Peter M. Jasinski and Dr. John S. Tanner, English

Though he became one of England’s greatest writers, Joseph Conrad was a native of Poland. His father, Apollo Korzeniowski, was a writer, Polish patriot, and martyr for his country. For this grant, I proposed to research the plausibility of Apollo as a prototype for one of Conrad’s most complex characters: Kurtz of Heart of Darkness. Prior to receiving the ORCA grant, I had written a paper with this thesis and submitted it to Conradiana, a leading peer-reviewed Conrad journal. In response, I received a letter from the editor and comments from a reviewer, both confirming that my argument was original, but lacked in-depth engagement with Conrad criticism. I was encouraged to situate my argument in the criticism and resubmit the paper. I proposed to perform an extensive survey of the criticism and biographical sources, with the intent to resubmit the paper to Conradiana.

I divided the research into three categories: primary and biographical sources, Conrad’s fiction, and criticism. The following is a description of some of the most relevant sources.

Among the important primary sources were the multi-volume Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad and Polish critic Zdzislaw Najder’s Conrad’s Polish Background: Letters to and from Polish Friends.1 Also, Najder’s definitive biography, Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle, contained invaluable excerpts from primary sources concerning Conrad’s family and early life in Poland, as well as his correspondence during the writing of Heart of Darkness. He made important revisions to Gustav Morf and Czeslaw Milosz, whose works on Apollo I had used earlier. I also read sections in Polish of the two-volume Memoirs by Tadeusz Bobrowski, Conrad’s maternal uncle who took care of him in Poland after his parents died. Memoirs has been used by countless critics, including Morf and Milosz, as a basis for understanding Apollo.2

Part of my proposal was to read more of the Conrad canon, but this proved to be more distracting than helpful. I read Lord Jim because it is also narrated by Marlow; in Lord Jim Marlow is in the position of father figure to Jim and in Heart of Darkness that of the son to Kurtz. While this and other findings had interesting implications, they pulled my thesis in too many directions. Also, almost all of Conrad’s fiction deals with surrogate parents, a phenomenon well documented by researchers, so I found looking to Conrad’s other works less productive.

Another work, however, that deserves attention here is “Outpost of Progress,” a short story that also derives from Conrad’s Congo journey. The story shares with Heart of Darkness the paradoxical theme of Western civilization and exploitation in Africa, depicting a trader’s descent into brutishness. But Kayerts, the protagonist, lacks the psychological complexity of Heart of Darkness. He is short and fat and slovenly, bearing little psychological or biographical similarity to Kurtz, much less to Apollo. The phonetic linkage between the names and the fact that Kayerts is a widower with a daughter back in Europe superficially relate to my thesis, but the glaring differences between Conrad’s treatment of Kayerts and Kurtz preclude serious comparison.

While I limited my reading of Conrad’s other works, I did read Conrad criticism extensively. There is too much to comment on here, but I will briefly discuss my research approach, then a few works. I began my research by searching databases of books and periodicals in English literature for pertinent titles. Using these sources I became familiar with the general body of criticism related to my topic. I discovered a subcategory of criticism that deals with the prototypes for Conrad’s characters, with an unusual amount for Kurtz prototypes. I used the references and bibliographies of these first sources to branch out to other sources.

Early in my research I came across a psychoanalytic work by Catharine Rising titled Darkness at Heart: Fathers and Sons in Conrad. This catalogued the many father–son relationships found in Conrad, but our library’s edition of the book is missing pages 43–50, where I was to find much later in my research references to three other psychoanalytic works that unfortunately articulated my thesis. In a lengthy footnote, Crews suggests the biographical similarities between Apollo and Kurtz, and Dobrinsky builds a textured reading of Heart of Darkness based on Crews’s hypothesis.3 In spite of my efforts to use my research for a different thesis, these and other critics exhausted the topic. (I considered using Kurtz as a representation of Conrad’s Polishness, in a variation on the doppelganger theme, but these ideas are already articulated in a dissertation by Dorothy Strohecker, Conrad’s Secret Sharer as the Pole Within: The Polish Father as Doppelganger, and Daniel Schwarz, Conrad’s Quarrel with Politics in Nostromo.)

Many of the critics that consider the relationship of Conrad and his father do not demonstrate awareness of other research on the topic. It appears that critics studying the possible prototypes for Conrad’s characters are ignorant of the psychoanalytic criticism on the same topic. This may account for the confirmation from both the editor of Conradiana and the reviewer that my thesis was original.4

This research experience has given me an invaluable introduction to Conrad scholarship and a feel for the daunting task of preparing to publish a significant contribution to criticism. Because the thesis turned out to be duplicated, I did not resubmit the paper. However, the research will certainly be useful in future projects. I maintain the goal to publish in Conradiana.5

References

1. Due to limited space, I will give only author and title in references.
2. In my opinion, this has caused an unbalanced view of Apollo, as Bobrowski was extremely critical of Apollo due to his opposite philosophical and political persuasions. Najder corrects this by looking beyond Bobrowski’s Memoirs and delving into other sources.
3. Frederick Crews, Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Critical Method and Joseph Dobrinsky, The Artist in Conrad’s Fiction: A Psychocritical Study. The other work is Richard Sterba, “Remarks on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 13 (1981).
4. A 1980 dissertation by George Bertram Alexander, In Search of the Real Mr. Kurtz: A Study of Multiple Sources in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, discusses at length numerous Kurtz prototypes asserted by critics, but fails to mention the 1975 Crews footnote.
5. I would like to thank John S. Tanner for his support, encouragement, and inspiration throughout this project and the Office of Research and Creative Activities for its sponsorship.