The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History

by Jonathan Franzen

  In August, Siebert went away to college, which allowed me to idealize her from a distance, communicate mainly in writing, put energy into new theatrical projects, and casually date someone else. Late in the fall, a publisher bought The Fig Connection for one hundred dollars, and I told my parents I was going to be a writer. They weren’t happy to hear it.

  I had started keeping a journal, and I was discovering that I didn’t need school in order to experience the misery of appearances. I could manufacture excruciating embarrassment in the privacy of my bedroom, simply by reading what I’d written in the journal the day before. Its pages faithfully mirrored my fraudulence and pomposity and immaturity. Reading it made me desperate to change myself, to sound less idiotic. As George Benson had stressed in Then Joy Breaks Through, the experiences of growth and self-realization, even of ecstatic joy, were natural processes available to believers and nonbelievers alike. And so I declared private war on stagnation and committed myself privately to personal growth. The Authentic Relationship I wanted now was with the written page.

  One Sunday night at Fellowship, the group did an exercise in which it arranged itself as a continuum across the church meeting hall. One corner of the hall was designated Heart, the opposite corner Brain. As anyone could have predicted, most of the group went rushing to the Heart corner, crowding together in a warm and huggy mass. A much smaller number of people, Symes among them, scattered themselves along the center of the continuum. Way over in the Brain corner, close to nobody else, Manley and I stood shoulder to shoulder and stared back at the Heart people defiantly. It was odd to be calling myself all Brain when my heart was so full of love for Manley. More than odd: it was hostile.

  DIOTI’s first prank of the new year was to batik a queen-size bedsheet and unfurl it over the school’s main entrance on the morning that an accrediting committee from the North Central Association arrived to inspect the school. I built a Device involving two sheet-metal levers, a pulley, and a rope that ran across the roof and dangled by a third-floor courtyard window. When we pulled the rope on Monday morning, nothing happened. Davis had to go outside, climb to the roof in plain view, and unfurl the banner by hand. It said DIOTI WELCOMES YOU, NCA.

  Through the winter, subgroups of DIOTI staged smaller side pranks. I had a taste for scenes involving costumes and toy guns. Davis and Manley kept climbing buildings, proceeding on a typical Saturday night from the gargoyled bell tower of Eden Seminary to the roofs of Washington University, and finally to the kitchen of the Presbyterian church, where freshly baked Sunday cookies were available to intruders.

  For the main spring prank, we chose as a victim one of my favorite teachers, Ms. Wojak, because her room was in the middle of the second floor and had a very high ceiling, and because she was rumored to have disparaged DIOTI. It took nine of us four hours on a Wednesday night to empty thirty rooms of their desks, herd the desks downstairs and through hallways, and pack them, floor to ceiling, into Ms. Wojak’s room. Some of the rooms had transoms that Manley or Davis could climb through. To get into the others, we removed the hinges from the door of the main office and made use of the keys that teachers habitually left in their mail slots. Since I was fifty as well as seventeen, I’d insisted that we take along masking tape and markers and label the desks with their room numbers before moving them, to simplify the job of putting them back. Even so, I was sorry when I saw what a violent snarl we’d made of Ms. Wojak’s room. I thought she might feel singled out for persecution, and so I wrote the words CENTRALLY LOCATED on her blackboard. It was the only writing I did for DIOTI that spring. I didn’t care about Mr. Knight anymore; the work was all that mattered.

  During our graduation ceremonies, at the football field, the superintendent of schools told the story of the desks and cited their masking-tape labels as evidence of a “new spirit of responsibility” among young people today. DIOTI had secreted a farewell banner, batiked in school colors, in the base of the football scoreboard, but the Device I’d built to release it hadn’t worked well in trials the night before, and vigilant school officials had snipped the release line before Holyoke, disguised in a fisherman’s outfit and dark glasses, arrived to pull it. After the ceremony, I wanted to tell my parents that it was official: I was the author of a new spirit of responsibility among young people today. But of course I couldn’t, and didn’t.

