The surrender of the whole self to one pursuit — the bargain E.T.A. and AA both demand
echoes
From: Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Limitation, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness
- Early text: "But we prefer not to countenance the kinds of
sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so good at one
particular thing"; the sacrifice is "A sub-sumption of almost all other
features of human life to their one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to
live in a world that, like a child’s world, is very serious and very small."
[mid-essay, the sacrifice passage] [e-text]; athletes as "our culture’s holy
men" who "give themselves over to a pursuit… sacrifice themselves for our
(we imagine) redemption" [fn 42].
- IJ echo: The novel's central institutional bargain — E.T.A.'s demand
that a junior give the entire self over to tennis, mirrored by Boston AA's
demand that an addict surrender the self to the program: the two
institutions as designed mirrors, the same surrender staged as benign in the
personal register and sinister in the institutional. Joyce's world "very
serious and very small" is E.T.A.'s enclosed junior universe described from
the outside.
- Weight: prefiguration