La fabrique d’un fleuve

The article is twofold in its approach. The first section purports to circumvent the generally all too global readings of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, by approaching it via the medium of fiction. Four tales inspired by the novella are briefly examined, in quest of a never-to-be found « agencement », linking a river, a big man and a missing people. The second section investigates how a river is fabricated in the workshop of the writer, whose knowhow is explicitly compared to that of a mechanic, of a welder of rivets. Along the way, successive modalities of the forging of a river are presented, from various types of embedding (narrative, biographical, fictional) to the « agencement » (Deleuze’s concept) of the living, to the philology of the rivet and to abstract painting, which stages the finally thwarted attempt to destroy a river by the means of writing.