Objects, Lost and Found: Henry Darger and the Art of Salvage

A review of Michael Moon, Darger’s Resources (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). Cited in the text as dr.

Among the many genres we might assign to the oeuvre of prolific “outsider” artist Henry Darger, the category of “found object” comes most readily to mind. For one thing, Darger’s 15,145-page In the Realms of the Unreal, an illustrated fantasy of literally epic proportions (the unabridged title tells it all: 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), is a work of bricolage. In the Realms is composed of salvaged materials, from the countless images Darger cribbed from children’s books, comics, newspapers, and magazines right down to the re-purposed telephone books in which he compiled his work. To boot, the work itself was effectively salvaged. In his last days, Darger moved out of his Chicago apartment and into a Catholic mission, leaving In the Realms behind for his landlords, Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner, to dispose of. The Lerners decided to save and publicize what to them was an obviously remarkable piece of work.

Despite the salvational operations performed both within and on Darger’s work, the story of the artist’s life and work is haunted by a number of irrevocable losses. In the Realms an army of little girl-warriors, the story’s protagonists, are repeatedly massacred by their adult enemies, usually by strangulation or dismemberment. For all its verdant landscapes populated by whimsical life-forms, In the Realms of the Unreal often manifests itself as, to use Darger’s own words, a world of “absolute and unredeemed desolation.”¹ The theology of Christian salvation, we learn, does not extend beyond Earth to Abbieannia, the planet on which In the Realms occurs. If Darger’s life was itself subject to any form of redemption, it certainly did not come in earthly form. After losing his mother at three and then his father at eight, the adolescent Darger was institutionalized in an asylum for the “feeble-minded” in Lincoln, Illinois. Upon his release at the age of sixteen, Darger found a job as a janitor at a Catholic hospital, where he would work for the remainder of his life. A recluse, he reportedly maintained a friendship only with William Shloeder, a man with whom he once attempted to adopt a child. Unsurprisingly, the attempt failed. So did his efforts to recuperate a lost newspaper clipping about a murdered child on whom he based the character of Annie Aronburg—a loss that triggered an emotional and artistic breakdown. Such is Darger’s story: one of as many lost objects as found ones.

Given the elements of salvage permeating Darger’s life and work, it should probably come as no surprise that Michael Moon’s new study, Darger’s Resources, presents itself as an act of recuperation. Moon conceives of his chief task as the recovery of our understanding of Darger from the haze of critical distortions that surround it. One such distortion is the myth that accompanies Darger’s designation as the archetypal “outsider” artist: the Romantic idea of an isolated and tormented eccentric who avoids contact with the real world in favor of retreating to a world of creative fantasy. This myth—even if it comes with the good intention of promoting Darger’s work as the product of a misunderstood genius—downplays Darger’s engagement with a discourse that extended beyond the confines and particularities of his idiosyncratic lifestyle. As Moon relates,

we can see Darger as, in his way, a heroic and inspired cultural worker participating (as many of his contemporaries were) in an emerging proletarian public sphere that flourished for a few decades early in the twentieth century. Come the end of the Great Depression and the Second World War, parts of that sphere vanished as if overnight and other parts of it went underground—but its traces are still numerous and obvious to those interested in seeing them, and still alluring to...