Posted: December 17th, 2014

"The loss of the creature" by Percy Walker

“The loss of the creature” by Percy Walker

This is an essay about “The loss of the creature” by Percy Walker.

“The Loss of the Creature” is an exploration of the way the more or less objective reality of the individual is obscured in and ultimately lost to systems of education

and classification. Percy begins by discussing the Grand Canyon—he says that, whereas García López de Cárdenas, who discovered the canyon, was amazed and awed by it,

the modern-day sightseer can see it only through the lens of “the symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer’s mind” (47). Because of this, the

sightseer does not appreciate the Grand Canyon on its own merits; he appreciates it based on how well or poorly it conforms to his preexisting image of the Grand

Canyon, formed by the mythology surrounding it. What is more, instead of approaching the site directly, he approaches it by taking photographs, which, Percy says, is

not approaching it at all. By these two processes—judging the site on postcards and taking his own pictures of it instead of confronting it himself—the tourist

subjugates the present to the past and to the future, respectively.

Percy suggests several ways of getting around this situation, almost all of them involving bypassing the structure of organized approaches—one could go off the beaten

path, for example, or be removed from the presence of other tourists by a national disaster. This bypassing, however, can lead to other problems: Namely, the methods

used are not necessarily authentic; “some stratagems obviously serve other purposes than that of providing access to being” (51). Percy gives the example of a pair of

tourists who, disgusted with the proliferation of other tourists in the popular areas of Mexico, stumble into a tiny village where a festival is taking place. The

couple enjoys themselves and repeatedly tells themselves, “Now we are really living,” but Percy judges their experience inauthentic because they are constantly

concerned that things may not go perfectly. When they return home, they tell an ethnologist friend of theirs about the festival and how they wish he could have been

there. This, says Percy, is their real problem: “They wanted him, not to share their experience, but to certify their experience as genuine” (53).

The layman in modern society, then, surrenders his ownership to the specialist, whom he believes has authority over him in his field. This creates a caste system of

sorts between laymen and experts, but Percy says that the worst thing about this system is that the layman does not even realize what it is he has lost.

This is most evident in education. Percy alludes to a metaphor he had used in “The Delta Factor,” that of the literature student who cannot read a Shakespearean sonnet

that is easily read by a post apocalyptic survivor in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The literature student is blocked from the sonnet by the educational system

built around it, what Percy calls its “package.” Instead of transmitting the subject of education, education often transmits only itself, and the student does not view

the subject as open and delightful, nor does he view himself as sovereign. Percy offers two ways around this, both involving, as did his solution to the problem of the

Grand Canyon, an indirect approach. Either the student can suffer some sort of ordeal that opens the text to him in a new way; or else he can be apprenticed to a

teacher who takes a very unusual approach to the subject. He suggests that biology students be occasionally taught literature, and vice-versa.

The overall effect of this obscuration by structure is one of the basic conditions of modern society: The individual layman is reduced to being a consumer. The

individual thing becomes lost to the systems of classification and theory created for the consumer, and the individual man loses all sense of ownership. The solution

to this problem, according to Percy, is not to get rid of museums but for “the sightseer to be prepared to enter into a struggle to recover a sight from a museum”

(62).

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(Important thing about my essay)

1. It should focus on “interpretive problem” focusing on Percy’s language and how he “construct” his essay. (ex:he even contradicts himself by using some specific

words and phrases and the construction of his essay –> so it can be interpreted in a new way) This interpretive problem from text should be “very original” idea from

me (even though some people out there can have a similar view of his essay.

Example essay: One student from Columbia actually wrote a very similar idea as me..I just wanted to show you about the idea in general that I was thinking about when I

was writing my original essay and amazed how she wrote in a very fluent way (but please no plagiarism). This is a link for her essay in morningside review.

https://morningsidereview.org/essay/and-the-moral-of-the-story-is-the-hypothetical-in-the-loss-of-the-creature/

2. Sorry that my first point was long. Second important thing is that this essay should built on my very first draft (like I said it should be radically revised), it

should be corrected & rewrite based on my “professor’s comments”. So this would be a very tricky part since it should be radically revised but at the same time should

follow my instructor’s comment. (This professor is very picky and even though I am paying for this, I am expecting to get maybe around B+, original grade C+)

Percy is acting as a “expert” (contradicts himself through out his essay since he criticizes people following experts while losing their sovereignty), because he also

gives a lot of “preconceived notion” to readers..(any terms like this should be defined very clearly before discussing). But interestingly, the way he constructed his

essay makes people “struggle” (he uses this word at the end of the essay) while following all the scenes that he created throughout his essay. He made people “think,

struggle, and doubt” about his essay and then put this quote including the word “struggle” to make readers to arrive a moment of Epiphany. (At the moment I realized

that he kind of pushed people off the cliff making them struggle through the entire paper and saying that word to open a new window)

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