Pataphysics on Grass and Clay

Hi all. It's Nate, your friendly neighborhood metaphysician. Here's a report from this summer in tennis, for those interested in that sort of thing.

Rafael Nadal is one of the twenty-first century’s great metaphysicians, though perhaps already one of its last. Out of nothing, more often than not, he marshals something. A shot no other player would dare reach for is plucked from just beyond the edge of the white-lined firmament, returned in excess of spin and speed. Winning for Nadal is in the guarantee that there will be more, a something where there should have been nothing.

To call him a “counterpuncher” is accurate, in a way, and yet does not do justice to the impossible vectors with which his carbon-fiber appendage can flick a ball from beyond the void into new and unlikely curvatures. He transfigures the little nothings of certain lost points into twisting continuities, which little by little amass, until an entire universe of sinuous contortion and impossibly paced spin has been recorded in strange numbers around him, revealing, more often than not, the pattern of victory.

As Nadal heals from the pain of stretching himself between being and nothingness, Nicholas Jarry of Chile emerged as the summer season’s pataphysician, though whether major or minor is yet undetermined. Whereas Nadal, along with Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, has spent the past fifteen or so years commanding submission to his play on a higher plane, Jarry has spent the summer making a joke of those who, out of priestly commitment to the powers of that godhead, attempt to imitate or channel their prowess.

Jarry bounds. He is just short of two meters (1.98 to be precise; 6 ft, 6 inches), one of the taller in the game. His shots are enormous, even on clay and grass, where the softer, more textured surface slows the ball and player movement down, somewhat, and brute force is supposed to give way to various forms of finesse. He is not mechanical, nor a “serve-bot,” as lumberingly tall, hard-serving players on the men’s tour are sometimes called. He is still an absurd, gangly mass, which seems to come to a blunt point to punch devastating angles and bursting, flat groundstrokes. He does so through a practiced stumbling into precise postures. At his best, he is nearly tripping over himself into the most incisive of shots.

Trodding around the grass and clay of Europe, he has made significant appearances in the finals of Geneva with a victory over former world number two, Alexander Zverev, as well as the round of sixteen at the French Open, losing only to one of the eventual finalists, Casper Ruud. His victory over Zverev offers a particularly instructive stylistic distinction. Whereas the Russian, recovering from a devastating injury at the 2022 French Open, moved delicately, gently, sidling up to each shot and then punishing it with a quick lashing, Jarry performed the very inverse. He looked awkward on the slippery dust of Geneva’s clay, yet never losing his balance, found alignment to each ball with the highest degree of precision. It seemed as though the ball played him, well. Nearly yogic, not in the sense of embodying a spiritual truth, but in the sense of its etymology of being “yoked” to the movement and energies of, in order to strike the correct posture. He seems to wait in a haunch, lumbering quickly but strangely. Yet at the moment of contact, the ball teaches his body how to align. For a perfect, immeasurable instant his mass is made supple in order to swing the enormous pendulum of his body with precise force, until tumbling over once again. How he stalks the ball is certainly a kind of measured, well-worn motion, but it is still ungainly, because he is rather waiting for the ball to strike him. This makes it nearly impossible to predict where his ball will go, which at pace, makes him an especially difficult opponent. One might be inclined to suggest his style of play is “emergent,” that is, actualizing a potentiality within the body that is the player, but it is rather one with the clinamen in the most pataphysical sense. He is the elegant swerve into equilibrium of dumb matter. To quote a more learned authority, “…the clinamen principiorum or ‘swerve’ of Lucretius is […] a philosophical theory central to the Epicurean system which Lucretius explains in De Rerum Natura as follows: Atoms fall headlong through space, carried on by their own weigh. At undetermined moments and in undetermined points of space, they manifest a minute quasi-deviation, only just sufficient for one to be able to speak of a modification of equilibrium. It is as a result of this ‘swerve’ or clinamen that so-called solid bodies are formed from the atoms of primordia.”[1]

No performance captured the effect of his pataphysics more than a recent win over then world number five, Stefanos Tsitsipas, in Halle—a grass-court tournament in central Germany and important lead-up to the year’s third major, Wimbledon. Tsitsipas has been a recent top ten stalwart, part of a new generation of players in the men’s field that has made minor inroads as we near the height of Novak Djokovic’s tour domination, which itself has followed Nadal’s, and Federer’s before him. He has not had a bad few months, though he could be said to be performing below expectation. While Tsitsipas has won no tournaments yet this year, he made it to the finals in the Australian Open and reasonably far in the French, as well as a few smaller clay tournaments, one of his stronger surfaces. A pataphysician, however, was perfectly poised to beat Tsitsipas, whose on-court life is full of unfulfillable, priestly fantasies.

In one sense, Tsitsipas performs a near flawless Freudian drama. Analysts professional and amateur have remarked that the resurgence of an erotics of the father on social media has left the Professor smiling, perhaps gravely, from the other side. However tennis fans who have seen the spectacle of Stefanos’s father, Apostolos, glowering in constant disapproval over his son’s play at every moment from the coach’s box, know this is the true contemporary Oedipal sitcom. Stefanos will never win a major tournament so long as he must first fulfil the impossible task of pleasing the Father (ironically not the “king,” but apostolos the “messenger” or literally, the apostle, though this is perhaps more fitting, given the drama of his semi-permissible coaching from the stands during the 2021-22 season). The potential dream confused with the impossible fantasy. This is a specific form of neurosis, which erupts on-court in a hobbling confluence of meltdowns, spectacularly shanked backhands, and inconveniently timed double-faults. For the pataphysician, however, the admixture of dream and fantasy is a place of great play. Ugly surrealism. Beauty not in the truth of victory, but in the expression of something proper to the strange qualities of the basest of matter.

Tsitsipas embodies another fantasy, which is perhaps worse, or more damning. Stefanos attempts, mightily, to re-present to us the fantasy of the regal, effortless Federer, and obliquely, of the gamely Nadal. The one-handed backhand, the Rolex ads, the long hair and the headband. He worships the empty signifiers of tennis’s worst impulses: nostalgia, quiet luxury, aristocratic repose. Or else, the impossibilities of wealth and class, and the notion they are inherently attendant to a mastery of the sport. To play tennis in pursuit of this posture is a picture-perfect example of what pataphysicians call “shit-digging.” Jarry knows this well. His victory over Tsitsipas in Halle was written as a “prose poem in the Lucretian name of Clinamen.” His awkwardly enunciated equilibria brought moments of great joy to me as a viewer. The swerve mocks such self-seriousness in tennis, as Carlos Alcaraz or Ons Jabeur’s drop-shots mock the monopoly of punishing groundstrokes, of raw power as domination. A now closing era, whose reigning champion in Djokovic is still winning unabated, is unfortunately what Tsitsipas is attempting to imitate, unable to dislodge himself from the idolatry of greatness or the false apostle in his own box.  

The finer mechanics of sport are difficult to comprehend. However the laughter of Jarry’s game is infectious, and so we find one way that a feat of play can be expressive even to us laypeople. It shapes an aesthetics located not in the truth of victory, the most ready sign of the good in athletic competition, but in the performance of one’s style of defying an impossibility, of which there are innumerable. While Nadal strode with great focus and seriousness into the abyss, from which nothing should return, Jarry wobbles into possibility, performing a kind of a quantum joke, which we might otherwise think to look for with an electron microscope.  

[1] Footnote 46 in the introduction of Exploits & Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician. Alfred Jarry, translated by Simon Watson Taylor, et al. Exact Change Press, 1996.