  I EXPECTED TO start drinking and having sex that summer. Siebert had returned from college by herself (her family had moved to Texas), and we had already done some heavy stagnating on her grandmother’s living-room sofa. Now Lunte and his family were about to embark on a two-month camping trip, leaving Siebert to house-sit for them. She would be in the house by herself, every night, for two months.

  She and I both took jobs downtown, and on our first Friday she failed to show up for a lunch date with me. I spent the afternoon wondering whether, as with Merrell, I might be coming on too strong. But that evening, while I was eating dinner with my parents, Davis came to our house and delivered the news: Siebert was in St. Joseph’s Hospital with a broken back. She’d asked Davis to take her to the top of the Eden Seminary bell tower the night before, and she’d fallen from a thirty-foot downspout.

  I felt like throwing up. And yet, even as I tried to wrap my mind around the news, my most pressing concern was that my parents were getting it directly, before I could tailor it for them. I felt as if I and all my friends had been Caught in a new, large, irrevocable way. My mother, as she listened to Davis, was wearing her darkest scowl. She’d always preferred the well-spoken Manley to the lumpy Davis, and she’d never had much use for Siebert, either. Her disapproval now was radiant and total. My father, who liked Siebert, was upset nearly to the point of tears. “I don’t understand what you were doing on the roof,” he said.

  “Yeah, well, so anyway,” Davis said miserably, “so she wasn’t on the roof yet. I was on the roof trying to reach down and, you know, help her.”

  “But, Chris, my God,” my father cried. “Why were the two of you climbing on the roof at Eden Seminary?”

  Davis looked a little pissed off. He’d done the right thing by giving me the news in person, and now, as a reward, my parents were beating up on him. “Yeah, well, so anyway,” he said, “she like called me last night and she wanted me to take her up to the top of the tower. I wanted to use rope, but she’s a really good climber. She didn’t want the rope.”

  “There’s a nice view from the tower,” I offered. “You can see all around.”

  My mother turned to me severely. “Have you been up there?”

  “No,” I said, which was accidentally the truth.

  “I don’t understand this at all,” my father said.

  In Davis’s Pinto, as the two of us drove to Eden, he said that he’d gone up the downspout ahead of Siebert. The downspout was solid and well anchored to the wall, and Siebert had followed him easily until she reached the gutter. If she’d just extended her hand, Davis said, he could have reached down from the roof and pulled her up. But she seemed to panic, and before he could help her the focus went out of her eyes, her hands flew back behind her head, and she went straight down, twenty-five feet, landing flat on her back on the seminary lawn. The thud, Davis said, was horrible. Without thinking, without even lowering himself off the gutter, he jumped down thirty feet and broke his fall with the roll he’d practiced after lesser jumps. Siebert was moaning. He ran and banged on the nearest lighted windows and shouted for an ambulance.

  The grass at the base of the downspout was not as trampled as I’d expected. Davis pointed to the spot where the EMTs had put Siebert on a rigid pallet. I forced myself to look up at the gutter. The evening air at Eden, incoherently, was mild and delicious. There was twilight birdsong in the freshly foliated oak trees, Protestant lights coming on in Gothic windows.

  “You jumped down from there?” I said.

  “Yeah, it was really dumb.”

  Siebert, it turned out, had been fortunate in landing flat. Two of her vertebrae wer
e shattered, but her nerves were intact. She was in the hospital for six weeks, and I went to see her every evening, sometimes with Davis, more often alone. A guitarist friend and I wrote inspirational songs and sang them for her during thunderstorms. It was dark all summer. I lay on the Luntes’ pool table with rum, Löwenbräu, Seagram’s, and blackberry wine in my stomach and watched the ceiling spin. I didn’t hate myself, but I hated adolescence, hated the very word. In August, after Siebert’s parents had taken her back to Texas with a cumbersome body brace and a lot of painkillers, I went out with the girl I’d been dating in the spring. According to my journal, we had an excellent time making out.

  ADOLESCENCE IS BEST enjoyed without self-consciousness, but self-consciousness, unfortunately, is its leading symptom. Even when something important happens to you, even when your heart’s getting crushed or exalted, even when you’re absorbed in building the foundations of a personality, there come these moments when you’re aware that what’s happening is not the real story. Unless you actually die, the real story is still ahead of you. This alone, this cruel mixture of consciousness and irrelevance, this built-in hollowness, is enough to account for how pissed off you are. You’re miserable and ashamed if you don’t believe your adolescent troubles matter, but you’re stupid if you do. This was the double bind from which our playing with Mr. Knight, our taking something so very useless so very seriously, had given us a miraculous fifteen-month reprieve.

