IJ study archive

Scene 026: schtitt and mario

Scene
26
Pages
79–85
When
YDAU (2009), undated warm evening(s) — habitual/iterative narration with one specific ice-cream walk into Allston
Where
E.T.A. grounds (East Courts pavilion, copper beech, picnic tables behind the Headmaster's House); Comm. Ave. eastward into Allston, ice-cream-boundin: E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. courts & Eschaton grounds · Allston-Brighton (also)
POV
3rd person over Schtitt and Mario (narrator openly apologizing for expository liberties, p. 82)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 7)

Summary

Gerhardt Schtitt — nearly seventy, black boots, epaulets, weatherman's pointer standing in for the forbidden riding crop, "a philosopher instead of a king" — keeps company with eighteen-year-old Mario Incandenza, the one person he speaks to candidly. Over pipe-smoke and on a walk to Allston for gourmet ice cream, Schtitt unfolds the philosophy JOI hired him for: real tennis is not statistics but "not-order, limit, the places where things broke down, fragmented into beauty" — a Cantorian infinity of responses bounded only by the self; the true opponent is never the boy across the net but the player's own limits, which makes tennis "an essentially tragic enterprise" and life "endless war against the self you cannot live without." Mario, the born listener whom damage renders invisible enough to be confided in, keeps trying to formulate the question the doctrine raises: what's the difference between vanquishing the self and destroying it — between the game and suicide? Over ice cream Schtitt answers the question Mario never managed to ask: "Maybe no different... Not different... except the chance to play," and roars with laughter.

What to notice

The narrator stops mid-scene to apologize for taking expository liberties — one of the book's rare open admissions that someone is arranging what you're told — and notice who draws out that candor: Mario, around whom, the scene says, bullshit tends to drop away. The structural masterstroke is an answered unasked question. Mario spends the walk failing to formulate the thing he wants to know — "what's the difference between tennis and suicide, life and death, the game and its own end?" — and Schtitt, over ice cream, answers it anyway: no different, maybe, "except the chance to play." Attention that complete, listening that hears the question under the silence, is the scene's real subject, and almost no one else in the novel ever manages it. Notice the staging of the concession: at the exact moment a man allows that life may differ from suicide only by the chance to play, a Green Line train rattles past — the train arriving before the wheelchair assassins' initiation game gives it its terrible meaning. And Mario's ice-cream conservatism — "Better the flavor you know for sure you already love." — is the desert scenes' choose-your-attachments doctrine in comic miniature: chosen love, small, safe, and entirely his.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 79: Schtitt's hiring (JOI "just about begged"); the Bollettieri riding-crop scandal; the mellowed corporal-punitive legend; pea-shooter on conditioning runs, Mario in the BMW sidecar.
  • pp. 79-80: Why Mario: "people can sometimes forget you're there, even when they're interfacing with you... bullshit often tends to drop away around damaged listeners"; Mario forging "an interpersonal connection he knows only he can truly feel" (n.31: 'Lebensgefährtin,' Schtitt's not-at-all-sexual term for deLint).
  • pp. 80-81: Pipe-smoke pedagogy: the "myth of efficiency," Euclidean flatness, "flat children"; WE ARE WHAT WE WALK BETWEEN; C.T. swapping JOI's founding motto — TE OCCIDERE POSSUNT... (n.32: 'They Can Kill You, But the Legalities of Eating You Are Quite a Bit Dicier') — for THE MAN WHO KNOWS HIS LIMITATIONS HAS NONE.
  • pp. 81-82: The JOI-Schtitt simpatico at the B.S. 1989 convention (n.33): tennis as chess-boxing hybrid exempt from stats; 'Extra-Linear Dynamics' (n.34: math's "lucid and elegant admissions of defeat" — JOI's "frustrated interest in grand-scale failure"); the Cantorian continuum (n.35: Cantor's diagonal proof, infinities between any two things) — "infinities of choice and execution, mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained... these boundaries of self."
  • pp. 82-83: Schtitt's Kanto-Hegelian Gymnasium formation — junior athletics as citizenship training, sacrifice of "the hot narrow imperatives of the Self" to team/State/Law; his verdict on O.N.A.N.ite U.S.A.: a state that is "a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears" whose only consensus is straight-line personal happiness; 'Verstiegenheit' (n.36: "wandering alone in blasted disorienting territory beyond all charted limits"); Mario: "Bless you."
  • p. 83: The willow-tree love story ("I went daily to there, to be with the tree"); Mario thinking hard, trying to square self-surrender with a one-on-one sport.
  • p. 84: The doctrine's core: the true opponent is the self; the boy across the net "is not the foe: he is more the partner in the dance... occasion for meeting the self"; tennis as tragic, "the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again"; Schtitt catches falling Mario in a dance-floor dip.
  • p. 84: Mario's unasked questions: is vanquishing the self destroying yourself? "what's the difference between tennis and suicide, life and death, the game and its own end?"
  • pp. 84-85: Ice cream: Schtitt experiments with exotic flavors; Mario "always chickens out and opts for good old basic chocolate" — "Better the flavor you know for sure you already love."
  • p. 85: The concession, at the sidewalk table over the tricolored cone: "And so. No different, maybe... Not different... except the chance to play. No? Yes? The chance to play, yes?" — Schtitt hears and answers the tennis/suicide question Mario never articulated; Schtitt's startling German roar, Mario's involuntary echo-laugh and dropped dollop of chocolate; the unexplained red welt on Schtitt's jaw (the mosquitoes of p. 81 collecting their due).

Themes in this scene

  • The Body and Tennis: this scene's theoretical center — tennis as self-transcendence, limits as the game's condition; everything Stice's transcendent late match and the plateaux-talks elaborate is stated here first.
  • Fathers and Sons: Schtitt as the surviving father-figure — he caught JOI's vision and now catches JOI's son mid-fall; the dead founder present in every doctrine quoted.
  • Disability and Deformity: Mario's damage as aperture — invisibility that lets truth be spoken around him; the sidecar, the dip, the bodies' comic asymmetry all rendered with total tenderness.
  • Communication and Solipsism: the connection "he knows only he can truly feel"; Mario's hardest questions never achieve articulation — the scene's wisdom is half-monologue, half-unsent reply.
  • Nationalism and O.N.A.N.: Schtitt's Old World critique of the experialist, waste-exporting U.S. — the political frame for why a nation of happiness-pursuers is defenseless against the Entertainment.
  • Memory and Forgetting: the narrator's mid-scene apology turns on the listener's faculty — "Mario Incandenza has a severely limited range of verbatim recall" (p. 82) — Schtitt's doctrine reaches us as exposition precisely because the one person he confides in cannot store it; memory's limits openly shaping how the book gets told.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Mario's "what's the difference between tennis and suicide?" hangs over JOI's actual suicide (scene 020) and Kate Gompert's "I didn't want to play anymore" (scene 024, p. 72) — three adjacent scenes triangulating the same question.
  • "The aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth" (p. 82) reuses, in rapture-key, the Deans' horror-description of Hal's breakdown — "a flutter of some sort of awful... growth" (p. 14, scene 003): the same image is tennis's beauty in Schtitt's mouth and Hal's catastrophe in YG (Carlisle catch).

Forward

  • Schtitt's self-as-opponent doctrine answers Hal's dream of the never-seen opponent (scene 023, p. 68) and undergirds Schtitt's later plateaux/"second world" lectures (pp. 458+) and the Eschaton debacle's map/territory collapse.
  • Schtitt's inherited motto "WE ARE WHAT WE WALK BETWEEN" (the academy sign, p. 81) and his something-bigger argument are Marathe's temple-speech in a different accent (scene 035, pp. 106-108): the book's two foreign moralists agree against U.S. self-worship.
  • The mottoes: JOI's TE OCCIDERE POSSUNT survives "unironically emblazoned" on the E.T.A. tow truck (scene 048, p. 153), and C.T.'s swap of the Headmaster's-office door motto "before Himself's microwaved head had even cooled" is retold with resentment in reported speech at scene 068 (p. 286); the replacement motto is pure C.T. (cf. his anxious-administrator portrait, pp. 519+).
  • "Better the flavor you know for sure you already love": Mario's chocolate echoes the attachment-choice theme (scene 035, "choose your attachments carefully") in miniature, comic key.
  • The willow-as-woman Schtitt loved prefigures the book's pattern of safe non-human love-objects (Lyle and sweat, Green and Mildred, the wraith and film).
  • "Mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained" infinity bounded by self (p. 82) is the benign mirror of the Entertainment's infinite loop — boundaries of self vs. their dissolution; Marathe's temple doctrine (scene 035) and Schtitt's something-bigger argument frame the same choice from two foreign accents.

Notable passages (8)
  • p. 80: "bullshit often tends to drop away around damaged listeners" — Mario's narrative function declared; cf. scene 015.
  • p. 81: WE ARE WHAT WE WALK BETWEEN — anthology-grade aphorism.
  • p. 82: "not-order, limit, the places where things broke down, fragmented into beauty" — Schtitt's aesthetics of tennis; pair with n.34/n.35 math glosses.
  • p. 84: "The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself... life's endless war against the self you cannot live without." — the book's sports-philosophy keystone; the full paragraph rewards reading whole.
  • p. 84: "what's the difference between tennis and suicide, life and death, the game and its own end?" — Mario's unasked question, this scene's thesis.
  • p. 85: "'Maybe no different, so'... 'Not different'—looking out into the Ave.'s raised median at the Green Line train rattling past downhill—'except the chance to play.'" — the scene's punchline and the book's whole wager in four words; read it WITH the p. 84 question it answers (note the train rattling past a man conceding life may be no different from suicide — proto-jeu-du-prochain-train staging).
  • p. 83: "I went daily to there, to be with the tree." — the willow love-story; safe attachment in one sentence; pairs with Mario's chocolate.
  • p. 80: "If nobody's really in there, there's nothing to be shy about." — the inner logic of confiding in the damaged; inverse of Hal's "I am in here."

What links here Timeline events here (21) · Echoes (1) · Connected from (17) · Passages quoted here (39) · Motifs (1)

Timeline events here

Echoes

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs