Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Problem of Pastiche: Patrick Suskind's Das Parfum

1990; Wiley; Volume: 63; Issue: 3/4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/406721

1756-1183

Judith Ryan,

Narrative Theory and Analysis

As critics of would have it, the phenomenon consists of of the styles of the past, the play of random allusion.' At the end of Patrick Siiskind's novel Das Parfum, the protagonist has himself been cannibalized, but not before his author has demonstrated a cannibalization of past styles taken to an extreme of flamboyant virtuosity. The extraordinary allusiveness of Das Parfum was recognized by a number of critics upon its first appearance;2 less obvious, however, was the fact that its intertextual references are heavily concentrated on two literary periods, Romanticism and Symbolism/Aestheticism. The novel's focus on these two movements, generally seen by literary historians as related, suggests that more is at stake here than simply a wild appropriation of all of the styles of the past. I shall be arguing here that Das Parfum is no mere exercise in postmodernist eclecticism, no mere fashionable patchwork of random literary allusion. Furthermore, the story it tells is an ironic allegory of the very process by means of which the text has been constructed: the perfumer's desire to imitate existing scents parallels his author's wide-ranging appropriations of existing texts, and his method of doing so raises the same questions, both aesthetic and ethical, as does the method by which Stiskind puts together the novel itself. Indeed, the final scenewith its surprise twists, ambiguities and self-deconstructing effectsis the ultimate exemplification of the particular kind of postmodern process that Das Parfum enacts. Before pursuing this argument, we will need to gain a foothold in the slippery debate on that has been carried out mainly in this country but has also, more recently, spread to the German-speaking domain. Many literary historians have been hesitant about adopting the term at all; but there are certain advantages to a cautious usage that would define postmodernism and distinguish it, on the one hand, from high modernism and the historical avant-garde, and identify it, on the other, as a particular literary trend within the wider spectrum of contemporary literature as a whole. The standard work on postmodern architecture defines its principal characteristic as a coding that addresses both a cultural elite and the ordinary person,3 although one might perhaps more properly call it a multiple coding that speaks on many different levels and to many audiences at once.4 Applied to literary texts, this means that manifests a particular kind of irony, sending out contradictory ideological messages, at once conservative and revolutionary.5 Critics have difficulty with postmodern texts in part because the texts appeal to a mass audience whose judgments are generally not taken seriously by literary pundits, while engaging in a allusiveness formerly the proper domain of criticism itself. Parody and pastiche lie at the heart of literary postmodernism, as a number of theorists have observed.6 I would suggest, however, that it is not just the appeal to a double audience but the peculiar status of postmodern texts between parody and pastiche that makes them so difficult to evaluate. Das Parfum is a good example of this problem. Although pastiche, because it is derivative, is often regarded as an inferior form or at best as a neutral or blank version of