  But when does the real story start? At forty-five, I feel grateful almost daily to be the adult I wished I could be when I was seventeen. I work on my arm strength at the gym; I’ve become pretty good with tools. At the same time, almost daily, I lose battles with the seventeen-year-old who’s still inside me. I eat half a box of Oreos for lunch, I binge on TV, I make sweeping moral judgments, I run around town in torn jeans, I drink martinis on a Tuesday night, I stare at beer-commercial cleavage, I define as uncool any group to which I can’t belong, I feel the urge to key Range Rovers and slash their tires; I pretend I’m never going to die.

  The double bind, the problem of consciousness mixed with nothingness, never goes away. You never stop waiting for the real story to start, because the only real story, in the end, is that you die. Along the way, however, Mr. Knight keeps reappearing: Mr. Knight as God, Mr. Knight as history, Mr. Knight as government or fate or nature. And the game of art, which begins as a bid for Mr. Knight’s attention, eventually invites you to pursue it for its own sake, with a seriousness that redeems and is redeemed by its fundamental uselessness.

  FOR AN INEXPERIENCED Midwesterner in the fast-living East, college turned out to be a reprise of junior high. I managed to befriend a few fellow lonelyhearts, but the only pranks I was involved in were openly sadistic—pelting a popular girl with cubes of Jell-O, hauling an eight-foot length of rail into the dorm room of two better-adjusted classmates. Manley and Davis sounded no happier at their respective schools; they were smoking a lot of pot. Lunte had moved to Moscow, Idaho. Holyoke, still with DIOTI, organized a final prank involving a classroom waist-deep in crumpled newspaper.

  Siebert came back to St. Louis the next summer, walking without pain, wearing clothes in the style of Annie Hall, and worked with me on a farce about a police inspector in colonial India. My feelings toward her were an adolescent stew of love-and-reconsider, of commit-and-keep-your-options-open. Manley and Davis were the ones who took me to breakfast for my birthday, on the last morning of the summer. They picked me up in Davis’s car, where they also had a white cane, Davis’s dimwitted spaniel, Goldie, and a pair of swimming goggles that they’d dipped in black paint. They invited me to put on the goggles, and then they gave me the cane and Goldie’s leash and led me into a pancake house, where I amused them by eating a stack of pancakes like a blind man.

  After breakfast, we deposited Goldie at Davis’s house and went driving on arterials in the baking August heat. I guessed that our destination was the Arch, on the riverfront, and it was. I gamely went tap-tapping through the Arch’s underground lobby, my sense of hearing growing sharper by the minute. Davis bought tickets to the top of the Arch while Manley incited me to touch a Remington bronze, a rearing horse. Behind us a man spoke sharply: “Please don’t touch the—Oh. Oh. I’m sorry.”

  I took my hands away.

  “No, no, please, go ahead. It’s an original Remington, but please touch it.”

  I put my hands back on the bronze. Manley, the little jerk, went off to giggle someplace with Davis. The park ranger’s hands led mine. “Feel the muscles in the horse’s chest,” he urged.

  I was wearing mutilated swimming goggles. My cane was a quarter-inch dowel rod with one coat of white paint. I turned to leave.

  “Wait,” the ranger said. “There are some really neat things I want to show you.”

  “Um.”

  He took my arm and led me deeper into the Museum of Westward Expansion. His voice grew even gentler. “How long have you been—without your sight?”

  “Not long,” I said.

  “Feel this tepee.” He directed my hand. “These are buffalo skins with the hair scraped off. Here, I’ll take your cane.”

  We went inside the tepee, and for a daylong five minutes I dutifully stroked furs, fingered utensils, smelled woven baskets. The crime of deceiving the ranger felt more grievous with each passing minute. When I escaped from the tepee and thanked him, I was covered with sweat.

