Inarticulacy — the gap between doing, saying, and being

echoes

Early text: "Great athletes usually turn out to be stunningly inarticulate about just those qualities and experiences that constitute their fascination"; the memoirs cannot deliver "personal and verbal access to an intrinsically public and performative kind of genius"; the dead-memoir verdict — "it communicates no real feeling and so gives us no sense of a conscious person. There’s nobody at the other end of the line."; and the closing paradox that the genius "must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it—and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence." [e-text]
IJ echo: IJ's preoccupation with the untranslatability of interior experience — the gap between what can be done/felt and what can be said (Hal's final unspeakability; the novel's recurring failure of one consciousness to reach another — "nobody at the other end of the line" is practically an IJ telephony image). The essay locates the same gap in athletic genius: the doer cannot say, and the sayer cannot do. Hal, uniquely, is both the prodigy and the hyper-verbal consciousness — the collision the essay only theorizes, IJ embodies.
Weight: prefiguration