Beyond memory: the absence of spirit ("Perfumer" P. Suskind)

Markova Anna Sergeevna Postgraduate student, Department of Theoretical and Historical Poetics, Russian State University for the Humanities 125993, Russia, g. Moscow, ul. Miusskaya Pl., d.6, k.7, of. kab. 278 lirel@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

What role does memory play in the formation of a genius? What types of memory are involved in shaping his vision of the world? Why is the absence of collective and cultural memory capable of turning the creator into a spiritless monster?

First of all, we must define the very nature of genius. And this question in itself still remains open, as it is often associated with the spiritual sphere, which is difficult to give in to scientific reflection. The word "genius" itself, according to the dictionary of N. M. Shansky, was borrowed in the Petrine era from the German language, which, in turn, came from Latin: "Genius" spirit, genius" <lat. genius – tj. (from gigno "I give birth")" ^[19]. It is noteworthy that the etymology of the word has preserved its relationship with the creative process.

In philosophy, genius, as a rule, is associated with a special gift to penetrate beyond the limits of everyday existence, to connect ordinary people with the subtle world. According to S. V. Chernov, any person can become a genius if he can overcome some obstacles related to mercantile interests, the search for practical benefits and excessive pragmatism. If successful, such a person will be transformed from a natural creature into a spiritual person. However, such changes rarely occur, since "the vast majority of people are fleeing from creativity and grace" ^{[18, pp. 17-18]}.

The opposite point of view on the nature of genius, as a rule, is based on the anatomical and physiological characteristics of a person, on the work of his brain and nervous system. These features become an individual prerequisite for the formation and disclosure of creative abilities of a person, which can manifest themselves as just abilities, develop into talent or even genius. As noted by Yu . V . Yeremeyeva, referring to the Great Psychological Dictionary of B. G. Meshcheryakov and V. P. Zinchenko, "genius is the highest degree of creative manifestations of a person, expressed in creativity of outstanding importance for the life of society" ^{[4, pp. 40-41]}.

It seems to us that the two points of view are not an opposition, but a dichotomy, if we correlate them with two types of memory.

M. Halbwaks was an opponent of considering memory as "a purely individual property that arises in consciousness limited by its own resources" ^[16]. The philosopher believed that memories can be classified in two different ways: "they either line up around a certain person who views them from his own point of view, or they are distributed over a large or small community, becoming its partial representations" ^[16]. Based on this, the scientist distinguished individual (personal) memory and collective memory. He defined the first as internal, the second as external, social.

In the work "Collective and Historical Memory" M. Halbwaks understands collective (historical) memory as information transmitted by word of mouth, closely related to the personality itself. As an example, primary, family socialization is given, when three generations – grandfathers, fathers and children - form a special group with common memories. Due to the fact that "memory is based not on learned, but on lived history" ^[16], collective memory is not a stingy collection of historical facts, but is filled with vivid emotions and "preserves only what still lives or is able to live in the consciousness of the group that supports it" ^[16]. 

In other words, M. Halbwaks shifted the attention of the scientific community from the individual to the social aspect of memory, which made it possible for further research. Developing the idea of M. Halbvaks, J. Assman noted that "the memory of the past, which no longer lives and is not embodied in the communicative memory of a generation, inevitably comes into conflict with the modernity that is moving on" ^{[2, pp. 240-241]}, therefore it is necessary to "transform the communicative – experienced and embodied in eyewitnesses – memories into cultural – framed and supported institutionally, i.e. in cultural mnemonics" ^{[2, pp. 240-241]}. Ya. Assman believed that the main task of cultural memory is the transmission of meaning ^{[2, p. 20]}. In his work "Cultural Memory: Writing, Memory of the Past and political Identity in the High cultures of antiquity", he also, referring to P. Nora, speaks of a "remembering culture" that "deals with memory that creates community" ^{[2, p. 30]}.

 Consequently, the communicative memory of a certain social group provides the primary socialization of a person. Cultural memory stores common memories, concepts, ideas and way of thinking, which contributes to the secondary socialization of the individual. Note that the comprehension of knowledge requires diligence and a kind of humility, and is also inextricably linked with the historical and cultural process. Thanks to collective memory, familiarization with culture and interaction with other subjects, a person can form his own "I", inner world.

