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. The oversized nose of Rushdie’s hero Saleem Sinai descends from a literary tradition that takes in works like Tristram Shandy and Cyrano de Bergerac. Seemingly very different texts, they bear one curious similarity: both feature a protagonist with an unusually sensitive sense of smell.

Das Parfum tells the tightly framed tale of a murderous perfumer in eighteenth-century France. Midnight’s Children is a sprawling story of Indian and British imperial and post-imperial history across the twentieth century. They might therefore be used as test cases for Jameson’s concerns. Die Geschichte eines Mörders (1984) stand out as two hugely successful novels from this period that raise questions about historical representation within the space of the popular. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) and Patrick Süskind’s Das Parfum.

The ‘postmodern fate’ of the historical novel is to be forced to come to terms with ‘a 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’ (Jameson, p. Doctorow’s American historical novels The Book of Daniel (1971), Ragtime (1975) and Loon Lake (1980), Jameson argues that in ‘a society bereft of all historicity’, ‘what used to be the historical novel’ (my emphasis) ‘can no longer set out to represent the historical past’ (Jameson, p. This remark about ‘novel-seeming goods’ becomes particularly stimulating when the subjects of the discussion are, or at least seem to be, novels. Wherever one looked, one saw ‘the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater waves of turnover’ (Jameson, p. Ī new alignment between the twin spheres of culture and the marketplace meant that ‘aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally’.

Among its distinguishing features was a new mode of ‘aesthetic populism’ grounded in anĮffacement 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. In a 1984 essay, the American critic Fredric Jameson famously diagnosed postmodernism to be ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism’.

Das parfum book