Jonathan Franzen - The Discomfort Zone

THE GERMAN DEPARTMENT’Sdifficult professor, George Avery, taught the seminar in German modernism that I took in my last fall at college. Avery had dark Greek eyes, beautiful skin, a strong nose, luxuriant eyebrows. His voice was high and perpetually hoarse, and when he got lost in the details of a digression, as often happened, the noise of his hoarseness overwhelmed the signal of his words. His outbursts of delighted laughter began at a frequency above human hearing — a mouth thrown open silently — and descended through an accelerating series of cries: “Hah! Hah! Hah! Hah! Hah! Hah!” His eyes gleamed with excitement and pleasure if a student said anything remotely pertinent or intelligent; but if the student was altogether wrong, as the six of us in his seminar often were, he flinched and scowled as if a bug were flying at his face, or he gazed out a window unhappily, or refilled his pipe, or wordlessly cadged a cigarette from one of us smokers, and hardly even pretended to listen. He was the least polished of all my college teachers, and yet he had something that the other teachers didn’t have: he felt for literature the kind of headlong love and gratitude that a born-again Christian feels for Jesus. His highest praise for a piece of writing was “It’s crazy !” His yellowed, disintegrating copies of German prose masterworks were like missionary Bibles. On page after page, each sentence was underscored or annotated in Avery’s microscopic handwriting, illuminated with the cumulative appreciations of fifteen or twenty rereadings. His paperbacks were at once low-priced, high-acid crapola and the most precious of relics — moving testaments to how full of significance every line in them could be to a student of their mysteries, as every leaf and sparrow in Creation sings of God to the believer.

Avery’s father was a Greek immigrant who’d worked as a waiter and later owned a shoe-repair shop in North Philadelphia. Avery had been drafted into the Army as an eighteen-year-old, in 1944, and at the end of basic training, in the middle of the night before his unit shipped out to Europe, his commanding officer shook him roughly and shouted, “Avery! Wake up! YOUR MOTHER’S DEAD.” Granted leave to attend her funeral, Avery reached Europe two weeks late, arriving on V-Day, and never caught up with his regiment. He was passed along from unit to unit and eventually landed in Augsburg, where the Army put him to work at a requisitioned publishing house. One day, his commander asked if anyone in the unit wanted to take a course in journalism. Avery was the only one who volunteered, and over the next year and a half he taught himself German, went around in civilian clothes, reported on music and art for the occupation newspaper, and fell in love with German culture. Returning to the States, he studied English and then German literature, which was how he’d ended up married to a beautiful Swiss woman and tenured at a fancy college and living in a three-story house in whose dining room, every Monday afternoon at four, we took a break for coffee and pastry that his wife, Doris, made for us.

The Averys’ taste in china, furniture, and room temperature was Continental modern. As we sat at their table, speaking German with varying degrees of success, drinking coffee that went cold in five seconds, the leaves I saw scattering across the front lawn could have been German leaves, blown by a German wind, and the rapidly darkening sky a German sky, full of autumn weltschmerz. Out in the hallway, the Averys’ dog, Ina, an apologetic-looking German shepherd, shivered herself awake. We weren’t fifteen miles from the tiny row house where Avery had grown up, but the house he lived in now, with its hardwood floors and leather upholstery and elegant ceramics (many of them thrown by Doris, who was a skilled potter), was the kind of place I now wished I’d grown up in myself, an oasis of fully achieved self-improvement.

We read Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy , stories by Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal, and a novel by Robert Walser that made me want to scream, it was so quiet and subtle and bleak. We read an essay by Karl Kraus, “The Chinese Wall,” about a Chinese laundry owner in New York who sexually serviced well-bred Caucasian women and finally, notoriously, strangled one of them. The essay began, “Ein Mord ist geschehen, und die Menschheit möchte um Hilfe rufen” [10] A murder has occurred, and mankind would like to cry for help. —which seemed to me a little strong. The Chinatown murder, Kraus continued, was “the most important event” in the two-thousand-year history of Christian morality: also a bit strong, no? It took me half an hour to fight through each page of his allusions and alliterative dichotomies—

Da entdecken wir, daß unser Verbot ihr Vorschub, unser Geheimnis ihre Gelegenheit, unsere Scham ihr Sporn, unser Gefahr ihr Genuß, unsere Hut ihre Hülle, unser Gebet ihre Brust war…[D]ie gefesselte Liebe liebte die Fessel, die geschlagene den Schmerz, die beschmutzte den Schmutz. Die Rache des verbannten Eros war der Zauber, allen Verlust in Gewinn zu wandeln. [11] Now we find out that our prohibitions were Nature’s procrastinations, our secrets her opportunities, our shame her spur, our danger her enjoyment, our defenses her cover, our prayers her breeding season…Fettered love loved its fetters; beaten love, its pain; filthy love, its filth. The revenge of the exiled Eros was the magic of turning every loss into a gain.

— and as soon as I was sitting in Avery’s living room, attempting to discuss the essay, I realized that I’d been so busy deciphering Kraus’s sentences that I hadn’t actually read them. When Avery asked us what the essay was about, I flipped through my xeroxed pages and tried to speed-read my way to some plausible summary. But Kraus’s German opened up only to lovers with a very slow hand. “It’s about,” I said, “um, Christian morality…and—”

Avery cut me off as if I hadn’t spoken. “We like sex dirty,” he said with a leer, looking at each of us in turn. “ That’s what this is about. The dirtier Western culture makes it, the more we like it dirty.”

I was irritated by his “we.” My understanding of sex was mainly theoretical, but I was pretty sure I didn’t like it dirty. I was still looking for a lover who was, first and foremost, a friend. For example: the dark-haired, ironic French major who was taking the modernism seminar with me and whom I’d begun to pursue with the passive, low-pressure methods that, although they’d invariably failed me in the past, I continued to place my faith in. I’d heard that the French major was unattached, and she seemed to find me amusing. I couldn’t imagine anything dirty about having sex with her. In fact, in spite of my growing preoccupation with her, I never came close to picturing us having sex of any kind.

THE PREVIOUS SUMMER,to prepare for the seminar, I’d read Rilke’s novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge . It immediately became my all-time favorite book, which was to say that there were several paragraphs in the first part of it (the easiest part and the only part I’d completely enjoyed) which I’d taken to reading aloud to impress my friends. The plot of the novel — a young Danish guy from a good family washes up in Paris, lives hand to mouth in a noisy rooming house, gets lonely and weirded out, worries about becoming a better writer and a more complete person, goes for long walks in the city, and otherwise spends his time writing in his journal — seemed highly relevant and interesting to me. I memorized, without ever quite grasping what I was memorizing, several passages in which Malte reports on his personal growth, which reminded me pleasantly of my own journals: