Jonathan Franzen - The Discomfort Zone

THERE WAS NOTHINGcool about high-school German. It was the language that none of my friends were taking, and the sun-faded tourist posters in the room of the German teacher, Mrs. Fares, were not a persuasive argument for visiting Germany or falling for its culture. (This much was true of the French and Spanish rooms as well. It was as if the modern languages were so afraid of adolescent scorn that even the classrooms were forced to dress predictably — to wear posters of the bullfight, the Eiffel Tower, the castle Neuschwanstein.) Many of my classmates had German parents or grandparents, whose habits (“He likes his beer warm”) and traditions (“We have Lebkuchen at Christmas”) were of similarly negligible interest to me. The language itself, though, was a snap. It was all about memorizing four-by-four matrixes of adjective endings, and following rules. It was about grammar, which was the thing I was best at. Only the business of German gender, the seeming arbitrariness of the spoon and the fork and the knife, [3] Der (masculine) Löffel; die (feminine) Gabel; das (neuter) Messer. gave me fits.

EVEN AS THEbearded Mutton and his male disciples were recapitulating old patriarchies, Fellowship was teaching us to question our assumptions about gender roles. Boys were praised and rewarded for shedding tears, girls for getting mad and swearing. The weekly Fellowship “women’s group” became so popular that it had to be split in two. One female advisor invited girls to her apartment and gave vivid tutorials in how to have sex and not get pregnant. Another advisor challenged the patriarchy so needlingly that once, when she asked Chip Jahn to talk about his feelings, he replied that he felt like dragging her out to the parking lot and beating the shit out of her. For parity, two male advisors tried to start a men’s group, but the only boys who joined it were the already-sensitized ones who wished they could belong to the women’s group.

Being a woman seemed to me the happening thing, compared to being a man. From the popularity of the weekly support groups, I gathered that women truly had been oppressed and that we men therefore ought to defer to them, and be nurturing and supportive, and cater to their wishes. It was especially important, if you were a man, to look deep into your heart and make sure you weren’t objectifying a woman you loved. If even a tiny part of you was exploiting her for sex, or putting her on a pedestal and worshipping her, this was very bad.

In my senior-year journal, while I waited for Siebert to return from her first year of college, I constantly policed my feelings about her. I wrote “Don’t CANONIZE her” and “ Don’t be in love or anything idiotically destructive like that” and “Jealousy is characteristic of a possessive relationship” and “We are not sacred.” When I caught myself writing her name in block letters, I went back and annotated: “Why the hell capitalize it?” I ridiculed and reviled my mother for her dirty-mindedness in thinking I cared about sex. I did, while Siebert was away, date a racy Catholic girl, O., who taught me to enjoy the raw-cauliflower aftertaste of cigarettes in a girl’s mouth, and I did casually assume that Siebert and I would be losing our virginity before I had to leave for college. But I imagined this loss as a grown-up and serious and friendship-affirming thing, not as intercourse of the kind I’d read about in Rogue . I’d finished with sex like that in junior high.

One summer evening, soon after Siebert broke her back, just before I turned eighteen, my friends Holyoke and Davis and I were painting a mural, and Holyoke asked Davis and me how often we masturbated. Davis answered that he didn’t do that anymore. He said he’d tried it a few times, but he’d decided it wasn’t really something he enjoyed.

Holyoke looked at him with grave astonishment. “You didn’t enjoy it.”

“No, not really,” Davis said. “I wasn’t that into it.”

Holyoke frowned. “Do you mind if I ask what…technique…and materials…you were using?”

I listened carefully to the discussion that ensued, because, unlike Davis, I hadn’t even tried it.

THE FIRST-YEAR GERMANteacher at Swarthmore College was a flamboyant, elastic-mouthed one-man show, Gene Weber, who pranced and swooped and slapped desktops and addressed his first-year students as “bambini.” He had the manner of an inspired, witty preschool teacher. He found everything in his classroom hilarious, and if the bambini couldn’t generate hilarity themselves, he said hilarious things for them and laughed on their behalf. I didn’t dislike Weber, but I resisted him. The teacher I adored was the drill instructor, Frau Plaxton, a woman of limitless patience and beautifully chiseled Nordic looks. I saw her every Tuesday and Thursday at 8:30 a.m., an hour made tolerable by her affectionate, bemused way of saying “Herr Franzen” when I walked into the room. No matter how badly her students had prepared, Frau Plaxton couldn’t frown sternly without also smiling at her sternness. The German vowels and consonants she overpronounced for heuristic purposes were as juicy as good plums.

On the other weekdays at 8:30, I had Several-Variable Calculus, a freshman class designed to winnow out students whose devotion to math/science was less than fanatical. By spring break, I was in danger of failing it. If I’d intended to pursue a career in science — as the official fifty-year-old continued to assure his parents that he did — I should have spent my spring break catching up. Instead, my friend Ekström and I took a bus from Philadelphia to Houston so that I could see Siebert, who was out of her back brace and living in a dorm at the University of Houston.

One night, to get away from her roommate, she and I went outside and sat on a bench in a courtyard surrounded by concrete walls. Siebert told me that one of her teachers, the poet Stephen Spender, had been talking a lot about Sigmund Freud, and that she’d been thinking about her fall from the downspout at Eden Seminary a year earlier. The night before she’d fallen, she and our friend Lunte had been hanging out at my house, and the doorbell had rung, and before I knew what was happening, Siebert was meeting my former sort-of girlfriend, O., for the first time. O. was with Manley and Davis, who had just taken her up to the top of the Eden Seminary bell tower. She was flushed and beaming from the climb, and she didn’t mind admitting that Manley and Davis had tied ropes around her and basically dragged her up the downspout; her physical unfitness was something of a joke.

Siebert had lost all memory of the day after she met O., but other people had subsequently told her what she’d done. She’d called up Davis and said she wanted to climb the same tower that O. had climbed. When Davis suggested that Manley come along, or that they at least take a rope, Siebert said no, she didn’t need Manley and she didn’t need ropes. And, indeed, she hadn’t had any trouble climbing up the downspout. It was only at the top, while Davis was reaching down to help her past the gutter, that she’d thrown back her hands. And Freud, she told me, had a theory of the Unconscious. According to Stephen Spender, who had a way of singling her out and fastening his uncanny blue eyes on her whenever he spoke of it, Freud believed that when you made a strange mistake, the conscious part of you believed it was an accident, but in fact it was never an accident: you were doing exactly what the dark, unknowable part of you wanted to do. When your hand slipped and you cut yourself with a knife, it was because the hidden part of you wanted you to cut yourself. When you said “my mother” instead of “my wife,” it was because your id really did mean “my mother.” Siebert’s post-traumatic amnesia was total, and it was hard to imagine anyone less suicidal than her; but what if she’d wanted to fall off the roof? What if the Unconscious in her had wanted to die, because of my dalliance with O.? What if, at the top of the downspout, she’d ceased to be herself and become entirely that dark, other thing?