In this paper, we will understand both communicative and cultural memory. Also note that in the work "Individual consciousness and collective mind" M. Halbwaks also touches on aspects of secondary socialization. The philosopher noted that the study of the human psyche is often limited to his physical abilities, conducted in isolation from a variety of external factors. Meanwhile, "even if an individual is artificially separated from society and considered without taking into account the connections with the group, he will still retain the imprint imposed by society" ^{[15, p. 106]}.

What will happen if such isolation becomes possible after all, due to a number of reasons? Can a personality – especially a genius personality– take place outside of collective memory?

         P. Suskind's novel "The Perfumer. The story of a murderer" ("Das Parfum. Die Geschichte eines M?rders", 1985) demonstrates how dangerous the development of an individual can be in such a situation. Especially if by nature this individual has extraordinary abilities.

         The researchers note that the central conflict of the work is connected with the physiological characteristics of the main character, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (from the French Grenouille – frog): he does not have his own smell. The narrator does not even see a person in him, equating him to a tick ^{[6, p. 27, 29, 41, 43, 113]}, a clumsy dwarf ^{[6, p. 116]}, a spider ^{[6, p. 23, p. 30]}, a frog. This, according to I. L. Galinskaya, motivates Grenouille to "create a smell that would inspire love" ^{[3, p. 73]}.

         However, it should be noted that since the murder of the girl from the Rue Marais, that is, from the moment of realizing himself as "the greatest perfumer of all time" ^{[6, p. 57]}, Grenouille wants only one thing – "to express his inner self outside <...>, which he considered more worthwhile than anything that the outside could offer the world" ^{[6, p. 139]}.

         This is what creates the problem. T. V. Myrkina, considering the novel from the point of view of the everyday life surrounding the characters, notes: "without having its own smell, Grenouille does not have its everyday life, its "I". His reality is only a subjective perception of the world, and only through smells. The outer world existed, but there was no inner world" ^{[10, p. 158]}.

         In other words, Grenouille is deprived of normal socialization due to physical characteristics: "unlike other people, he did not create an exciting atmosphere, did not cast, so to speak, shadows on other people" ^{[6, pp. 190-191]}, and also because of the circumstances of his birth and upbringing. This leads to such isolation, which distorts his perception of life, excludes empathy and the very possibility of focusing on the "other" for the formation of his own personality. Grenouille only selfishly and vainly opposes himself to all other people ("for they are nothing, and he is everything" ^{[6, p.193]}) and even to God: "what a pathetic fragrance this God has" ^{[6, p.195]}. Isolation, moral and moral underdevelopment in combination with genius abilities lead the perfumer to the idea that he is able to create a special, "angelic" fragrance ^{[6, p. 194]}, capable of conquering people, inspiring them with unconditional love.

         But Grenouille himself does not know what love is. Although the fragrance of the girl from the Rue Marais made him "tremble with happiness" ^{[6, p. 57]}, but the hero did not find his own reflection in it and, therefore, did not find a sense-forming whole. This happens not only because of innate physiological features, but also because the sense of smell dominates over other abilities. Yu. A. Arskaya notes that "when mastering a language, he does not use abstract concepts at all, but he lacks specific designations for olfactory sensations" ^{[1, p. 105]}. Grenouille literally has no idea about ethical and moral categories, because he is unable to correlate them with his picture of the world: "law, conscience, God, joy, responsibility, humility, gratitude, etc. – what should be expressed by them was and remained vague for him"^{[6, P. 33]}. What should have been perceived as integral images remained just nominatives.

         To some extent, it would be fair to say that Grenouille is in a kind of parallel reality accessible to him alone (his fantasies in a cave where he enjoys the creation of the world and drinks aromas like wine from bottles are proof of this), however, he also needs the participation of the "other". In complete solitude, Grenouille almost physically drowns in the fog: "if his scream had not torn apart this stench, he would have choked on himself" ^{[6, p. 168]}.

         Despite the fact that the narrator from the very beginning of the work tries to convince his reader that the hero is a monster ^{[6, p. 5, p. 25, p. 28]}, however, speaking about the hero's childhood in the orphanage of Madame Gaillard, he notes: "safety, attention, tenderness, love and similar things which the child supposedly needs were completely superfluous for Grenouille. Moreover, it seems to us that he deprived himself of them in order to survive" ^{[6, p. 28]}. The need to survive in a world where there is no one who could recognize and love him turned a person into a monster.

