The Discomfort Zone (17 page)

 

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 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”
^*
—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—

—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:

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

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. Kafka 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.

“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: