Poutrincourt's doctrine: transcend the goal or be doomed — the academy's deepest pedagogy

pivotal · 11 Nov YDAU

• When: afternoon, 11 Nov YDAU, Show-Court bleachers, third set of the Hal-Stice match (deLint's seat now taken by prorector Thierry Poutrincourt)
• What: The academy's philosophical core, laid out to the profiler by Québécois prorector Thierry Poutrincourt and prorector deLint. The problem E.T.A. exists to solve: adolescent prodigies ("étoiles") can win fearlessly precisely because they are not yet adult to the pressure — but "it is soon you start to see the burning out which the place like ours is hoping to prevent" (Jaeger, Austin, Capriati). So the Enfield/Schtitt philosophy (which Poutrincourt calls "more Canadian than American") holds that a player "must have something built into them along the path that will let them transcend it, or they are doomed." The two dooms of the attainer: the impaling "shock" that the goal does not redeem (illustrated by the E.T.A. legend "the saga of Eric Clipperton"), or "the Syndrome of the Endless Party" — becoming a celebrity instead of a player. Schtitt's aim for the étoiles is "to map out some path between needing the success and mockery-making of the success." The exchange ties the pedagogy back to the dead Founder: Schtitt says the Founder "was a student of types of sight" — "not so much how one sees a thing, but this relation between oneself and what one sees" — grounding E.T.A.'s seeing-instead-of-being-seen ethic in James Incandenza's optics. deLint's parallel gloss is the taxonomy of the "complete game"/gestalt (Wayne pure force, Hal built "as much out of what's missing as what's there"). See the Schtitt timeline, the JOI timeline, the Hal timeline, John Wayne's timeline.