The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History

  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 FOR third-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 DISTRACTION of 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*—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*

  —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?*

  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*

  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?”*

  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.”* The man’s disrespect, his philistine amusement with himself, amused me, too.

  THE GERMAN DEPARTMENT’S difficult 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 hi
s 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”*—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.*

  —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:

  Ich lerne sehen. Ich weiß nicht, woran es liegt, es geht alles tiefer in mich ein und bleibt nicht an der Stelle stehen, wo es sonst immer zu Ende war. Ich habe ein Inneres, von dem ich nicht wußte. Alles geht jetzt dorthin. Ich weiß nicht, was dort geschieht.*

  I also liked Malte’s very cool descriptions of his new subjectivity in action, such as:

  Da sind Leute, die tragen ein Gesicht jahrelang, natürlich nutzt es sich ab, es wird schmutzig, es bricht in den Falten, es weitet sich aus wie Handschuhe, die man auf der Reise getragen hat. Das sind sparsame, einfache Leute; sie wechseln es nicht, sie lassen es nicht einmal reinigen.*

  But the sentence in Malte that became my motto for the semester was one I didn’t notice until Avery pointed it out to us. It’s spoken to Malte by a friend of his family, Abelone, when Malte is a little boy and is reading aloud thoughtlessly from Bettina von Arnim’s letters to Goethe. He starts to read one of Goethe’s replies to Bettina, and Abelone cuts him off impatiently. “Not the answers,” she says. And then she bursts out, “Mein Gott, was hast du schlecht gelesen, Malte.”*

  This was essentially what Avery said to the six of us when we were halfway through our first discussion of The Trial. I’d been unusually quiet that week, hoping to conceal my failure to read the second half of the novel. I already knew what the book was about—an innocent man, Josef K., caught up in a nightmarish modern bureaucracy—and it seemed to me that Kafka piled on far too many examples of bureaucratic nightmarishness. I was annoyed as well by his reluctance to use paragraph breaks, and by the irrationality of his storytelling. It was bad enough that Josef K. opens the door of a storage room at his office and finds a torturer beating two men, one of whom cries out to K. for help. But to have K. return to the storage room the next night and find exactly the same three men doing exactly the same thing: I felt sore about Kafka’s refusal to be more realistic. I wished he’d written the chapter in some friendlier way. It seemed like he was being a bad sport somehow. Although Rilke’s novel was impenetrable in places, it had the arc of a Bildungsroman and ended optimistically. Kafk
a was more like a bad dream I wanted to stop having.

  “We’ve been talking about this book for two hours,” Avery said to us, “and there’s a very important question that nobody is asking. Can someone tell me what the obvious important question is?”

  We all just looked at him.

  “Jonathan,” Avery said. “You’ve been very quiet this week.”

  “Well, you know, the nightmare of the modern bureaucracy,” I said. “I don’t know if I have much to say about it.”

  “You don’t see what this has to do with your life.”

  “Less than with Rilke, definitely. I mean, it’s not like I’ve had to deal with a police state.”

  “But Kafka’s about your life!” Avery said. “Not to take anything away from your admiration of Rilke, but I’ll tell you right now, Kafka’s a lot more about your life than Rilke is. Kafka was like us. All of these writers, they were human beings trying to make sense of their lives. But Kafka above all! Kafka was afraid of death, he had problems with sex, he had problems with women, he had problems with his job, he had problems with his parents. And he was writing fiction to try to figure these things out. That’s what this book is about. That’s what all of these books are about. Actual living human beings trying to make sense of death and the modern world and the mess of their lives.”

  Avery then called our attention to the book’s title in German, Der Prozeß, which means both “the case” and “the process.” Citing a text from our secondary-reading list, he began to mumble about three different “universes of interpretation” in which the text of The Trial could be read: one universe in which K. is an innocent man falsely accused, another universe in which the degree of K.’s guilt is undecidable…I was only half listening. The windows were darkening, and it was a point of pride with me never to read secondary literature. But when Avery arrived at the third universe of interpretation, in which Josef K. is guilty, he stopped and looked at us expectantly, as if waiting for us to get some joke; and I felt my blood pressure spike. I was offended by the mere mention of the possibility that K. was guilty. It made me feel frustrated, cheated, injured. I was outraged that a critic was allowed even to suggest a thing like that.