The Discomfort Zone

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Go back and look at what’s on the page,” Avery said. “Forget the other reading for next week. You have to read what’s on the page.”

  JOSEF K., WHO has been arrested at home on the morning of his thirtieth birthday, returns to his rooming house after a long day at work and apologizes to his landlady, Frau Grubach, for the morning’s disturbances. The arresting officials briefly commandeered the room of another boarder, a young woman named Bürstner, but Frau Grubach assures K. that her room has been put back in order. She tells K. not to worry about his arrest—it’s not a criminal matter, thank God, but something very “learned” and mysterious. K. says he “agrees” with her: the matter is “completely null and void.” He asks Frau Grubach to shake his hand to seal their “agreement” about how meaningless it is. Frau Grubach instead replies, with tears in her eyes, that he shouldn’t take the matter so much to heart. K. then casually asks about Fräulein Bürstner—is she home yet? He has never exchanged more than hellos with Fräulein Bürstner, he doesn’t even know her first name, but when Frau Grubach confides that she worries about the men Fräulein Bürstner is hanging out with and how late she’s been coming home, K. becomes “enraged.” He declares that he knows Fräulein Bürstner very well and that Frau Grubach is completely mistaken about her. He angrily goes into his room, and Frau Grubach hastens to assure him that her only concern is with the moral purity of her rooming house. To which K., through a chink in the door, bizarrely cries, “If you want to keep your rooming house clean, you’d better start by asking me to leave!” He shuts the door in Frau Grubach’s face, ignores her “faint knocking,” and proceeds to lie in ambush for Fräulein Bürstner.

  He has no particular desire for the girl—can’t even remember what she looks like. But the longer he waits for her, the angrier he gets. Suddenly it’s her fault that he skipped his dinner and his weekly visit to a B-girl. When she finally comes in, toward midnight, he tells her that he’s been waiting more than two and a half hours (this is a flat-out lie), and he insists on having a word with her immediately. Fräulein Bürstner is so tired she can hardly stand up. She wonders aloud how K. can accuse her of being “late” when she had no idea he was even waiting for her. But she agrees to talk for a few minutes in her room. Here K. is excited to learn that Fräulein Bürstner has some training as a legal secretary; he says, “That’s excellent, you’ll be able to help me with my case.” He gives her a detailed account of what happened in the morning, and when he senses that she’s insufficiently impressed with his story, he starts moving her furniture around and reenacting the scene. He mentions, for no good reason, that a blouse of hers was hanging on the window in the morning. Impersonating the arresting officer, who was actually quite polite and soft-spoken, he screams his own name so loudly that another boarder knocks on Fräulein Bürstner’s door. She tries again to get rid of K.—he’s now been in her room for half an hour, and she has to get up very early in the morning. But he won’t leave her alone. He assures her that, if the other boarder makes trouble for her, he’ll personally vouch for her respectability. In fact, if need be, he’ll tell Frau Grubach that everything was his fault—that he “assaulted” her in her bedroom. And then, as Fräulein Bürstner tries yet again to get rid of him, he really does assault her:

  …lief vor, faßte sie, küßte sie auf den Mund und dann über das ganze Gesicht, wie ein durstiges Tier mit der Zunge über das endlich gefundene Quellwasser hinjagt. Schließlich küßte er sie auf den Hals, wo die Gurgel ist, und dort ließ er die Lippen lange liegen.*

  “Now I’ll go,” he says, wishing he knew her first name. Fräulein Bürstner nods tiredly and walks away with her head down and her shoulders slumping. Before he falls asleep, K. thinks about his behavior with her and concludes that he’s pleased with it—indeed, is surprised only that he’s not even more pleased.

  I thought I’d read every word of the first chapter of The Trial twice, in German and in English, but when I went back now I realized that I’d never read the chapter even once. What was actually on the page, as opposed to what I’d expected to find there, was so unsettling that I’d shut my mind down and simply made believe that I was reading. I’d been so convinced of the hero’s innocence that I’d missed what the author was saying, clearly and unmistakably, in every sentence. I’d been blind the way K. himself is blind. And so, disregarding Avery’s talk of three universes of interpretive possibility, I became dogmatically attached to the opposite of my original supposition. I decided that K. is a creepy, arrogant, selfish, abusive shmuck who, because he refuses to examine his life, is having it forcibly examined for him.

