Disputing the Canon Essay -- The Loss of the Creature Walker Percy Ess

Disputing the Canon I was in the best of settings when I realized that Shakespeare was indeed great. My freshman year in high school, I had English class with an esteemed teacher, Mr. Broza—hailed as the Paul D. Schreiber High School Shakespeare aficionado, founder of Schreiber’s Annual Shakespeare Day, and, perhaps most heart-warming of all, a self-proclaimed Shakespeare lover whose posters of The Bard could be found as wallpaper in his small office. How lucky I thought I was. Indeed, if I wanted to appreciate Hamlet, I was in the right hands. But how misled I actually was—at least, in Walker Percy’s eyes. In his essay, â€Å"The Loss of the Creature,† Percy recalls a scene from The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter: †¦the girl hides in the bushes to hear the Capehart in the big house play Beethoven. Perhaps she was the lucky one after all. Think of the unhappy souls inside, who see the record, worry about the scratches, and most of all worry about whether they are getting it, whether they are bona fide music lovers. What is the best way to hear Beethoven: sitting in a proper silence around the Capehart or eavesdropping from an azalea bush? (521) Percy here contrasts two different approaches to viewing art—the girl who informally and spontaneously encounters the work of art, out of context, as opposed to the â€Å"unhappy souls inside† who formally prepare themselves for a kind of pre-packaged listening experience. Percy wonders which is better—a question meant for the reader’s pondering. But his essay offers his answer: we can only truly see or hear a piece of art by â€Å"the decay of those facilities which were designed to help the sightseer† (514). Perhaps Percy is right—it might have been better if my experience with Hamlet had been an accide... ...uch great heights to which I may leap, so many undiscovered territories awaiting my arrival. Works Cited Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon. Harcourt, 1994. â€Å"Borges, Jorge Luis; Joyce, James; Shakespeare, William.† Columbia Encyclopedia. 6th ed. 2000. Gould, Stephen Jay. â€Å"Women’s Brains.† Encounters: Essays for Exploration and Inquiry. 2nd ed. Ed. Pat C. Hoy II and Robert DiYanni. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000. 305-10. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Ed. Raymond Guess and Ronald Speirs. Trans. Ronald Speirs. New York: Cambridge UP, 1999. Percy, Walker. â€Å"The Loss of the Creature.† Ways of Reading. Ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. Boston:Bedford, 1996. Winterson, Jeanette. â€Å"The Semiotics of Sex.† Encounters: Essays for Exploration and Inquiry. 2nd ed. Ed. Pat C. Hoy II and Robert DiYanni. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000. 642-51.