         And Grenouille himself suffers from his essence. So much so that even in the moment of supreme triumph, the moment of the failed execution and the subsequent insane orgy under the influence of the angelic fragrance, he feels his defeat and, suffocating from the fog of his own smell (which has a "different nature" ^{[6, p. 299]}), he waits with hope for the saving blow of the Rishi – a sword or dagger that will penetrate in his heart and there will be "something other than himself" ^{[6, p. 300]}. 

         In German there is an opposition: soul and spirit (die Seele (soul) and der Geist (spirit)). The soul is understood as the sensory sphere and the ability to experience various emotions. As E. A. Zueva notes, the concept of die Seele is directly related "to the material (bodily) part of a person" ^{[5, p. 100]}. The concept of der Geist, on the contrary, is identified with the mind, with the immortal part of the soul of the individual, but most importantly – with spiritual qualities. A person endowed with spirit "has a special inner world" ^{[5, p. 100]}.

         Being isolated from society and lonely, Grenouille cannot form his inner image as a reflection of the perception of the "other". He sees only objects around him, not endowing anyone with subjectivity.

         He is deprived of empathy due to the fact that he does not feel his involvement with either an individual or a social group, therefore, he cannot immerse himself in collective memory, is deprived of the opportunity even to "merge with it for a short time" ^[16], which could awaken new feelings and give awareness of himself and his life. Grenouille will also not leave his mark on history (which marks a break from cultural memory), will not have any common memories with anyone, will disappear without a trace – which is effectively and cruelly demonstrated by the finale of the novel.

         It would be possible to put an end to this, but the novel, whose name literally translates as "smell, aroma", is more complicated than a simple statement of the fact of a person's isolation. The novel tells not about a single person, but about a whole society with a fragmented consciousness.

         The work opens with a statement of the fact that the eighteenth century in France was an era "rich in brilliant and disgusting figures" ^{[6, C. 5]}, to whom Grenouille was not inferior in "arrogance, contempt for people, immorality <...>, in godlessness" ^{[6, C. 5]}. On his life's journey, he did not meet a single person who would see him as a subject. And this was not only because of its peculiarity of not having its own smell, but because of the system itself. People turned the whole surrounding world into objects, which is emphasized and sharply contrasted by the subjectivation of colors: "like mortally frightened eyes, they lay on the surface for just a second and instantly turned pale when the whorl picked them up and turned them into hot fat" ^{[6, p. 216]}. Thus, subjectivation opens up options for reading the work. As the context opens them.

Many researchers (S. N. Chumakov, M. V. Nikitina, E. V. Kholmogorova, etc.) have noted that the novel "Perfumer" has several levels of reading. Being a postmodern work, the text contains references to other literary creations, whether it is the "Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music" by F. Nietzsche or the "Collector" by J. Fowles ^{[7, p. 206]}, but no less important, the context seems to appeal to cultural memory and to the reader's horizons and reveals the missed opportunities roman opportunities.  

Thus, I. A. Popova-Bondarenko notes that the Perfume contains a number of intercodes, one of which is clearly correlated with Shakespeare's play: "in the filmed form, Grenouille's attitude to his main victims as a whole and the aromatic alpha and omega – to the girl from the Rue Marais and Laura Rishi (that it is a single the image is emphasized by the text: "it was now and here – here or now it was – then, and here – there, that is, on the Rue Marais, in Paris, in September 1753: the fragrance flowing from the garden was the fragrance of a red-haired girl whom he then killed" ^{[6, p. 210. A.M.'s note]}) – develops precisely as the attitude of Romeo to Juliet" ^{[14, p. 365]}. The researcher notes that the female image in the novel is presented as two-dimensional. However, we note that there were much more victims. To create angelic spirits, Grenouille killed twenty-five girls. And all of them are in one way or another a single whole.

And this brings us to, perhaps, the central image of the novel – the blue flower.

