Illuminations

The Secret World of Henry Darger

The number of pages in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy: up to 2,500. The number of pages in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series: up to 4,176. The number of pages in Henry Darger’s unpublished manuscript, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave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: 15,145. That number doesn’t include the hundreds of illustrations meant to accompany the text. 15,145 single-spaced pages, discovered posthumously and written in between shifts as a dishwasher and janitor, about the adventures of seven prepubescent sisters fighting a war against evil, sadistic adults.

Darger’s private world has become the art world’s epitome of “outsider art,” characterized by works made by naïve or untrained artists who have had little contact with mainstream art institutions, and who are often mentally ill. While there is controversy over whether or not Darger himself suffered from mental illness, his work reflects a vast inner fantasy completely removed from the world as we know it, and the violence and sexual deviation in some of his illustrations suggest that Darger may have channeled some personal turmoil into his art. Alongside brilliant, watercolor scenes of pastoral bliss where young girls and friendly beasts play happily are bloody scenes of torture and war where young girls are impaled, crucified, and left bleeding on the ground (we’re talking entrails and empty eye sockets here).

The Vivian Sisters and their fellow females are often portrayed with male sexual organs, a phenomenon Darger never explains in the accompanying text. Darger used cartoon girls from magazine and newspapers, like the Coppertone girl and Little Annie Rooney as templates for his illustrations, but The Story of the Vivian Girls is also populated by fantastical creatures of Darger’s own creation, such as the “Cat Headed Blengin” and the “Eagle Headed Blengin,” dragon-like amalgams of the worldly creatures for which they are named and Darger’s own imagination.

Praised for his use of color and for his surreal and vivid landscapes, Darger is certainly the epitome of the unfettered artist: he worked in complete privacy, telling no one of the world he was creating, had no formal training, and created without thought to critical reactions. Did he ever plan to make his work public? It’s hard to know for sure, but one gets the feeling that Darger was creating this world for himself and only himself. He placed himself as a character in his manuscript, and while an autobiography was discovered along with The Story of the Vivian Girls, there is no evidence that he ever wanted anyone to know what he was up to alone in his apartment. Which makes me wonder: do we have any right to be examining, studying, and psychoanalyzing his work? What would Darger say if we asked him why his beloved Vivian Girls have penises? Darger lived an isolated life, holding menial jobs and generally avoiding contact with the outside world; now, he’s an art world celebrity. He has no known living relatives, no one who might be offended or embarrassed by the spreading of work that was probably never meant to be spread, but does that make it alright? Surely, artists can learn something from studying Darger’s skill as a painter and the depth of his fantasy, but aren’t we still participating in voyeurism? Does the right to privacy stop at death? Keeping in mind that we are getting it out of context, the following passage from The Story of the Vivian Girls might make a few observers uneasy:

“All the Gold in the Gold mines
All the Silver in the world,
Nay, all the world,
Cannot buy these pictures from me,
Vengeance, thee {terrible} vengeance
On those who steals or destroys them.”






---Margaret Sarsfield.

Image Sources: http://imgs.abduzeedo.com/files/nathan/henrydarger/darger12.jpg
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