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"Airlifting the IM-99A missile, like marriage, demands a certain amount of "togetherness' between Air Force and contractor" (par. 1), so runs the opening of Thomas Pynchon's first published text, an article titled "Togetherness' which appeared in the December 1960 issue of the journal Aerospace Safety. This short piece foreshadows one of the lasting concerns in the narrative work of this postmodernist master: the problem of communal life. How, whether and why to live together: these were the questions that mattered then, right before the libertarian explosion of the 1960s, when an attempt to redefine authentic togetherness—Martin Luther King famously spoke of a "marvelous new militancy" sponsoring the "beautiful symphony of brotherhood"—was urged in all areas of civic and private existence; the questions that keep vexing us today, inhabitants of a global world one of whose most visible leaders once worked as "community organizer" in depressed urban areas of Chicago's South Side.¹ Pynchon recommended togetherness (team action, joint effort, error-proof communication) as a means to increase safety in a very restricted area of human experience. But the advice stretched to all potential areas of social life, as most successful inter-personal agreements are predicated, "like marriage," on "a certain amount of togetherness." It is unlikely that Pynchon's trope, the ironic yoking through simile of the public (commercial contract) and the private (marital contract), helped in any discernible way to increase aero-spatial safety but it certainly managed to determine his subsequent novels, often read as ironic fables of improbable togetherness.²

DOI: 10.1057/9781137282842_1

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