Chekhov’s Mistess

Walker Percy on Reading and Authenticity

From Walker Percy’s essay “The Loss of Creature” in The Message in the Bottle (note that some of this might not be clear without reading the entire essay):

…The reader may also be content to judge life by whether it has or has not been formulated by those who know and write about life. A young man goes to France. he too has a fair time of it, sees the sights, enjoys the food. On his last day, in fact as he sites in a restaurant in Le Havre waiting for his boat, something happens. A group of French Students in the restaurant get into an impassioned argument over a recent play. A riot takes place. Madame la concierge joins in, swinging her mop at the rioters. Our young American is transported. This is “it.” And he had almost left France without seeing “it”!




But the young man’s delight is ambiguous. On the one hand, it is a pleasure for him to encounter the same Gallic temperament he had heard about from Puccini and Rolland. But on the ohter hand, the source of his pleasure testifies to a certain alienation. For the young man is actually barred from a direct encounter with anything French excepting only that which has been set forth, authenticated by Puccini and Rolland – those who know. If he had encountered the restaurant scene without reading Hemingway, without knowing that the performance was so typically, charmingly French, he would not have been delighted. He would only have been anxious at seeing things get so out of hand. The source of his delight is the sanction of those who know.




This loss of sovereignty is not a marginal process, as might appear from my example of estranged sightseers. It is a generalized surrender of the horizon to those experts within whose competence a particular segment of the horizon is thought to lie. Kwakiutls are surrendered to Franze Boas; decaying Southern mansions are surrendered to Faulkner and Tennessee Williams. So that, although it is by no means the intention of the expert to expropriate sovereignty – in fact he would not even know what sovereignty meant in this context – the danger of theory and consumption is a seduction and deprivation of the consumer. (emphasis mine)

Well I can personally relate to this, seeing the world through the eyes of a literary great and being all the more satisfied knowing that I had it as part of my consciousness before having seen it in person. For instance, after having read Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, I visited Belgium. Its otherwise flat, dull green hills took on the life of the Napoleonic battles fought there, as experienced for me through the exuberant eyes of Fabrizio Del Dongo.

Quixote has Amadis of Gaul and Orlando with which to view the world and without that lens he has nothing. His past world was not good enough (I say world instead of life because I feel like Cervantes/Quixote is more concerned with the state of the world than just the banality of his own life), so Quixote “surrenders” his experience to those who lived it with all the romance and truth he believes the current world is lacking.

In his quest to return to chivalric times he sees very little as it is, and anything put into context of that world he is quick to believe, even though he is typically being deceived. The question of whether or not the chivalric knights Quixote read are imaginary or real is brought up often, and Quixote insists they were real even though he knows he read fictional accounts. He has no choice but to believe they are real, like the dictator who thrives on paranoia.

What he really does is turn Percy’s idea on its head – he is not merely an observer, but a participant, as if remaking the histories he loves, and now his history has been written and like so much in Don Quixote, our authenticity of experience (as such) is derived from Don Quixote’s derived experience, which is not only influenced by his beloved books of chivalry but by the influence of Sancho and all the other actors who play along with the Ingenious Gentleman.

I think when we start talking about authenticity, we are getting into what is now thought of as the Borgesian spirit of the text (meaning: damn this is confusing). Percy’s essay at its heart asks where experience lies in the same way Borges often asks where memory lies. It seems to me that Cervantes understood this so well that he played with it like a cat batting about catnip, and Quixote is dizzy with it, as are we if we’re lucky.

comments

Anne, thanks for your (email) comment! Interestingly, given what you said about the “blue-books,” my first exposure to Percy was through a college reader. I’ve always loved that essay because it is a topic that I’ve long thought about (in less concrete terms, perhaps, before reading the essay) - as one who enjoys reading, writing, travel and photography (all things that prompt the thought of how we experience the world around us) and a self-described Romantic, authenticity to me is often on the forefront of my mind, even as I just walk around our beloved city. Unfortunately, it seems the more you think about it, the further you get from it!

    – Bud Parr (06/20  at  11:13 PM)

What does it mean? Gallic temperament: Puccini and Rollan?

    – Erica (09/28  at  12:26 AM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: June 19, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

Tags: Cervantes, Don Quixote

• Comments:2
• Links to this Post: Technorati

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