In a recent article, Tim Yu gives a good overview of Wallace's
"deeply ambivalent" relationship to professionalization and the pro-fessionalization of creative writing!' As Yu notes, Wallace's writing repeatedly features top professionals and professional-like figures who specialize in incredibly narrow domains, whose specialization is both key to their wild vocational successes and the very things that degrade their full humanities. The path to virtuoso mastery, it turns out, is also the royal road away from personhood. The troubled figure of the professional is best exemplified, for Yu's Wallace, by the professional athlete. Wallace wrote extensively about the amazing capacities which also are, at the same time, the amazing incapacities of the figure of the tennis pro. Recall how Wallace argues that Tracy Austin is great not despite the vapidity and seeming banal flatness of her memoir, but because of it. The thing that allows the great ge-nius-level tennis pro to be great and genius-level, as Wallace puts it in the case of Austin, is being able to think "nothing at all?"& So one extreme solution to what Jon Baskin calls the "Cartesian trap" of pathological self-consciousness is evacuating yourself of any sense of self in the first place.

Another illuminating metaphor for the simultaneous capacity and incapacity of the professional athlete is Orin Incandenza's "oversized left arm and big left leg." At one point in Infinite Jest, Wallace's narrator describes Orin's "tennis arm" as "roughly churn-sized," and the other arm as having "dimensions" that are merely "human." Again, specialization and professionalization stand in stark opposition to the "human." In this particular case, the distortion of the human happens not because of any lack of consciousness Orin is nothing if not self-aware but as a byproduct of doing one thing over and over again, of radically leaning into some capacities, and of systematically ignoring others.