GRGR Section 1 - Vagitus

[David Casseres]

Oooh! Me! Me!  Call on me!

Yes, and that newborn cry is one of the avatars of what I referred to
earlier as the god-cry.  It is "I want!"  It is "I need!" It is "It is
somewhere and I can't reach it!"  It is "Whoever has the power, help
me out down here!"  And yeah, thanks for pointing out what I missed,
it is "Ugh! I'm trying to shit and it's hard!"

On 10/30/05, Cometman <cometman_98 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Just to briefly consider the opening passage "in the broadest way
> immarginable" (as Joyce described Finnegan's life), and maybe to elicit
> some scornful spit-takes, what about this: the screaming across the sky
> is a newborn's vagitus (just learned that word from "A Word a Day": #
> Subject: A.Word.A.Day--vagitus
> # vagitus (vuh-JI-tuhs) noun
> # [From Latin vagire (to wail).]
> # A newborn child's cry is called vagitus.)
>
> The evacuation is birth, going from the comfortable insularity of the
> womb into the vast and dangerous world, the War stands for all the
> world's hazards, and the process of Life is the Counterforce.
>
> Then by the same crackbrained extension, Slothrop is the individual
> consciousness finding out more about the world.  Specifically, the
> young American consciousness after WWII setting the pat answers and
> archetypes of its formative years against the data of experience and
> the strivings of conscience.  Many of us growing up in the 50s and 60s
> may have read stuff like "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" by James Doolittle
> approvingly, without a thought about the moral implications of
> fire-bombing a civilian population (I know I did)
>
> Slothrop's conditioned excitement with Imipolex G is not of itself evil
> - I suggest it's the plastic that was abused, in making it part of an
> instrument of death.
> Pirate's use of his semen to decode a message brought by the same
> death-dealing carrier shows the same direction of sexual life-force.
> But Pirate stays a functionary within the System, still working for
> Them though occasionally getting "small homeopathic doses of truth",
> while Slothrop (by virtue of being the main character, of course) digs
> much deeper, learns much more, and transcends the War.
>
> Of course (as Rain Man would say) the entity being born is really the
> book itself as experienced by Pynchon in his parthenogenesis of it, and
> also in the reader's consciousness.  Slothrop is the shadow of the book
> illuminated by the writer's and readers' thoughts.
>
> A further knotting-into: Pirate's consciousness like that of a new
> father in a waiting room is full of his own worries and duties.  The
> birth-wail of Slothrop is compelling and unique (there is nothing to
> compare it to) but Scene 1 is Pirate's dream after all. During the
> little caesura after the screaming, the new being is trundled away by
> nurses to emerge fully grown a few pages later.
>
> Textual evidence?  Nah! (we don't need no stinking textual evidence)
>