The Loss of the Creature - Essay Example

Anthology of Walter Percy’s Bartholomae and Petrosky (2004) include Walter Percy’s essay in their anthology for writers because it makes several interesting points for those who are using the book to learn how to write and present their ideas. There are several main points made in the essay and it is easy to agree with most of them since the issues described in the essay can be experienced and have been experienced by many learners. To better understand these issues and to know why the issues are valid problems, it would be ideal if we examine them individually. The first and primary issue presented by Percy is the loss of reality which comes from experiencing something through second hand sources rather than experiencing something for the first time. Percy gives the example of the discovery of the Grand Canyon which was first experienced from a western viewpoint through the eyes of García López de Cárdenas. He experienced the Grand Canyon without any comparative basis and did not have a clue about its size or grandeur therefore it made a significant impact on him. On the other hand, a visitor to the Grand Canyon today would be fed with information about the Grand Canyon including audiovisual information about the Grand Canyon which would set up certain expectations for the visitor. The visitor would therefore judge his experience of the visit with regard to the expectations which were created before the visit and to the extent that those expectations were met or not. As pointed out by Percy, in a similar manner, education and the reality of the educational system create expectations for us with regard to certain topics or certain subjects that we study. Even before learning about poets such as Shakespeare or Wordsworth, the culture that surrounds us as well the popular media sets up certain expectations and ideas about those writers. I believe that more individuals may be familiar with stories of Shakespeare which have been lampooned by The Simpsons rather than the actual stories themselves. When they read the plays they would be entering a different world from what they thought they would be coming into and it is likely that their expectations would be quite different from someone who reads Shakespeare for the first time without have any expectations of the writer. It is a foregone conclusion that it would be very difficult to find such an individual since Shakespeare is considered to be the greatest playwright in the English language and anyone who is familiar with English will know something about him. Many of the phrases we use today have come from him and it is as unlikely to find a person who knows English but knows nothing of Shakespeare as it is to find a person living in America who does not know what the Grand Canyon is. Even the name itself gives a clue about the geographical entity because clearly it is a canyon and as the name implies, it is grand. In a similar way, education creates expectations for individuals and when knowledge is passed on to the individual, the position of those expectations being met or not will affect how the knowledge is absorbed. In some ways, this will have a negative influence on the person seeking knowledge and the process of education could be hampered. It is easy to agree with these positions since individual experience shows how these expectations can hurt or help a person. For example, students are told about college and they certainly form certain expectations about what college life is going to be like. Once they arrive in college, some of their expectations would be met while others would be shattered. A student might say, “They told me it would be like this” or s/her might say, “I never knew it could be like this” and these words would simply ratify what Percy had said about human expectations regarding knowledge. There is no easy way of getting out of this situation since the approaches used for learning in our present system of education create expectations by default. However, in some cases we can experience something for the first time by taking a unique perspective on things and understanding them from a different viewpoint. Genuinely new experiences are limited and a person would have to go beyond the beaten track to experience something which is completely new and has little basis in the familiar and known. For example, the incidence of Baldwin going to a Swiss village is important and unique since “no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before (Baldwin, 1955, Pg. 1)”. The event of him being the first meant that the villagers were able to experience a fresh viewpoint of looking at people. In this example, Baldwin wanted not be seen as “an exotic rarity (Baldwin, 1955, Pg. 1)”, and wished that people around him could see him as he is. However, as discussed by other writers such as Younge (2005), people will continue to live with stereotypes of race and continue to associate certain behaviors with individuals. The situation today “condemns black American men not to end their lives hanging from a tree, but to spend it rotting in jail (Younge, 2005, Pg. 1)”. On a more positive note, the reason why something is considered to be genuinely creative and new is often due to the positive viewpoint taken about it. Even when it comes to advertising, a new method of looking at the same object can show hidden advantages in buying one product over the other (Galician, 2004). This allows individuals to experience the object in a different light and associate more than simple utility to something which is being sold to them. It helps them associate an image which provides them a lot more value for the same item. Apple computer exploited this to a large extent and Scott (1991) explains the persuasive power of their famous 1984 commercial as well as the artistic merits of the ad by taking a literary approach to the ad. The commercial itself can be described as a young woman being chased by storm trooper like soldiers as she rushes past shaved workers wearing grey overalls. She comes to a massive screen where a big brother like figure is seen and she hurls a hammer into the screen which causes a huge blast. A calm and smooth male voice then announces that 1984 will not be like 1984 because of the Macintosh. This advertisement broke every advertising convention known in 1984 since it carried a minimal corporate identity, no message about the technical abilities of the computer, no direct benefits to the individual, not even the price point of the item. As it was known in 1984, this could not even be considered as advertising. However, it let people experience the object in a new light and that experience certainly worked because when the Macintosh computer became available three days after the airing of the ad, more than two hundred thousand people lined up across the country to buy one (Scott, 1991). In conclusion, it is easy to say that a genuinely new experience, even if it is somewhat connected to the familiar and to the known will have a positive effect if the creative approach to the topic remains grounded in reality. This can be true for all sorts of communications ranging from television advertising to literature since it is the experience itself that counts rather than the relations which connect the experience to reality. Works Cited Baldwin, 1955, ‘Stranger in the Village’, [Online] Available at: http://www.uwm.edu/~gjay/Whiteness/stranger.htm Galician, M. 2004, Handbook of Product Placement in the Mass Media, Best Business Books. Percy, W. ‘The Loss of the Creature’ in Bartholomae, D. and Petrosky, A. 2004, Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers, Bedford. Scott, L. 1991, ‘For the Rest of Us: A Reader-Oriented Interpretation of Apple's “1984” Commercial’, Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 25, no. 1, pp 67-81. Younge, G. 2007, ‘Apart from the noose, this is an everyday story of modern America’, [Online] Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,2170644,00.html Word Count: 1,353 Read More