Summary Of The Message In The Bottle

Summary
[1] In the second chapter of his book, The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other,” Walker Percy argues that lack of independence as well as the presence of “symbolic complexes,” or interpretations of an experience in the eyes of the public, deprives an individual of a truly full or “sovereign” experience. He argues that educational experience becomes spoiled by two primary concepts: the “packaging” of information (delivering information in pre-organized, recurring way), and theory behind the studied subject (Percy 58).
Evidence
[2] The most interesting thing about Walker Percy’s reasoning is that he does not at all rely on scientific, historical and anecdotal evidentiary
support. Instead, he makes up his own hypothetical situations and then makes reasoning chains and draws conclusions on them. Since self-devised stories are the most questionable, let me explore exactly what evidence Percy provides to develop his line of argument to develop the aforementioned point.
[3] Percy begins with a hypothetical experience of a generic tourist visiting the Grand Canyon. Instead of experiencing a full, deep experience (seeing the Grand Canyon “for what it is” 47)), a tourist loses his sovereignty to a “symbolic complex”, which is pre-formed by “picture postcards, geography book, tourist folders, and the words Grand Canyon” (47). In other words, his/her satisfaction will depend exclusively on whether the experience conforms to the preconceived expectations of its beauty: if it matches the picture on the postcard, the experience is “good”; if it doesn’t, it’s “bad”. Percy argues that the only way to get back the sovereignty in this case is to avoid the “approved confrontation of the tour and Park Service” (48); or, in other words, “break the symbolic machinery by which experts present the experience to the consumer” (49). To bring the concept of loss of sovereignty into the context of the broader set of experiences, he uses another thought experiment. Even though a student in a lab is, theoretically, has perfect conditions for learning more about dogfish, has a hard time uncovering the package in which it is put. As Percy describes it, the dogfish suffers a double loss of value due to the symbolic complex (similar to the one formed for the Grand Canyon), and the theory behind the studied subject. When a student walks into the lab, he sees all the equipment necessary for dissection and a “specimen” of dogfish. As Percy argues, the concept of “specimen” greatly devalues each individual dogfish (59). He cites these two basic pieces of evidence in convey an idea that sovereignty, independence of experience, and achievement through struggle are essential to a full educational (as well as personal) experience.
Critical thinking
[4] In general, Walker Percy aptly develops relevant imagined examples.
For instance, the Grand Canyon example demonstrates really well what spoils the experience for tourists, as well as it provides a well-rounded explanation of why that happens. I find this thought experiment not only highly relevant to the discussion of the concept of sovereignty loss, but also very relatable as I had experienced the feeling of dissatisfaction with visiting particular sights because they did not match my pre-conceived notions of them (This happened to me when I visited the city of Milan, for example). However, what I find not a good logical chain in Percy’s argument is the way he tries to extrapolate the Grand Canyon example and apply the similar logic in the context of education. Percy’s logical flaw lies both in the way he builds a hypothetical situation and in the way he interprets it. First of all, Walker Percy makes it seem like boredom and unproductive learning is the only scenario in a typical lab. I can serve as counterexample to this claim: every time I come to a lab with the most typical equipment, a specimen of, say, human DNA, and a strong theoretical background knowledge of Genetics, I receive full excitement of discovery and learning about the way information about our bodies is stored and transferred. Thus, this piece of evidence is not entirely valid. However, should a dogfish argument be in full harmony with reality, the point that he takes out of it is a very debatable one. First of all, Percy, assuming that only a full educational experience can be “good”, proposes to alter the way students learn the subjects by trying to create in all students a sense of discovery. Application of this interpretation would not prove useful in the real world, as, for some students, getting only a superficial coverage of the topic would be the best. For instance, a college student majoring in, say, economics, who has to take geology as requirement, would be better off if he
could get only a superficial idea of geological concepts.
[5] Thus, taking the Grand Canyon example into context of education is a weak point of Percy’s argumentation line, which makes his point very debatable and inconclusive.