\u00fcrich: Diogenes, 1985), p. 5.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

VORGESCHLAGENE ZITIERWEISE: David Anderson: \u2018Novel-seeming goods\u2019: Re-reading Salman Rushdie\u2019s \u2018Midnight\u2019s Children\u2019 and Patrick S\u00fcskind\u2019s \u2018Das Parfum\u2019 40 years later, in: ZfL BLOG, 20.6.2022, [https:\/\/www.zflprojekte.de\/zfl-blog\/2022\/06\/20\/david-anderson-novel-seeming-goods-re-reading-salman-rushdies-midnights-children-and-patrick-sueskinds-das-parfum-40\/<\/a>].<\/span>
\nDOI: https:\/\/doi.org\/10.13151\/zfl-blog\/20220620-01<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n