An Inauthentic Existence

In "The Loss of the Creature" Percy bemoans the loss of the observers sovereignty. He provides his reader with the example of a couple traveling through Mexico in search of that authentic experience. Believing they have found that experience in a small mountain village, they seek validation from a friend of theirs--an ethnologist. Percy writes, "What has taken place is a radical loss of sovereignty over that which is a much theirs as it is the ethnologist's" (54). Percy believes that the couple's feelings of "uneasiness" come from a perceived inability to judge authoritatively the authenticity of their experience (54). But Percy is wrong. The couple's uneasiness comes from an subconscious awareness that authenticity does not exist.
Let's consider the couple's experience. They show up in a small Mexican town on a day when a religious ceremony is being held. They spend their visit "observing the Indians and being themselves observed" (52). In this act of observance is the death of authenticity. The Indians will behave differently for the benefit of outsiders; the outsiders will be on their "best behavior" as not to offend the natives. Native and visitor are now performing to the expectations of their observers. Our American travelers seek validation of their "authentic" experience because deep-down they know what they have experienced is not authentic in the true sense of the word but an authentic performance.
The same can be said for the Shakespeare student. The difficulty is not in "salvaging the creature itself from the educational package" but in recognizing that the creature is an unknown value P--one that can never be known "authentically" outside the mind of its creator (57). The job of student and educator, then, is to recognize the unknowability of authenticity, to know that there is no right or wrong interpretation, that each reproduction, each re-reading is a new form of performance and to learn to respect the inauthenticity of that experience.