The grammars of the system: Thomas Pynchon at Boeing

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe present essay sketches, on the basis of new archival research, the general contours of Pynchon’s contributions to the Bomarc Service News, asking, especially, how his work for that publication might have intersected with his literary work in the sixties. Looking at Pynchon’s prose quantitatively helps us to see the author’s grammatical tendencies, an economy of prose, so to speak, that allowed him to function within the Boeing-USAF communications system while maintaining an original style that his contemporaries at Boeing remember well. Pynchon’s work for Boeing evidences in greater frequency than his peers’ several grammatical features we might consider to be hallmarks of prose fiction – most notably the use of personal pronouns and active verbs. One of Pynchon’s contributions to the Bomarc Service News, in other words, was a narrative voice that inculcated confidence and engagement in readers amidst the complex and exacting work of maintaining a continental defence system. This synthesis of personnel and technological apparatuses was key to Boeing’s innovation in large-scale systems integration, but it also factored importantly Pynchon’s narrative development, and in closing I look briefly at how the grammatical economies of V. (1963) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) might have been influenced by Pynchon’s work for Boeing.