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Percy Response Question #2

Due Thursday 9/18.

Percy suggests several ways to "recover" (512) authenticity (leaving the beaten path, surviving a disaster, filming a movie, etc.).

Concentrate on one of these methods, and then find a specific passage in the essay where Percy seems to be staging this particular way of recovery in his essay, as an experience for his reader.

In your demonstration of how a reader undergoes the "recovery" experience, pay close attention to how details are organized in the passage.

A Model Answer

Walker Percy’s descriptions in "The Loss of the Creature" can be remarkably thin. For example, the young man in France described on page 517 is little more than a stick figure. How can the reader take this tourist as an example of anything, even a negative example? The best way to make sense of Percy’s portrait is to read it as an example of the "dialectical movement" (513) of recovery.

Percy’s description of the young man is terse and trite. He’s given no name, and his entire experience of France is compressed into one sentence: "He too has a fair time of it, sees the sights, enjoys the food" (517). The man is generic and faceless, in contrast to the specifics that surround him (students arguing after seeing a play, "Madame la concierge," a mop). If "the young man is actually barred from a direct encounter with anything French," Percy’s reader is barred from any real encounter with this young man.

As inadequate as it seems, this description is actually a good example of the dialectical movement that Percy claims "brings one back to the beaten track but at a level above it" (513). In presenting this scenario in terms that are flat and almost provocatively commonplace, Percy is inviting his readers to measure it against their own experience and question its relevance. Surely we’re more complex than this empty cartoon. In this way, Percy’s "exercise in familiarity" (513) subtly invites us to measure ourselves against the most beaten of paths.