About Henry Darger
Hey guys. I'm here today to tell you about a book I read recently, namely Henry Darger: In The Realms Of The Unreal, by John MacGregor. 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 fifteen 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 5000-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 seven 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.
This stuff fascinates me, for reasons that I hope are obvious. It may or may not fascinate you. (If it doesn't, you probably won't enjoy the rest of this post.) After I discovered Darger on Wikipedia, my fascination led me to poke around online for more info, and it soon became evident that the one really serious academic book on Darger was John MacGregor's 700-page tome Henry Darger: In The Realms Of The Unreal. It took me a while, but I've finally gotten around to reading it -- or, most of it, anyway. (I turned it back to the college library because someone had put a hold on it, and it was around finals week, and I worried that they might need it for a final, or something.)
MacGregor's book is an extensive study of Darger and his work -- part biography, part literary analysis, but mostly just an account of what Darger wrote and painted, and what it says about his peculiar mind. On the one hand, it's great that something like this exists. There are other Darger books out there, but most of them are not very informative and focus too much on his paintings. (This is material for another rant entirely, by the way. Darger has become well-known after his death as, essentially, a modern artist. His paintings are sold for large sums at art auctions, presumably because they look "interesting" in a sort of modern art-ish way. Never mind that that unique, weird look was produced because he couldn't draw and was forced to rely on tracing photographs -- and that the paintings were not standalone "works" but illustrations to his novel, which gets weirdly little attention despite being a far more interesting achievement than the paintings.) John MacGregor is a good writer, and he's interested in Darger in an obsessive, detail-oriented way, which is great: he reports vast amounts of information about Darger's writing and quotes many scenes from the text.
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. And this account is all jumbled up with that juicy exposition I mentioned earlier. Darger's work is so long that MacGregor can't possibly substantiate the generalizations he makes: when he tells us that Darger usually does something, or never does something else, we just have to trust him. (MacGregor hasn't read all of the Realms -- in all likelihood, no one ever will -- but he says he's read a lot of it, and at least rested his eyes on every individual page.) But MacGregor's generalizations are often tinged by his (annoying, implausible) psychological thesis, so that it's hard to tell how reliable they are.
The rest of this post will consist mostly of me ranting about MacGregor, followed by a sketch of a theory that I think explains Darger better than MacGregor manages to. I don't really know why you'd be interested in reading such a thing, unless you, I dunno, want more evidence that I'm still alive or something. (Like most people, I post on Facebook a lot more than LJ these days.) But if a long rant about an obscure academic book sounds like your cup of tea, then come on in!
Now, before I start wailing on MacGregor, I want to mention some more gee-whiz facts about Darger. (I would have put this above the cut, but the pre-cut segment of this post was already getting long enough to be potentially annoying.) I'm just going to make a big list of really weird things about Darger and his work. Part of the reason I'm doing this is just to show that, however much I may bitch about it later on, the MacGregor book is really interesting. (If these Darger-facts whet your appetite, there are plenty more where they came from, in other words.) I have a more serious point, though, which is basically:
Henry Darger was ridiculously weird.
Now, this might seem obvious. Eccentric recluse, wrote longest book ever, blah blah blah. He's weird. Duh. What more needs to be said? But one of the things I learned when I read the MacGregor book is that Darger -- like the character Andrew Loeb in Cryptonomicon -- was fractally weird. No matter how close you look, he just keeps getting weirder and weirder. There are a few broad traits and tendencies that capture the overall gist of his weirdness -- for instance, he was (as you might imagine) obsessive as all hell, which explains the length of his written works and also a good deal of their oddly repetitive content. But the difference between Darger and you-and-me is not just "obsessiveness," or anything else. The more you examine his actions, the less explicable they seem. (It's sad and ironic that MacGregor is so successful at producing this impression of Darger, since it actually undermines MacGregor's own psychological thesis. But more on that later.) So, without further ado, here are some interesting things about Henry Darger:
Essentially, the problem is this. Before we can get an idea of how Darger's circumstances produced his actions, we need an understanding of how Darger's mind worked. That is, before we can start saying "situation X made Darger do Y" for particular Xs and Ys, we need some sense of how Darger's mind generally paired Ys to Xs. With most biographical subjects, this is a moot point, because the author and reader's common-sense assumptions about human psychology are usually sufficient to make the connection between X and Y transparent. If we write, "he was hungry, so he went to the kitchen to make a sandwich," we don't have to follow this up with a paragraph explicating our subject's tendency to respond to hunger with food-seeking patterns of behavior. Of course biographical subjects have personalities -- patterns of tendencies beyond just the ones that most humans have -- and these deserve comment from the biographer. But with Darger this task is orders-of-magnitude more important and difficult than with most people, because the standard personality categories we have are not capable of picking out any type of mind that looks remotely like Darger's. With Darger, common-sense psychology is not adequate, because by all signs Darger was actually a really weird guy, in a sense not really reducible to circumstances. (We can't, that is, explain all of his bizarre Ys by reference to some set of equally exceptional Xs. Yeah, his childhood was weird, but not that weird.) And yet this is what MacGregor wants to do.
