Perfume (novel) Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Judith Ryan

Critical Essay by Judith Ryan

SOURCE: Ryan, Judith. “The Problem of Pastiche: Patrick Süskind's Das Parfum.” German Quarterly 63, nos. 3–4 (summer-fall 1990): 396-403.

In the following essay, Ryan examines the textual significance of allusions in Das Parfum to the Romanticism and Symbolist-Aestethic literary periods in light of postmodern ideas concerning pastiche and parody.

As critics of postmodernism would have it, the phenomenon consists of “random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random allusion.”¹ At the end of Patrick Süskind'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...
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