Grotesquerie and completeness — the mutilation that is also transcendence

echoes

Early text: "The restrictions on his life have been, in my opinion, grotesque; and in certain ways Joyce himself is a grotesque"; yet "the radical compression of his attention and self has allowed him to become a transcendent practitioner of an art"; "Michael Joyce is, in other words, a complete man (though in a grotesquely limited way). But he wants more." [closing ¶s] [e-text]
IJ echo: IJ's ambivalence about its tennis prodigies — the E.T.A. juniors (Hal above all) as beings shaped, gifted, and deformed by the same compression; the novel's refusal to resolve whether such a life is achievement or amputation. The essay's held-together paradox (transcendent artist / grotesque) is the exact ambivalence IJ sustains about Hal and about the academy.
Weight: shared-preoccupation