GRGR(11): Webley Silvernail/a little on narration

[Paul Mackin]

Mike Crowley writes:

>One of my favorite scenes of the novel is Webley Silvernail's song and
>dance number with the lab rats & mice, especially his remarks to the
>rodents afterwards: "I would set you free, if I knew how.  But it isn't
>free out here[...]" ( 230).  But how does one make sense of it?  I guess
>it's easy enough to naturalize the whole thing--the jailhouse slang of
>229 is Silvernail, movie watcher, imagining the kind of dialogue the
>rodents would speak; thinking of an overhead German camera angle leads
>him to imagine the similar perspective in Busby Berkeley-type musicals
>and how he and the mice would look to an angel-eye lab worker. 
>Naturalize it further?  The rodents "come out of their enclosures, in
>fact, grown to Webley Silvernail-size (though none of the lab people seem
>to be noticing) to dance him down the long aisles[...]"  Later, "They
<have had their moment of freedom."  Does Silvernail let some of the
<rodents out of their cages, get down on the floor and play with them for
<a few minutes, improvising a little song about their condition (any ideas
>on wht the "popular beat and melody" behind those lyrics are?)?  Or is
>the whole thing just in Silvernail's imagination?  Or not even in his
>imagination, but only the narrator's?


Isn't what's happening  that halfway through the proceedings focus shifts
from the actual rodents and lab animals to the human lab workers
(behaviorists) conjured up in Webley's imaginatiion as themselves having
their responses observed and rewarded by some higher observer so that it's
not the rodents per se who come out of their cages and carry on
terpsichorially (in Web's imagination) but other orders of the human
species placed down the hierachical scale.  That they have  "grown to
Webley Silvernail-size" is no doubt a camera illusion. It is only in
comparison with the rats and mice with whom they have been identified that
this is so. In the end it's about setting the preterite free which of
course can't be done--there is no way to do it. Maybe that's what you go
on to say about the narrator. 


>What is "actually" going on in the novel's fictional world in this
>scene (and a ton of others) is also related, for me, to questions of the
>narrator and the narrator's control of the narrative.  Molly Hite (in her

		P.