Jenny Sullivan

            On Saturday morning after yoga, I immediately got started on getting my blogs out of the way so I could focus as early as possible on the final stretch of my essay. I didn’t quite get my Thirty Years Ago Journal posted because my computer froze while editing the photo. So, I shut down, did a shortened song practice, and then came back to it. I had everything posted by around 9:00. 

            I weighed 87.6 kilos before breakfast. 

            I started working on my essay but my brain was tired and so I took an early siesta at 10:00. When I got up at 11:30 I went into the final stretch. 

            I weighed 86.6 kilos before lunch. 

            I was pretty much finished my essay by 13:30. The paper was supposed to be between 500 and 750 words, and I had exactly 750. I spent the next few hours figuring out my citations. I made a few adjustments to the text as I was inserting those. I uploaded my essay at around 16:30. Here it is: 

                                       Monstrous Faces for Facing the Monstrous: 

            The Use of the Word “Monstrous” in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Simon Gikandi’s “Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference” and in David Richards’s “Modernism and the Primitive” 

                                I can’t forget but I don’t remember what – Leonard Cohen 

           In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the word “monstrous” appears to be used by Marlow in the conventional negative sense. William Rubin however, in comparing Kurtz’s experience of Africa in Conrad’s novel with the effect of African masks in Pablo Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, reads this sense of the monstrous as transcendent (Gikandi 468). I will show that Rubin’s assessment is correct and that Conrad’s apparently maleficent use of “monstrous” is a mask meant to suggest through its concealment a necessary ancestral memory. I will look at how the word “monstrous” is variously defined, then examine how it is used by Rubin as quoted by Simon Gikandi and how it is implied by Pablo Picasso as quoted by David Rich-ards. I will contrast these with Conrad’s ostensibly adverse treatment of the word but will argue that since it is spoken by an unreliable narrator, his adjectival masks must be removed to reveal the essential meaning. This will show the correspondence between these apparently conflicting uses of “monstrous.” 

            The monstrous can be excessive physically and figuratively; deviate from convention; be depraved, atrocious, wrong, and embody horror (“Monstrous” - OED). These are mostly negative definitions, but in his examination of Pablo Picasso’s engagement with African masks in his painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Rubin uses “monstrous” benevolently when he writes about the masks being tools for dramatizing an interplay between sexuality and death and conveying “something that transcends our … civilized experience … something ominous and monstrous such as Joseph Conrad’s character Kurtz discovered in the heart of darkness (Gikandi 468).” 

            But Rubin’s assessment of Kurtz’s experience is not that of Conrad’s Marlow. For him, the monstrousness that Kurtz encountered was far from transcendent. It was the awakening of an undesirable ancestral memory that compelled him to let go of civilized restraint with devastating result: “… the heavy … spell of the wilderness … seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts … the memory of … monstrous passions … had … beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations.” Kurtz had slipped free of civilization and could not be urged with Christian morals because he now lived in a waking dream. “... his soul … had looked within itself and … gone mad ...” because he had “no restraint, no faith, and no fear … (Conrad 65-66)” 

            But Marlow is an unreliable narrator with no clear idea of what Kurtz experienced in Africa. When he says Kurtz awakened a memory of “brutal instincts” and “monstrous passions (Conrad 65),” he implies this awakening resulted in indulgence in primitive decadence that slipped him from the bounds of learned self-control. However, if one removes Marlow’s biased morally judgmental adjectives one can unmask the monstrous to reveal the same transcendence that Rubin is suggesting:                  “… the … spell of the wilderness … seemed to draw him … by the awakening of forgotten instincts and … passions ... that had beguiled his … soul beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations … (Conrad 65)” This also brings Kurtz’s experience in the heart of darkness closer to that which Picasso claims to have drawn from the African masks when he says: “For me the masks were not just sculptures. They were magical objects . . . intercessors . . . against everything – against unknown, threatening spirits . . . They were weapons – to keep people from being ruled by spirits, to help free themselves. If we give a form to these spirits, we become free (Richards 67).” 

            But Picasso’s assessments of the effect of the African masks also do not appear to equate with Rubin’s use of the word “monstrous.” For Picasso the masks are weapons used to frighten away monstrous forces such as “threatening spirits,” while Rubin sees the masks themselves as benevolently monstrous. 

