MMV: Conrad and Hemingway

[jbor]

Intertextual elements

The primary literary allusions in the story are to Conrad's _Heart of
Darkness_ and, I suspect, to Hemingway's _The Sun Also Rises_ (or _Fiesta_).
Pynchon, while showing off somewhat his own critical insights into these two
novels, also appropriates imagery from both texts into his story in a
thoroughgoing, though less-than-straightforward, way.

Ten seconds after Lupescu leaves the apartment he pops his head back in the
door again and announces "Mistah Kurtz -- he dead". Just before, in response
to Siegel's bewildered inquiry -- "Wait a minute ... where the hell are you
going?" -- Lupescu had announced that he was going to "[t]he outside ... out
of the jungle". Later, during her "confession", Lucy tells Siegel that
Lupescu was troubled and that he had been "going native". Pynchon telegraphs
the analogy he is going to make later on -- Siegel replies:

      "That's a strange way to put it," Siegel said. After all,
    going native in Washington, D.C? In more exotic places,
    certainly, he had seen that. He remembered ...
    
(And note how the narrative shifts into and out of Siegel's thought
processes and point of view here, as it does also in the story's final
sentences. The joke in the Peter Arno cartoon which Siegel recalls right
after this is echoed ironically in the story of Irving Loon, and it's
another take on or reversal of the "going native"/_Heart of Darkness_ theme,
as also is the recount of Grossman's gradual Bostonisation.)

Towards the end of the story Siegel is reminded of Lupescu's cryptic quips
and Lucy's comment and he consciously reflects on the current situation
being similar to the one described in Conrad's novel. Lupescu (and so,
Siegel too) is identified with Kurtz, "possessed by the heart of a
darkness". The "jungle" here is the apartment-confessional -- an "interior"
with the same sort of psychological baggage attached to it as Conrad's
"interior", but a million miles distant from it nevertheless -- and the
pseudo-bohemians are the "gatherers" who plunder from Lupescu/Kurtz's
leasehold to build their solipsistic "ivory towers". It's a bit naff but
it's about the best passage in the story.

It's a long time since I read the Hemingway novel but the stories of the
romantic entanglements and boorish shenanigans which Siegel hears in 'MMV'
read to me like a parody of Hemingway's characters and plot, and the
bullfighting imagery and tensions between Jewish and Catholic, and American
and European sensibilities are other aspects which seem as though they might
have been lifted from _The Sun Also Rises_. Worth a look, anyway.

In neither case is it a straight appropriation of the original texts:
Pynchon is interpreting the two novels in and through his own text,
parodically for the most part, and in doing so he is dialoguing with and
critiquing Conrad's and Hemingway's worldviews.

By contrast to these intertextual connections, Grossman taunting Siegel by
calling him "Stephen" and Lupescu's "Mon semblable, mon frere" citation from
_The Waste Land_ are little more than one-line throwaways. They seem
intended to characterise Grossman on the one hand, and to consolidate the
supposedly uncanny mirroring of Lupescu in Siegel on the other.

best