GRGR Section 1 - Vagitus

[Cometman]

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)