  THAT FALL, I was happier than I’d been since high school. My friend Ekström and I were living in a two-room double in a centrally located dorm, and I’d lucked into the job of editing the college literary magazine. In the same zany early-seventies spirit that had saddled the college’s art-film series with the name TAFFOARD,* the magazine was called The Nulset Review. Its previous editor was a petite red-haired poet from New York who’d had a mostly female staff and had mostly printed poetry by female poets. I was the outsider who was supposed to freshen up the magazine and find new contributors, and the first thing I did was organize a contest to rename it. The red-haired former editor relinquished her post graciously, but without conceding that anything had been wrong with The Nulset Review. She was a languid, large-eyed woman with a soft, tremulous voice and a thirty-year-old Cuban boyfriend in New York. My staff and I spent the first half hour of our first editorial meeting waiting for her to show up and tell us how to run a magazine. Finally, someone called her at home and woke her up—it was one o’clock on a Sunday afternoon—and she drifted in half an hour later, carrying an enormous mug of coffee and basically still sleeping. She lay on a sofa, her head pillowed in the nest of her curly red hair, and rarely spoke unless we were struggling to understand a submitted manuscript. Then, accepting the manuscript with a languid hand, she cast her eye over it briefly and delivered an incisive summary and analysis. I could see she was my competition. She was living upstairs from a grocery-and-meat market, in an off-campus apartment where the dark-haired French major I was chasing also lived. They were best friends. At a party in November, while everybody else was dancing, I found myself standing alone with the competition for the first time. I said, “I guess this means we finally have to have a conversation.” She gave me a cold look, said, “No, it doesn’t,” and walked away.

  I was making pretty good progress with the French major. One night in December she asked me to check the grammar in a paper on Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexander-platz which she was presenting in Avery’s seminar the next day. I disagreed with her thesis in it, and at a certain point I realized that if I just kept discussing the book with her, we might end up spending the night together. We developed a better thesis—that Döblin’s working-class hero, Franz Biberkopf, believes in masculine STRENGTH, but in order to find redemption he must admit his absolute weakness in the face of DEATH—and then, side by side, scribbling madly, smoking Marlboro Lights, we wrote a whole new paper. By the time we’d finished, at six in the morning, and were eating pancakes in an IHOP, I was so wired on nicotine and excited by the situation that I couldn’t believe we wouldn’t be falling straight into bed together after breakfast. But, my usual luck, she still had to type the paper.

  On the last night of the semester, Ekström and I threw a big party. The French major was there, as were all our other friends and neighbors, and as were George and Doris Avery, who stayed for hours, sitting on Ekström’s bed and drinking Gallo Hearty Burgundy and listening avidly to what our classmates had to say about literature and politics. I already suspected that Avery was the best teacher I would ever have, and I felt that he and Doris had done us a big favor by showing up and making our party extraordinary, not just a kid thing but a grownup thing as well; all evening, friends of mine came up to me and marveled, “They’re such great people.” I was aware, though, that I’d done the Averys a favor, too—that they didn’t
get invitations from students all that often. Every year an upperclassman or two fell under Avery’s spell, but never more than one or two. And even though Avery was handsome and loyal and tenderhearted, he wasn’t a lot more popular with his younger colleagues than he was with students. He had no patience with theory or political doctrine, and he was too obviously fascinated by good-looking women (just as Josef K. can’t help mentioning to Fräulein Bürstner that a blouse of hers was hanging on her window, Avery was powerless, when speaking of certain female faculty, to omit descriptions of their clothes and bodies), and he was perhaps not always truthful in calling balls in or out on the tennis court, and he and his colleague Weber loathed each other so profoundly that they resorted to strange circumlocutions to avoid even pronouncing each other’s names; and too often, when Avery was feeling insecure, he assaulted his and Doris’s guests with hour-long recitations of raw literary-historical data, including, for example, the names and titles and capsule biographies of various contemporary archivists in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. It was this other side of Avery—the fact that he so visibly had an other side—that was helping me finally understand all three of the dimensions in Kafka: that a man could be a sweet, sympathetic, comically needy victim and a lascivious, self-aggrandizing, grudge-bearing bore, and also, crucially, a third thing: a flickering consciousness, a simultaneity of culpable urge and poignant self-reproach, a person in process.

  Ekström and I had cleared the furniture from my bedroom and made it the dance floor. Well past midnight, after the Averys and our less good friends had gone home, I found myself alone on the floor, dancing to Elvis Costello’s “(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea” in my tightly wound way, while a group of people watched. They were watching my expressivity, I wrote in my notebook the next day, on a plane to St. Louis. I knew this, and about a minute into the song I cast an “Oh so much attention showered upon modest me” smile at the whole line of them. But I think my real expressivity was in that smile. Why is he embarrassed? He’s not embarrassed, he loves attention. Well, he’s embarrassed to get it, because he can’t believe that other people can so quietly be party to his exhibition. He’s smiling with good-hearted disdain. Then “Chelsea” gave way to “Miss You,” the Stones’ moment in disco, and the French major joined me on the floor. She said, “Now we’re going to dance like we’re freaked out!” The two of us brought our faces close together, reached for each other, dodged each other, and danced nose to nose in a freaked-out parody of attraction, while people watched.

  THE HOUSE IN Webster Groves looked tired. My parents were suddenly old. I had the sense that Bob and his wife were secretly appalled by them and planning a revolt. I couldn’t understand why Tom, who’d introduced me to the Talking Heads song “Stay Hungry,” which had been my personal anthem in Germany, kept talking about all the great food he’d been eating. My father sat by the fireplace and read the story and the poem of mine I’d printed in the literary magazine (new name: Small Craft Warnings) and said to me, “Where is the story in these? Where are the word pictures? This is all ideas.” My mother was a wreck. Twice, since September, she’d been in the hospital for knee operations, and now she was suffering with ulcerative colitis. Tom had brought home an unprecedentedly suitable new girlfriend in October, he’d given up filmmaking and was finding work as a building contractor, and the girlfriend seemed willing to overlook his lack of health insurance and conventional employment. But then my mother found out that the girlfriend wasn’t suitable at all. She was, it turned out, cohabiting with Tom, and my mother could not be reconciled to this. It chewed away inside her. So did the imminence of my father’s retirement, which she was dreading. She kept telling anyone who would listen that retirement was wrong for “able, vital people who can still contribute to society.” Her phrasing was always the same.

