Gerhardt Schtitt

Arc

Schtitt is the novel's resident philosopher of limitation, and the timeline's shape is a doctrine acquiring a biography. The doctrine comes first because it came first in him: a pre-Unification Gymnasium formation in which junior athletics taught "learning to sacrifice the hot narrow imperatives of the Self" to team and rule — values the narration itself flags for their "whiff of proto-fascist potential" — under a training-hall sign reading "WE ARE WHAT WE WALK BETWEEN" (1), in academies where boys lived inside the court's lines for months "to learn to live inside" (2). Everything he teaches at E.T.A. is that formation transposed: the true opponent "is the player himself," the boy across the net "more the partner in the dance"; tennis as "an essentially tragic enterprise" whose whole point is "life's endless war against the self you cannot live without" (6); and, practically, the "second world inside the lines" where "there are no conditions" (7), balanced on the care-and-not-care paradox Schacht reads off him (8). Pressed by Mario on the darkest implication — what separates vanquishing the self from suicide — Schtitt concedes "Maybe no different, so," except "the chance to play" (6). The book takes the concession seriously: this is the school where Clipperton shot himself, and it is Schtitt who keeps the special key and sends whingers to sit in the locked room (11).

The biography that carries the doctrine is a partnership. James Incandenza found him — riding-crop reputation and all (4) — at a B.S. 1989 convention where the two proved "totally simpatico" about tennis as "not-order, limit, the places where things broke down, fragmented into beauty" (5), hired him at the founding, fought him over curriculum (Schtitt "pushing hard for some mix of theology and the very grim ethics of Kant," 15), cast him in a film about a man who suspects he is made of glass (16), and left him twice: first to alcohol and absence, then to the microwave — and it was Schtitt, "irreproachably brisk and efficient and sensible," whom the thirteen-year-old Hal ran into first on the day of the suicide, "just the authority figure to go get in the first place" (17). What survives the Founder is Schtitt as the institution's keel: the mellowed "philosopher instead of a king" (10) in his crow's nest, shrill after wins (21), gatekeeping the media he considers thalidomide for juniors (12), and diagnosing self-evasion in Schtitt-terms wherever he sees it — Orin's punting as "still just only lobbing," with "several very bad feelings about Orin's future, inside" (13).

The timeline's warmth is concentrated in two boys and one habit. The habit is the soundproofed room where an ascetic old man on an army cot can sleep only inside deafening Wagner (19) — the second world made literal, conditions shut out by sheer volume. The boys are Mario, the damaged born-listener who rides the BMW's sidecar and is "pretty much the one person with whom Schtitt speaks candidly" — the one who gets the willow-tree love story (3, 9) — and Hal, his "revenant" (14), whose YDAU leap he watches with an affectionate pointer and whose unexplained exhibition against Stice he orders for reasons no one pins down. What the doctrine finally does in the world the book leaves double-edged, and the deputies who preach it (deLint's "self-transcendence through pain," Poutrincourt's "walk between these," authorship unresolved as written, 18) only widen the question. The last word goes to Hal in the Year of Glad, reduced to a voice no one can understand, coping by "the sort of all-defensive game Schtitt used to have me play: the best defense: let everything bounce off you; do nothing" (22) — the second world holding, at the cost the doctrine always named and never priced.