Two Kinds of Sin in "Perfume"

It's hard to want to read anything else after reading a superb novel. I sit, outside on the balcony, inside a train on the way to work, knowing another world awaits if I could just move on start reading the first book on the pile. And I do, and I'm always happy I did. But that great novel leaves behind a little mist that leaves everything else hard to see. I just keep thinking of them.

Patrick Süskind's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, gruesome as it is, was the most recent "great novel" on my list. It's the first great novel I've read entirely in the German language. I read translations of Kafka and others in college and I've practice my language with the German versions of fun Swedish thrillers, but I haven't read anything that you could call great literature auf Deutsch, and the fact that I read and understood  Perfume was an encouragement of my own language ability. It's beautifully written - even to my second-language ears - still dark and disturbing yet strangely human. If you haven't read it, let me say that it's well worth it (though, again, gruesome). Oh, and if you haven't read it, then maybe you shouldn't read the following paragraphs. One of the novels pleasures is its unpredictability, and there are spoilers ahead.

In a book about brutal serial killer with an extraordinary sense of smell, it's a credit to Süskind's writing that I came away feeling more philosophical than disturbed. There's a lot in the text I could talk about, but I want to mention how Jean-Baptiste Grenouille's villainy reminds me of something C.S. Lewis points out in Mere Christianity.

Grenouille's first victim is a girl who's smell he simply wants to possess. Her exquisite smell conquers him and he kills her. The scene reminds me of a pit bull attacking a two-week old kitten. It turns him into an animal. But later in the book he becomes something worse. As he realizes what kind of power scent has over a person, he decides to combine the best human smells, which are evidently only possessed by pretty girls. Then, methodical and sinister, he murders 25 of them and steals their scent. Why does he want this master perfume? He wants to be loved and adored by all, and he knows the perfect smell could manipulate this adoration. His animal desire leads to a heinous act; his pride leads to 25 more. Here's what Lewis writes:

You may remember, when I was talking about sexual morality, I warned you that the centre of Christian morals did not lie there. Well, now, we have come to the centre. According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.

Later in the same chapter:

It is a terrible thing that the worst of all the vices can smuggle itself into the very centre of our religious life. But you can see why. The other, and less bad, vices come from the devil working on us through our animal nature. But this does not come through our animal nature at all. It comes direct from Hell. It is purely spiritual: consequently it is far more subtle and deadly. For the same reason, Pride can often be used to beat down the simpler vices. Teachers, in fact, often appeal to a boy's Pride, or, as they call it, his self-respect, to make him behave decently: many a man has overcome cowardice, or lust, or ill-temper, by learning to think that they are beneath his dignity - that is, by Pride. The devil laughs. He is perfectly content to see you becoming chaste and brave and self-controlled provided, all the time, he is setting up in you the Dictatorship of Pride - just as he would be quite content to see your chilblains cured if he was allowed, in return, to give you cancer. For Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.

You can read the whole chapter here. I'm quoting this out of order, but here is one more point Lewis makes:

In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that - and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison - you do not know God at all. As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.

I have no idea if Süskind considered such religious language when creating his antihero, but it's interesting to note how Grenouille always looks inward and never up.