Jonathan Franzen - The Discomfort Zone

I’d heard of Freud, of course. I knew that he was Viennese and important. But his books had looked unpleasant and forbidding whenever I’d pulled one off a shelf, and until this moment I’d managed to know almost nothing about him. Siebert and I sat silently in the deserted concrete courtyard, breathing the vernal air. The loosenings of spring, the fragrances of breeding, the letting go, the thaw, the smell of warm mud: it was no longer as dreadful to me as it had been when I was ten. It was delicious now, too. But also still somewhat dreadful. Sitting in the courtyard and thinking about what Siebert had said, confronting the possibility that I, too, had an Unconscious that knew as much about me as I knew little about it, an Unconscious always looking for some way out of me, some way to escape my control and do its dirty work, to pull my pants down in front of the neighbor girls, I started screaming in terror. I screamed at the top of my lungs, which freaked both me and Siebert out. Then I went back to Philadelphia and put the whole episode out of my mind.

MY INSTRUCTOR FORthird-semester intensive German was the other tenured professor in the department, George Avery, a nervous, handsome, scratchy-voiced Greek-American who seemed hard-pressed to speak in sentences shorter than three hundred words. The grammar we were supposed to review didn’t greatly interest Avery. On the first day of class, he looked at his materials, shrugged, said, “I’m guessing you’re all familiar with this,” and embarked on a rambling digression about colorful and seldom-heard German idioms. The following week, twelve of the fourteen students in the class signed a petition in which they threatened to quit unless Avery was removed and replaced with Weber. I was against the petition — I thought it was mean to embarrass a professor, even if he was nervous and hard to follow, and I didn’t miss being called a bambino — but Avery was duly yanked and Weber came prancing back.

Since I’d nearly flunked Several-Variable Calculus, I had no future in hard science, and since my parents had suggested I might want to pay for college myself if I insisted on being an English major, I was left with German by default. Its main attraction as a major was that I got easy A’s in it, but I assured my parents that I was preparing myself for a career in international banking, law, diplomacy, or journalism. Privately, I looked forward to spending my junior year abroad. I wasn’t liking college much — it was a comedown from high school in every way — and I was still technically a virgin, and I was counting on Europe to fix that.

But I couldn’t seem to catch a break. The summer before I left for Europe, I inquired about an odd, lanky beauty I’d once danced with in a high-school gym class and had been fantasizing about at college, but she turned out to have a boyfriend and a heroin habit now. I went on two dates with Manley’s younger sister, who surprised me on the second date by bringing along a chaperone, her friend MacDonald, who’d thought I was a cheater. I went off to study German literature in Munich, and on my third night there, at a party for new students, I met a lucid, pretty Bavarian girl who suggested that we go have a drink. I replied that I was tired but it might be nice to see her some other time. I never saw her again. The ratio of male students to female students in Munich’s dorms was 3:1. During the next ten months, I met not one other interesting German girl who gave me the time of day. I cursed my terrible luck in having been given my only chance so early in the year. If I’d been in Munich even just a week longer, I told myself, I might have played things differently and landed a terrific girlfriend and become totally fluent in German. Instead, I spoke a lot of English with American girls. I contrived to spend four nights in Paris with one of them, but she turned out to be so inexperienced that even kissing was scary for her: unbelievably bad luck. I went to Florence, stayed in a hotel that doubled as a brothel, and was surrounded in three dimensions by people industriously fucking. On a trip to rural Spain, I had a Spanish girlfriend for a week, but before we could learn each other’s languages I had to go back to stupid Germany and take exams: just my luck. I pursued a more promisingly jaded American, sat and drank and smoked with her for hours, listened to “London Calling” over and over, and tested what I believed were the outer limits of pushiness compatible with being a nurturing and supportive male. I lived in daily expectation of scoring, but in the end, after months of pursuit, she decided she was still in love with her Stateside ex. Alone in my dorm room, I could hear multiple neighbors humping — my walls and ceiling were like amplifiers. I transferred my affections to yet another American, this one with a rich German boyfriend whom she bossed around and then bemoaned behind his back. I thought if I listened long enough to her complaints about the boyfriend, and helped her realize what an unsupportive and unnurturing asshole he was, she would come to her senses and choose me. But my bad luck was beyond belief.

WITHOUT THE DISTRACTIONof a girlfriend, I did learn a lot of German in Munich. Goethe’s poetry particularly infected me. For the first time in my life, I was smitten with a language’s mating of sound and sense. There was, for example, all through Faust , the numinous interplay of the verbs streben, schweben, weben, leben, beben, geben [4] Strive, float, weave, live, tremble, give. —six trochees that seemed to encapsulate the inner life of an entire culture. There were insane German gushings, like these words of thanks that Faust offers Nature after a really good night’s sleep—

Du regst und rührst ein kräftiges Beschließen

Zum höchsten Dasein immerfort zu streben [5] You awaken and stir a powerful resolve / To strive, henceforth, for the highest form of being.

— which I endlessly repeated to myself, half in jest and half adoringly. There was the touching and redeeming German yearning not to be German at all but to be Italian instead, which Goethe captured in his classic verse in Wilhelm Meister :

Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen blühn,

Im dunkeln Laub die Goldorangen glühn…

Kennst du es wohl? [6] Do you know the country where the lemon trees bloom, / and the oranges like gold in leafy gloom …Maybe you know it?

There were other lines that I recited every time I climbed a church tower or walked to the top of a hill, lines uttered by Faust after cherubs have wrested his spirit from the Devil’s clutches and installed him in Heaven:

Hier ist die Aussicht frei,

Der Geist erhoben.

Dort ziehen Frauen vorbei,

Schwebend nach oben [7] Here the view is clear, / The spirit exalted. / Over there, moving past, / Women float skyward.

There were even, in Faust, short passages in which I recognized an actual emotion of my own, as when our hero, trying to settle down to work in his study, hears a knocking on his door and cries out in exasperation, “Wer will mich wieder plagen?” [8] “Who’s bothering me now?”

But despite my pleasure at feeling a language take root in me, and despite the tightly reasoned term papers I was writing on Faust’s relationship with Nature and Novalis’s relationship with mines and caves, I still saw literature as basically just the game I had to master in order to get a college degree. Reciting from Faust on windy hilltops was a way of indulging but also defusing and finally making fun of my own literary yearnings. Real life, as I understood it, was about marriage and success, not the blue flower. In Munich, where students could buy standing-room theater seats for five marks, I went to see a big-budget production of Part II of Faust , and on my way out of the theater I heard a middle-aged man snickeringly offer his wife this “complete and sufficient” summary of the play: “Er geht von einer Sensation zur anderen — aber keine Befriedigung.” [9] “He goes from one sensation to another—but no satisfaction.” The man’s disrespect, his philistine amusement with himself, amused me, too.