  For the first time in my life, I was starting to see the people in my family as actual people, not merely as relations, because I’d been reading German literature and was becoming a person myself. Aber diesmal wird es geschrieben werden,* I wrote in my notebook on my first evening in St. Louis. I meant that this holiday with my family, unlike all the holidays in the past, would be recorded and analyzed in writing. I thought I was quoting from Malte. But Rilke’s actual line is much crazier: Aber diesmal werde ich geschrieben werden.* Malte is envisioning a moment when, instead of being the maker of the writing (“I write”), he will be its product (“I am written”): instead of a performance, a transmission; instead of a focus on the self, a shining through the world. And yet I must not have been reading Rilke all that badly, because one of the family members I could now see more clearly as a person was the youngest son, the warm puppy who amused the others with the cute things he said and then excused himself from the table and wrote cute sentences in his notebook; and I was running out of patience with this performer.

  That night, after multiple dreams about the French major, each of which ended with her reproaching me for not wanting to have sex with her, I had a nightmare about the Averys’ sweet-tempered German shepherd, Ina. In the dream, as I was sitting on the floor of the Averys’ living room, the dog walked up to me and began to insult me. She said I was a frivolous, cynical, attention-seeking “fag” whose entire life had been phony. I answered her frivolously and cynically and chucked her under the chin. She grinned at me with malice, as if to make clear that she understood me to the core. Then she sank her teeth into my arm. As I fell over backward, she went for my throat.

  I woke up and wrote: So, eines morgens wurde er verhaftet.*

  My mother took me aside and said viciously, regarding Tom’s visit with his girlfriend in October, “They deceived me.”

  She looked up from a note she was writing at the dining-room table and asked me, “How do you spell ‘emptiness’? Like, ‘a feeling of emptiness’?”

  All through Christmas dinner, she apologized for the absence of the traditional cranberry sorbet, which she’d been too tired to make this year. Each time she apologized, we assured her that we didn’t miss the sorbet at all, the regular homemade cranberry sauce was all the cranberries any of us needed. A few minutes later, like a mechanical toy, she said she was sorry she hadn’t made the traditional cranberry sorbet this year, but she was just too tired. After dinner, I went upstairs and took out my notebook, as I had many times before; but this time I was written.

  FROM A POST-HOLIDAY letter of my mother’s:

  Dad feels your schedule is so light he’s fearing he isn’t getting his “money’s worth” or something. Actually, sweetie, he is disappointed (perhaps I shouldn’t tell you though I suspect you sense it) that you aren’t graduating with a “saleable skill” as you promised—you’ve done what you loved, granted, but the real world is something else—& it has been extremely costly. I know, of course, you want to “write” but so do tens of thousands of other also talented young people & even I wonder how realistic you are at times. Well, keep us informed as to any encouraging or interesting developments—even a degree from Swarthmore is no guarantee of success, automatically. I hate being pessimistic (I’ve usually been a positive person) but I’ve seen how Tom has wasted his talents & I hope there won’t be repetition.

  From my letter in reply:

  Perhaps I should make clear a few things that I had considered knowledge common to the three of us.

  1. I am in the HONORS PROGRAM. In the honors program we take seminars that require large amounts of independent reading; each one is therefore considered the equivalent of two 4 or 5-hour courses…

  2. Just when did I promise to graduate with what you continue to call a “saleable” major? What was this promise tied to? Your continued support of my education? All of this seems to have slipped my memory, you’re right.

  3. I know that by now you are reminding me weekly of how “extremely costly” Swarthmore is less for information’s sake than for rhetoric’s. Yet I think you should know that there is a point where such repetition begins to have an effect directly opposite to the o
ne you seek.

  From my father’s reply to my reply:

  I feel that your letter needs a rebuttal as it contains so many critical—and some bitter—comments. It is a little difficult to reply without the letter from your mother but as background you should recognize by now that she is not always rational or tactful—and also consider that she has not felt well since last September…Even her knee is bothering again. She takes four different pills several times a day which I don’t think is good for her. My analysis is that she has mental concerns that throw her out of balance physically. But I can’t figure out what worries her. Her health is our only concern and that becomes a catch-22 situation.

  And from my mother’s reply to my reply:

  How can I undo the damage I’ve done, hurting you as I did and feeling so down & so guilty ever since when, because of my love and respect for you (not only as my son but as one of the most special of all people in my life), I am depressed over the poor judgment & unreasonableness of the letter I wrote you when I was in an unfortunate mood. All I can say is, I’m sorry, I’m miserable over it, I trust you completely and I love you dearly———I beg your forgiveness and speak from my heart.