GRGR(3) talking dog 44.20

[Keith Woodward]

At 09:25 AM 6/4/99 -0700, David wrote:

>rj will not doubt provide a thorough answer, but I think Keith is not
>arguing for the indeterminacy of the text, but rather for his "Readers'
>Traps" theory, where all narration must be seen through a particular
>character's consciousness, and thus "evidence" of the "supernaturalness" (or
>conditionedness, or...) of Slothrop's abilities re. the rockets can all be
>discounted as the fantasy of a particular character.  This effectively
>removes all "reality" from the surreality.

I don't think that this is an instance of a reader trap.  A reader trap does
not require that all narrative be relegated to a character's consciousness
(if it did, it would include texts that weren't reader traps [most of
_Ulysses_ would have to be seen as such, for example, but I don't think it
is] and texts that did have reader traps would have to fall outside of the
categorization [the reader trap re Slothrop, for example, doesn't depend on
Pointsman's narrative consciousness].  Rather, the text does look
indeterminate from a naratological standpoint because, as Doug and I were
discussing, the narrative might be read from a third-person objective POV or
it might be read from Pointsman's POV.  David's problem with reader traps
is, I think, that it removes the "sur" from "surreality" and not vice versa
(as he says above).  I think, for some, the theory threatens to remove the
apparent magicality from the text (or to discredit it) by discounting
Pointsman's theory re Slothrop.  But that's not what I'm trying to do here.  

Rather, it's not problematic to read the dog as thinking x, but bits of the
language regarding his thought also appear to use a language to describe it
that Pointsman would also use.  It seems to me that it could go either way,
thus it's indeterminate.  To argue for a strict surrealism in the text is
not necessarily to argue for indeterminacy (because then we can
determinately say about the text that it is indeterminate).  

keith w