The Flaws of the Creature: A Critique on Walker Percy

In his essay, “The Loss of the Creature,” Walker Percy claims that there are two types of “students:” “privileged” and “unprivileged knowers.” However, Percy labels his readers by what he feels is appropriate. According to David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky in the introduction to Ways of Reading, it is up to us, the readers, to determine what Percy might mean when he uses key terms and phrases in his essay. Bartholomae and Petrosky believe that “The meaning is forged from reading the essay, to be sure, but it is determined by your account of what Percy might mean when he talks about ‘symbolic packages’ or a ‘loss of sovereignty’ (8).” Yet Percy only believes in his ideas because of his elitist point of view and feels as though he is the “privileged knower” who knows how to correctly experience life. I mostly disagree with what Percy says in his essay because he makes several valid arguments, but ultimately contradicts and shoots his own ideas down. I believe that I am an “unprivileged” knower, yet I still have the ability to see things for what they truly are (or as Percy would say, I have not lost my “sovereignty”). My argument is that sovereignty is possible and that it does not require an “expert” like Walker Percy to guide an “unprivileged knower.” And I am confident that we, the readers, believe that he is unable to speak for all of us. Moreover, Bartholomae and Petrosky offer readers a way to read Percy, which will allow their own interpretation to be correct and “not be exactly what Percy said” (8). We should all have our own “experiential, emotional sovereignty” to determine what an authentic experience truly is.

What do such terms as “sovereignty,” “packaging,” “privileged,” and “dialectic” mean to one who has never read “The Loss of the Creature” by Walker Percy? What do they mean to one who has? What do they mean to Percy? Different answers are very likely to be given to these similar questions. So we are faced with a problem: who is correct? Who defines these terms for us? Bartholomae and Petrosky argue that it is up to the reader to determine “what Percy might mean when he talks about ‘symbolic packaging’ or a ‘loss of sovereignty’ (phrases Percy uses as key terms in the essay)” (8). Isn’t this the most logical answer? All humans have different points of view and ways of looking at certain things. I choose to believe what I want from Percy’s argument. For example, I am intrigued about his idea of “privileged” and “unprivileged knowers” but I feel that it is neither a valid nor reasonable idea. It seems as though Percy is implying that he is an “expert” or privileged “knower” while also implying that we are the “students” or unprivileged “knower.” Supposedly, Percy is not convinced that those who might be the unprivileged knowers learn best from such experts. So is Percy saying that he himself is not in a position of to teach and share knowledge? I feel as though this is a flaw in Percy’s essay because it does not strengthen his argument against “students” having a sovereign experience. This is one of the several weak-points in his essay.

Another weak-point derives from Percy’s idea of rating the authenticity of an experience by giving it a value P. He then states, “it would be nearer the truth to say that if the place is seen by a million sightseers, a single sightseer does not receive value P but a millionth part of value P” (Percy 469). This idea is another problematic point in his argument because Percy is unable to feel what one feels. If we were to measure the emotions felt when one takes in the sight of something such as Ground Zero, it is absolutely impossible to say that he has less “emotional sovereignty” than the people before him. If President Bush were the first person to look at the abyss of sorrow and lament left in the Earth after the 9/11 attacks, it cannot possibly mean that he received the full value P and it certainly does not mean that the families and the friends of the victims received a lesser value of the same experience. Percy’s idea of measuring an experience this way is absurd and invalid because he cannot possibly tell one of these “knowers” that his or her experience was less “sovereign” than the next one’s.

In my own experiences, I have been an “unprivileged knower,” but also a “privileged” knower. After my sophomore year of high school, in which I won an award for excellence in Spanish and tutored several peers in the same subject, I went on a weeklong trip to Argentina with my mother. I usually practice speaking Spanish with my mother, who is fluent after living in Buenos Aires for five years. Prior to landing in the beautiful South American country, I felt as if I were an “expert” as Percy would say. However, I soon realized that I did not