“About Henry Darger”, 2011-05-26 (; backlinks; similar):
[On why Henry Darger, an elderly, solitary dishwasher, wrote and illustrated a 15,000+ page unpublished fantasy novel.]
I’m here today to tell you about a book I read recently, namely Henry Darger: In The Realms Of The Unreal, by John Mac2002. It’s a study of Henry Darger, a man I instantly became obsessed with upon encountering his Wikipedia entry sometime last fall.
Here’s a quick sketch of who Darger was, which will hopefully give you an idea of why I find him so fascinating. He was a reclusive man who worked various dishwashing jobs for most of his life. He only had one real friend in the course of his life, and although he occasionally interacted with the other residents of his apartment complex, they just saw him as a peculiar, taciturn eccentric. But when Darger was on his deathbed, his landlord Nathan Lerner began to clean out his room and discovered something incredible. Unknown to everyone around him, Darger had been writing and painting. Writing and painting a lot.
Among the objects Lerner discovered were 15 massive volumes comprising one continuous fictional work entitled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. In total, the typed, single-spaced text was 15,145 pages long—one of the longest fictional works ever produced by a human being, if not the longest. (Whether it is the longest or not depends on what counts as a single work; there are some long works of serial pulp fiction that, in total, are longer, but that’s only if you add up the length of hundreds of installments.) This was not Darger’s only writing project.
There was also a sort of sequel, Crazy House, which ran to around 10,000 pages, and the 5,000-page autobiography The History of My Life, as well as numerous journals and other miscellany. And then there were the paintings, hundreds of huge, odd-looking, compositions depicting battles, scenes of torture, and heroic adventures. (You can see some of Darger’s art thanks to Google Image Search here).
It turned out that the paintings were illustrations for Darger’s 15,145-page masterwork, called In The Realms Of The Unreal for short. In The Realms Of The Unreal is, in some very broad sense, a fantasy novel. It takes place on a planet far larger than Earth, which Earth is said to orbit as a moon. This planet is mostly composed of Catholic nations, of which the most important to the plot are Angelinia, Calverinia and Abbieannia. (Protestants do not appear to exist in this world, though—confusingly enough—one of the Catholic nations is called Protestantia.) The story is about a war between the Catholic nations and the atheist nation Glandelinia, which is inhabited by evil, sadistic people who practice institutionalized child slavery. Shortly before the time period described in the text, some of the child slaves mounted a rebellion, led by a heroic 10-year-old named Annie Aronburg. The Glandelineans quashed the rebellion and killed Aronburg, but this started a chain of events that led to a Glandelinean invasion of Calverinia and eventually a full-scale war between the Catholic nations and Glandelinia.
In The Realms Of The Unreal tells the story of this war, an incredibly long succession of huge battles, espionage missions, scenes of torture in the Glandelinean slave camps, and so on. The protagonists, curiously enough, are a set of 7 prepubescent sisters—the titular Vivian girls—who follow the Christian armies, spy on the Glandelineans, and narrowly escape mortal danger on innumerable occasions. The battles are mostly realistic in nature—though they involve millions of combatants—but the world is an enchanted one, filled with chimeric beasts called “Blengiglomenean creatures” (or “Blengins”, for short) which assist and protect the Vivian girls.
…The problem comes when MacGregor tries to interpret the text psychologically, which happens often. MacGregor is a Freudian analyst—he studied with Anna Freud, in fact—and he is mainly interested in Darger as a psychological subject. Now, this is not the time or place to hash out whether Freudian psychology does or doesn’t succeed, generally speaking, at explaining the human mind. But even if I withhold judgment on MacGregor’s Freudian premises, his account of Darger’s psychology is just really, really bad and frustrating.
…So, without further ado, here are some interesting things about Henry Darger:
In the Realms, there are numerous characters named after Darger…These Dargers do not all seem to be distinct in the author’s mind, and it’s often confusing which one is being referred to in any given instance.
Darger’s paintings are filled with prepubescent girls—usually the Vivian girls, but there are also sometimes anonymous child slaves, etc. They are usually depicted naked, even when there is no good reason for this…The little girls usually, but not always, have penises…
Darger collected lots of random junk in the course of his menial job. He was particularly fond of photographs of children…
The inspiration for writing the Realms was the loss of a particular newspaper clipping, a photo of Elsie Paroubek, a little girl who had been murdered, and whose murder was all over the Chicago papers for a short time.
Darger’s journals express no particular interest in this picture until he discovered that he had lost it. After that, he spent much of the rest of his life in a profound state of anger at God, who he believed had taken the picture from him. He saw the fictional war between Christians and Glandelineans as a way of punishing God for taking the picture by causing harm to millions of (fictional?) Christians.
…Darger’s 5,000-page work The History Of My Life is putatively an autobiography. However, that word does not accurately describe the vast majority of its contents. The first several hundred pages of the work are indeed an account of Darger’s early life.
However, after describing a scene in which his younger self is entranced by the sight of a powerful storm, he apparently gets distracted by the storm and spends the remaining 4000-some pages of the text describing the wake of destruction caused by a fictional twister called “Sweetie Pie”, with no further mention of his own life whatsoever.
…Near the end of his life, Darger apparently spent a lot of time playing with string. In his journal he recounts collecting string and coiling and uncoiling it, and huge amounts of string were found in his room after his death.
…Any account of Darger’s psychology is going to have to explain this weirdness. This is what, I contend, John MacGregor’s account fails to do. Fails pretty massively, in fact—massively enough that Darger seems less, rather than more, comprehensible after you read MacGregor try to “explain” him…But MacGregor also tells us that the battles sometimes lasted for hundreds of pages, and that they include vast amounts of bureaucratic detail (about particular regiments, commanders, tactical maneuvers, etc.—lots and lots of proper names), but that none of this detail is in any way self-consistent (so that it is impossible, for instance, to form a mental picture of the shape of the battlefield that does not distort over time). And that Darger is obsessed with what some might consider the more “boring” details of war—he spends huge amounts of time describing the way the supply lines work, for instance. It’s still conceivable that this sort of ridiculously long bureaucratic catalogue could be an expression of pent-up rage, but if so, it’s a very odd one, and naturally raises the question of just what sort of guy would deal with his frustrations by going home from his job every night and writing about the tedious technical details of a fictional war. But that’s exactly the question MacGregor does not want to answer…If writing this stuff was somehow pornographic for Darger, then how is it that so much of the text is composed of moralizing about the glorious Christians and the wicked Glandelineans, describing military maneuvers in mind-numbing detail, and so on, rather than talking about anything that smacks in any way of overt sexuality? Remember that this is a 15,000-page text in which no one ever gets it on; if we’re looking at a sexual fantasy, it must be the coyest sexual fantasy ever produced by the human race.
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