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

[Mike Crowley]

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? 
    Maybe these questions aren't all that important, but I would like to know what's going on.  And, Silvernail is one of the good guys--how does he evolve from this view of the world?
    Of course, the use of film also helps to explain the scene; Silvernail is the audiovisual man, thinks in terms of German camera angles, sees himself as a guest star--this leads me to think he's just imagining the scene, that the rodents don't actually get "their moment of freedom."  Although, I guess the point of Silvernail's speech is that nobody ever gets a moment of freedom, in the cage or out.

    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 Ideas of Order) describes the narrator in terms of Hugh Kenner's "Uncle Charles Principle": the narrator takes on the verbal ticks and habits of the character whose point of view is being adopted, kind of an idiosyncratic use of third person limited narration.  If this is the case, then the narrator is kind of surrendering control here to Silvernail's mindset.  Of course, I find it just as easy to read this section as all from the narrator, making Silvernail and the rodents mere puppets made to sing and dance for his and our entertainment--the slang from the rodent prisoners isn't Silvernail's speculation, but either is their thoughts or just the narrator's imaginary dialogue; the song is the narrator's, not Silvernail's; the other people in the lab don't notice anything because nothing unusual is going on.  In the first case, the narrator appears very democratic, uncontrolling; in the second, he's a bit more fascist.

    Is the "i'n't it now"--which pretty clearly comes from Silvernail's point of view--the same voice as the one doing the jailhouse conversation of the mice just before it?

Is there some kind of deep Disney/Fantasia parody that I'm not getting going on as the critters "eventually all form into the shape of a single giant mouse"?

Any comments on Webley Silvernail's name?  It's pretty cool, for one; maybe a bit hippie-ish, for two.


[next one's kind of a spoiler if anyone is concerned]




How does Silvernail come to be part of the Counterforce?





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Michael J. Crowley
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10 Park Hall
crowley at arches.uga.edu
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