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Percy Response #1

....was due Tuesday 9/11.

- Question
- 3 negative examples & a model
- Class favorite

Question

Concentrate on section one of "The Loss of the Creature."

There are many specific portraits of travelers in this section (the explorer Cardenas, a sightseer with a camera, a family marooned during an outbreak of typhus, an American couple in Mexico, a young man in France, etc.).

All of these portraits are biased to some extent; which one of them seems to you the most questionable? Use details involved in the portrait you pick to expose Percy's assumptions.

What lesson do we as readers learn from Percy’s presentation of this portrait?

Cardenas paragraphs: 3 false starts & a model

False start 1. In "The Loss of the Creature", by Walker Percy, he talks about experiencing things. You have to get off the beaten path. Society stops people from seeing things for themselves. I think this is really true. I liked the part about Garcia Lopez de Cardenas. "One crosses miles of desert, breaks through the mesquite, and there it is at one’s feet."

False start 2. At the beginning of "The Loss of the Creature," Walker Percy starts by describing Garcia Lopez de Cardenas. He discovered the Grand Canyon after crossing miles of desert. It was beautiful to him because he was the first to see it. But now that the government has made it a national park, we can’t see it like this. Percy says that if seeing the Canyon had a value of "P" for Cardenas, then now we only get a millionth part of "P" today.

False start 3. Walker Percy is a racist. I couldn’t believe how he says that Indians don’t count as people, and how he just assumes that the Spanish guy had all these emotions. How does he know? He wasn’t there.


Model. Percy credits Garcia Lopez de Cardenas with "discover[ing]" (511) the Grand Canyon, laying eyes on it before anyone else. Percy assumes that only Cardenas is able to see the Grand Canyon "for what it is" (512); sightseers coming after him can never have this experience. But this assumption is shaky.

The picture of Cardenas at the Grand Canyon is sheer conjecture: no actual documents back up Percy’s claims. In fact, the sing-song description of Cardenas’s discovery ("…breaks through the mesquite, and there it is at one’s feet"(511)) highlights the artificiality of this fantasy. Percy’s pseudo-analytic labeling of Cardenas’s discovery as "a certain value P" (511) continues the charade. It’s curious that Percy uses "P" rather than a more mathematical "X" in this phrase—is it a coincidence that our author is stamping this description with his own initial?

These opening tricks should put Percy’s reader on guard. Percy is doing two things at once: he’s railing against "formulated" (512) experience, and also giving us a demonstration of how easy it is to fall into blindness thanks to preformulation. By coating Cardenas with fantasy, Percy loses sight of the actual explorer, ironically demonstrating the same failure to perceive that he denounces.

Actual response: class favorite

Examining "It"

Through the use of fictitious travelers, Percy would like us to believe, unfairly, that to truly see and experience a certain thing for what it really is, one has to be the lone, initial discoverer of it, or a rare individual that has recovered "sovereignty" in it. This bias is most unfair in Percy's anecdote of a lost midwestern couple who stumbles into a tiny Mexican village.

The discoveries of the author's Spanish explorer, Garcia Lopez de Cardenas, and the lost American couple, forced into the role of explorer, are comparable. Cardenas's canyon and the couples' village are both uncharted and unmapped. The canyon and the village are both "unspoiled" places. The fictional explorers both experience a high level of being - Cardenas is "amazed", the Americans are "entranced". Despite the similarities, Percy steals away the sovereignty of the American couple and assumes their level of experiences is less that of Cardenas's.

Percy writes that the discovery by the American couple is "a far cry indeed from an immediate encounter with being" and a "desperate impersonation" of such. Why? Percy explains that, despite the authenticity of the sight, the encounter is not authentic because the couple seeks to have their discovery "certified" by returning to the village with their ethnologist friend for his approval of their experience. Can we not assume that Cardenas may have returned to Spain with a twentieth century sightseers enthusiasm and implored the Queen to finance another expedition to the region and claim it for Spain, thus seeking the same certification as the American couple? Nonetheless, as readers we are, through Percy's biased, unfair and incomplete use of fantasy travelers, taught to examine more deeply what we may perceive as being "it" and if not "it", how we can reach that level of being as individuals.