  At the top of the Arch, I was finally unblinded and saw: haze, glare, coal barges, Busch Stadium, a diarrhetic river. Manley shrugged and looked at the metal floor. “We were hoping you’d be able to see more up here,” he said.

  It often happened on my birthday that the first fall cold front of summer came blowing through. The next afternoon, when my parents and I drove east to a wedding in Fort Wayne, the sky was scrubbed clean. Giant Illinois cornfields, nearly ripe, rippled in the golden light from behind us. You could taste, in air fresh from crossing Canada, almost everything there was to know about life around here. And how devoid of interiors the farmhouses looked in light so perfect! How impatient to be harvested the cornfields seemed in their wind-driven tossing! And how platonically green the official signs for Effingham! (Its unofficial name, I surmised, was Fuckingham.) The season had changed overnight, and I was reading better books and trying to write every day, starting over from scratch now, by myself.

  My father was exceeding the speed limit by an unvarying four miles per hour. My mother spoke from the back seat. “What did you and Chris and Ben do yesterday?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “We had breakfast.”

  THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE

  Man wird mich schwer davon überzeugen, daß die Geschichte des verlorenen Sohnes nicht die Legende dessen ist, der nicht geliebt werden wollte.*

  RILKE, Malte Laurids Brigge

  Rotwerden, Herzklopfen, ein schlechtes Gewissen: das kommt davon, wenn man nicht gesündigt hat.*

  KARL KRAUS

  I WAS INTRODUCED to the German language by a young blond woman, Elisabeth, whom no word smaller than “voluptuous” suffices to describe. It was the summer I turned ten, and I was supposed to sit beside her on the love seat on my parents’ screen porch and read aloud from an elementary German text—an unappetizing book about Germanic home life, with old-fashioned Fraktur type and frightening woodcuts, borrowed from our local library—while she leaned into me, holding the book open on my lap, and pointed to words I’d mispronounced. She was nineteen, and her skirts were sensationally short and her little tops sensationally tight, and the world-eclipsing proximity of her breasts and the great southerly extent of her bare legs were intolerable to me. Sitting next to her, I felt like a claustrophobe in a crowded elevator, a person with severe restless-leg syndrome, a dental patient undergoing extended drilling. Her words, being products of her lips and tongue, carried an unwelcome intimacy, and the German language itself sounded deep-throated and wet compared to English. (How prim our “bad,” how carnal their “schlecht.”) I leaned away from her, but
she leaned over farther, and I inched down the love seat, but she inched along after me. My discomfort was so radical that I couldn’t concentrate for even one minute, and this was my only relief: most afternoons, she lost patience with me quickly.

  Elisabeth was the little sister of the wife of the Austrian rail-equipment manufacturer whom my father had helped introduce to the American market. She’d come over from Vienna, at my parents’ invitation, to practice her English and to experience life with an American family; she was also privately hoping to explore the new freedoms that Europeans had heard were sweeping our country. Unfortunately, these new freedoms weren’t available in our particular house. Elisabeth was given my brother Bob’s vacated bedroom, which looked out onto a soiled, fenced square of concrete where our neighbors’ piebald hunting dog, Speckles, barked all afternoon. My mother was constantly at Elisabeth’s side, taking her to lunch with her friends, to the Saint Louis Zoo, to Shaw’s Garden, to the Arch, to the Muny Opera, and to Tom Sawyer’s house, up in Hannibal. For relief from these loving ministrations, Elisabeth had only the company of a ten-year-old boy with freedom issues of his own.

  One afternoon, on the porch, she accused me of not wanting to learn. When I denied it, she said, “Then why do you keep turning around and looking outside? Is there something out there I don’t see?” I had no answer for her. I never consciously connected her body with my discomfort—never mentally formed any word like “breast” or “thigh” or “dirty,” never associated her knockout presence with the schoolyard talk I’d lately started hearing (“We want two pickets to Tittsburgh, and we want the change in nipples and dimes…”). I only knew that I didn’t like the way she made me feel, and that this was disappointing to her: she was making me a bad student, and I was making her a bad teacher. Neither of us could have been less what the other wanted. At the end of the summer, after she left, I couldn’t speak a word of German.