As a symbol of romanticism, the blue flower is known thanks to Novalis, but as an independent image, it not only "surpassed the success of the novel itself ("Heinrich von Ofterdingen" Approx. AM.)" ^{[13, p. 80]}, but to this day it does not lose its popularity. This, in particular, is evidenced by the works of fiction only in the last three years in German: the thriller "The Blue Flower of Kelbra" ("Die Blaue Blume von Kelbra" 2021) by F. Rebicek; collections of poems "I shake the dust off the blue flower" ("Ich entstaube die Blaue Blume", 2021) by M. Allner and "Blue Flower" ("Blaue Blume", 2020) by H. Schettge; fantastic detective "Blue Flower" ("Die Blaue Blume" A-L. Riedel and T. Riedel, 2019) and others.

And, of course, in a German-language novel, in which, according to E. V. Kholmogorova, a romantic tradition and a personal dialogue with romantic authors are traced ^{[7, p. 207; 16, p. 17]}, the image of a blue flower cannot but arise.

For Novalis, "the blue flower does not correlate with any of the plants" ^{[9, p. 125]}, as well as the female image is not embodied in any of the women. The blue flower – Matilda – Kiana (Cyana) – an Oriental woman – form a whole image in which "all women are one" ^{[11, p. 11]}. In the novel "Perfumer", the metaphor is literally embodied, and the blue flower "turns into a process, a technique for obtaining a smell from flowers or the smell itself" ^{[16, p. 107]}.

In the finale of the novel, Grenouille, dressed in a blue jacket, tries to show himself to the world in the image of a blue flower ^{[7, p. 207]}, but fails. As Yu. A. Arskaya notes, this is because "Grenouille's creation is inhumane" ^{[1, p. 109]}. The researcher comes to the conclusion that P. Suskind not only thereby "states the death of the humanistic principle in art" ^{[1, p. 109]}, but tries to find the origins of the phenomenon. The tragedy of the character is connected with the society in which he passes his formation as a person: "there is no love and humanism in the society that surrounds him. All the people he meets on the way use him for their own purposes" ^{[1, p. 109]}.

In other words, the monster that Grenouille is turning into has given birth to society itself. This is also confirmed by M. Halbwax's idea that "intelligence is a purely relative factor, since it interacts with the social environment, which is transforming and changing depending on the place and epoch" ^{[15, p.106]}.

Society itself has lost the connection of generations and that part of the communicative and cultural memory that creates community. So, it lost its spirit.

Conclusions

To summarize. The very nature of genius can be understood as a dichotomy of spiritual and physiological abilities of a person. Two types of memory: individual and collective – allow you to get additional optics to uncover the problem of genius.  Personal memory, to a greater extent, is associated with individual memories, which are built up due to the anatomical and physiological characteristics of a person. Communicative and cultural memory is comparable to the spirit of the people and the epoch, the repository of eternal values. An appeal to external memory is able to form a holistic consciousness and an image of one's own inner self. 

Disconnection from external memory, separation from it leads to moral and spiritual degradation, which is illustrated by P. Suskind's novel "The Perfumer. The story of a murderer." The central character, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, due to physiological characteristics becomes a social outcast, which does not allow him to form an image of his inner self as a reflection on the perception of the "other". At the same time, having outstanding abilities, he is a brilliant personality who takes other people's lives without a conscience to achieve his goals. Grenouille sees only objects in everyone on his life path. But other characters in the book perceive the world in the same way, which is in sharp contrast to the narrator's deliberate subjectivation of colors.

This fact suggests that the author not only hints to the reader about the dehumanization of art, but also about the spiritual degradation of society. Numerous levels of reading, intercodes and receptive images confirm this idea.

Appealing to cultural memory, we see what opportunities Grenouille is missing. He will not become a Romeo, a poet, or even a handsome prince (which his name promises us, according to the Grimm Brothers' fairy tale "The Frog King or Iron Henry" ^[12]).  

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille continues a series of infamous characters in German literature who, because of their arrogance, "lost the most valuable thing - the soul – connection with the mythical consciousness, with the original, with a single whole" ^{[8, p. 201]}. Outside of collective memory, it is impossible to find or preserve the spirit (der Geist) as part of his personality. That is why the novel "Perfumer" tells about the absence of spirit.

But the reader has a choice. And, perhaps, this is the true victory of fiction.