            However, the two uses of “monstrous” by Conrad and Rubin, and its third implication by Picasso are all in essential agreement. Art is about “the awakening of forgotten instincts … and passions … beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations (Conrad 65).” The African masks as art then are constructed to appear monstrous and employed in the way that small fires are used to hold back jungle infernos, to terrify the monstrous horror of nature that haunts us. The monstrous is evoked from our own so-called primitive past when civilization had not yet become monstrously mechanical. A time in our un-consciously remembered history when there was no high, thick wall between Nature and human consciousness. Only the thin armour of imagination that we now call art. 

            Works Cited 

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness: A Norton Critical Edition. 4th Edition, edited by Paul D.                              Armstrong, PDF, Norton, 2006, pp. 65-66. PDF. 

Gikandi, Simon. “Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference.” Modernism/Modernity, PDF,                        Johns  Hopkins University Press, Volume 10, Number 3, September 2003, p. 468. 

“Monstrous.” Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press, https://www-oed-                                          com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/view/Entry/121759?redirectedFrom=Monstrous , 2022.            Richards, David. “At Other Times: Modernism and the “Primitive,”” PDF, Downloaded from                              https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Toronto, 31 January, 2022. p. 67

            I decided to go for a late bike ride and then to go to the supermarket. I thought that riding would be easier than yesterday since it looked like there’d been considerable melting. But O’Hara was just as bad as the day before and Maple Grove was worse. I guess it’s because the snow was soft yesterday and easier to get through while today it had frozen and had also gotten spread by the ploughs more over the road. The Bloor bike lane wasn’t bad, and neither was Ossington until I got to College. The enormous pothole had traffic cones around it. On Queen Street, I was blinded by the light of the setting sun and almost had to guess where I was going. 

            At No Frills I bought a bag of red grapes and three or four bags of black grapes. I got an apple pie, three bags of milk, two containers of regular skyr, and one of strawberry, I got a jar of pasta sauce and a jug of orange juice. 

            I had the green light to go east on King to Dunn but I figured a small street like Dunn would be difficult in this weather and so I took Jameson to Queen and headed home. 

            I weighed 87.2 kilos at 18:30. 

            I grilled two pork burgers in the oven and had one between two toasted halves of a slice of Bavarian sandwich bread topped with ketchup, mustard, two slices of pickle, and piri-piri sauce. I ate it with a beer while watching an episode of Adam-12. 

            In this story, the background situation is that Reed has volunteered to book the entertainment for a police event but he’s coming up dry. They have to serve a subpoena to a famous folk singer and Malloy suggests he ask him to do the show. Reed is nervous about the idea. They get a tip from Teejay who rats to them about a drug dealer named Jimmy Eisley and he tells them the secret knock to get in. Meanwhile, they see a woman and a little girl have been sitting at the same bus stop for an hour. When they stop, she tries to run but not very hard. Her name is Ellen Harris and she arrived from New Mexico yesterday looking for her husband who left two weeks before to find work as a sheet metal worker. Neither she nor her daughter has eaten in a day. She hands Malloy a box of cookies that she stole but didn’t open. They take her to the Salvation Army to stay until her husband is found. It seems odd that he wouldn’t have written to her. 

            That night they go to Jimmy Eisley’s house. They find drugs on the first guy coming out and then raid the place after backup arrives. They catch another guy with drugs, but they can’t find Jimmy’s stash until Malloy digs it out of the shower drain. The funny thing is that all the drug users and dealers look like middle-aged accountants. Another thing is that after fifteen episodes of this series not a single non-white criminal has appeared. It’s as if all the good crime and drug-using jobs have been taken by white people. The producers seem to be going out of their way to not portray black people in a negative light. One of the cops in another car is black and besides him, there have been three stories in which black people figure prominently. In each case, they are all law-abiding citizens. 

            Ellen Harris was played by Jenny Sullivan, who played reporter Kristine Walsh in “V” and “V the Final Battle.” She played Barbara in the sitcom “Me and Maxx”. She has a long association with the Rubicon Theatre in Ventura California where she has acted and served as the artistic director, directing several plays featuring well-known movie stars. She wrote the play “Journal for John” based on several unsent letters that her father, actor Barry Sullivan wrote for her developmentally challenged brother. She directed John Ritter in the play and co-starred with him. She also directed a long-running LA production of The Vagina Monologues. She was married for ten years to Jim Messina, a former member of The Buffalo Springfield, co-founder of Poco, and former musical partner of Kenny Loggins.