The Art of the Acronym in Thomas Pynchon

[Dave Monroe]

Putz, Manfred. "Thc Art of the Acronym in Thomas Pynchon."
   Studies in the Novel 23. 3 (Fall 1991): 371-382.

In Pynchon's fiction the most accessible level in the uses of acronyms
is constituted by their calculated overuse which, in turn, establishes
a parodistic dimension. Thus Gravity's Rainbow, which plays during the
Second World War, becomes a virtual display ground for the immense
flood of initial abbreviations then in circulation among the insiders
of military organizations and intelligence agencies of all kinds.
There is hardly a page in the novel without reference to topical
abbreviations, which eventually develop into a veritable pandemonium
of acronymania that has its distinctly parodistic sides.

[...]

http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/literary-criticism/9610231657/art-acronym-thomas-pynchon

Pynchon indicates noncommunication among individuals by creating
characters who speak in clichés, verbal shorthand, and private sign
language.  In the novel V, a group of New Yorkers called The Whole
Sick Crew uses an abbreviated language in which blocks of information
can be conveyed by one word or even by a wave of the hand. The group
judges each member’s “statements” to be smart or stupid by the way the
speaker arranges and rearranges the finite number of prepackaged
blocks of words and signs.   Pynchon shows that The Crew will
eventually run out of combinations of blocks, and communication among
them will be dead.  When the zero point of noncommunication is
reached, The Crew--and, symbolically, the world--will have arrived at
the terminal point of the vertices of the V.

 In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon presents a different kind of shorthand,
the jargon of the military and of technology, but the downward spiral
of the V again holds true.  Pynchon loads the novel with acronyms and
alphabet abbreviations (NAAFI, S.O.E., TDY, P.W.E., BBC, SHAEF, OSS,
OWI), some familiar but many obscure, to the point that the reader
often cannot follow what Pynchon is talking about.  The confusion is
deliberate.  Pynchon seems to want the reader to experience confusion
in trying to make sense of his representation of modern
(non)communication in order to remind us of the confusion we face
every day in our own lives.  Paradoxically, in this Orwellian world,
the amount of significant communication conveyed in these shorthand
words is less than with ordinary words because, as words made up of
other words that are already symbols, initialisms and acronyms are one
step further removed than common words from the “reality” they are
designed to represent.

http://allegoriaparanoia.com/pynchon/early_stories/intro.html

Herbert Marcuse. One-Dimensional Man

4: The Closing of the Universe of Discourse

[...]

Note on abridgment. NATO, SEATO, UN, AFL-CIO, AEC, but also USSR, DDR,
etc. Most of these abbreviations are perfectly reasonable and
justified by the length of the unabbreviated designata. However, one
might venture to see in same of them a “cunning of Reason” – the
abbreviation may help to repress undesired questions. NATO does not
suggest what North Atlantic Treaty Organization says, namely, a treaty
among the nations on the North-Atlantic – in which case one might ask
questions about the membership of Greece and Turkey. USSR abbreviates
Socialism and Soviet; DDR: democratic. UN dispenses with undue
emphasis on “united;” SEATO with those Southeast-Asian countries which
do not belong to it. AFL-CIO entombs the radical political differences
which once separated the two organizations, and AEC is just one
administrative agency among many others. The abbreviations denote that
and only that which is institutionalized in such a war that the
transcending connotation is cut off. The meaning is fixed, doctored,
loaded. Once it has become an official vocable, constantly repeated in
general usage, “sanctioned” by the intellectuals, it has lost all
cognitive value and serves merely for recognition of an unquestionable
fact.

This style is of an overwhelming concreteness. The “thing identified
with its function” is more real than the thing distinguished from its
function, and the linguistic expression of this identification (in the
functional noun, and in the many forms of syntactical abridgment)
creates a basic vocabulary and syntax which stand in the way of
differentiation, separation, and distinction. This language, which
constantly imposes images, militates against the development and
expression of concepts. In its immediacy and directness, it impedes
conceptual thinking; thus, it impedes thinking. For the concept does
not identify the thing and its function. Such identification may well
be the legitimate and perhaps even the only meaning of the operational
and technological concept, but operational and technological
definitions are specific usages of concepts for specific purposes.
Moreover, they dissolve concepts in operations and exclude the
conceptual intent which is opposed to such dissolution. Prior to its
operational usage, the concept denies the identification of the thing
with its function; it distinguishes that which the thing is from the
contingent functions of the thing in the established reality.

[...]

I have alluded to the philosophy of grammar in order to illuminate the
extent to which the linguistic abridgments indicate an abridgment of
thought which they in turn fortify and promote....


[...]

The suppression of this dimension in the societal universe of
operational rationality is a suppression of history, and this is not
an academic but a political affair. It is suppression of the society's
own past – and of its future, inasmuch as this future invokes the
qualitative change, the negation of the present. A universe of
discourse in which the categories of freedom have become
interchangeable and even identical with their opposites is not only
practicing Orwellian or Aesopian language but is repulsing and
forgetting the historical reality – the horror of fascism; the idea of
socialism; the preconditions of democracy; the content of freedom. If
a bureaucratic dictatorship rules and defines communist society, if
fascist regimes are functioning as partners of the Free World, if the
welfare program of enlightened capitalism is successfully defeated by
labeling it “socialism,” if the foundations of democracy are
harmoniously abrogated in democracy, then the old historical concepts
are invalidated by up-to-date operational redefinitions. The
re-definitions are falsifications which, imposed by the powers that be
and the powers of fact, serve to transform falsehood into truth.

The functional language is a radically anti-historical language:
operational rationality has little room and little use for historical
reason.[18]

Is this fight against history part of the fight against a dimension of
the mind in which centrifugal faculties and forces might develop –
faculties and forces that might hinder the total coordination of the
individual with the society? Remembrance of the Fast may give rise to
dangerous insights, and the established society seems to be
apprehensive of the subversive contents of memory. Remembrance is a
mode of dissociation from the given facts, a mode of “mediation” which
breaks, for short moments, the omnipresent power of the given facts.
Memory recalls the terror and the hope that passed. Both come to life
again, but whereas in reality, the former recurs in ever new forms,
the latter remains hope. And in the personal events which reappear in
the individual memory, the fears and aspirations of mankind assert
themselves – the universal in the particular. It is history which
memory preserves....

[...]

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/one-dimensional-man/ch04.htm