In MacGregor's work, it's never quite clear whether the psychological theory working in the background is just standard old biographical intuitive-psych ("when people are hungry, they seek food," etc., etc.) or something more Freudian. Either way, the psychological theory is never really brought into the open; we know that MacGregor is a Freudian (because he tells us), but he never comes out and says "these are my assumptions," followed by some list of Freudian postulates (or, I dunno, something else). In some ways, this is kind of nice: the book is mostly free of jargon, and MacGregor seems intent on making his arguments palatable to general readers, not just to people who are theoretically aligned with him. But he doesn't really succeed at this effort; when stripped of the jargon and the explicit theoretical assumptions, MacGregor's Freudian arguments just look like strangely bad common-sense arguments.
As I was saying, one of these hidden assumptions is the notion that the behavior of a strange man like Darger is the result of the interaction between exceptional circumstances and the ordinary mechanisms of the human mind. MacGregor thinks, basically, that Darger wrote all that weird stuff because of he had a set of desires that could he could not satisfy in real life (because they were socially unacceptable, or immoral, or simply not feasible). So he created a fantasy world in which he could carry out those desires, usually with some sort of narrative or setting-based pretext that rendered them more acceptable than they would have been in the real world. For instance, MacGregor believes that Darger really had a sort of sadistic sexual obsession with harming little girls, particularly through strangulation, and that the brutal scenes set in the Glandelinean slave camps served as a means to depict such child-targeted violence in a morally acceptable way -- because, see, he's just showing you how horrible and brutal those Glandelinean bastards are! MacGregor paints a picture of Darger as, basically, a very frustrated and unhappy man, traumatized by his early experiences in an asylum and unable to live happily in the real world. MacGregor's explanation for the singular qualities of Darger's work, the dizzying length, the bizarre content, the obsessive tendencies, all of it -- MacGregor's explanation for all this stuff is that, well, that's what happens when there's a gap this huge between someone's desires and the things that the world is willing to provide for them. We all sublimate our share of desires, but for most of us, this just leads to some weird fantasies and occasionally, maybe, a bit of weird creative work. But Darger just had way more stuff to sublimate -- more desires! bigger desires! transgressive-er desires! -- and (says MacGregor) the sheer mental weight of all this stuff-he-couldn't-do was great enough to produce the vast and violent Christian-Glandelinean war, the horrors of the child slave camps, the Blengins, the proliferation of weirdly-named Darger analogues, the little girls with penises, the obsessional drive to write day after day after day until the text had become one of the longest things ever written by a human being . . .
No. That can't be right. It just doesn't work that way. You can't say, "he was just so frustrated and so full of transgressive desires that he decided to spend his life writing and illustrating an incredibly violent war epic starring seven little angelic Catholic girls." Because no circumstance, even a really frustrating one, could possibly make you or I do that. It's like saying that a man was so pissed off that he decided to wear bananas as if they were shoes. Certainly it is conceivable that being angry might lead to wearing bananas on one's feet, but still -- some additional explanation is required. Trauma, powerful as it may be, is not a catch-all explanation for any type of unusual behavior.
So MacGregor's problem, as I said, is that he tries to explain Darger by looking at what happens when you take a (Freudian) model of normal human psychological functioning and put it through a wringer of trauma and shame. But all of the evidence about Darger suggests that this will never work because his mind did not, even in his happier moments, obey the rules of "normal human psychological functioning." When reading about Darger -- particularly at the lush level of detail that MacGregor provides -- I'm always struck by his alienness, the numerous peculiarities of his actions that, by being less comprehensible, are far more unnerving (to me) than all of the lurid stuff with the child slaves and the violent battles. Let's consider those battles, for instance. MacGregor gives us a seemingly intuitive explanation for them: they were expressions of Darger's intense pent-up frustration and rage, which he was only able to express by, effectively, crashing action figures into one another on the page. That's fine -- Darger was angry, angry people like causing chaos. (When I'm angry, I really like tearing up pieces of paper.) 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.
This is something that deserves a longer remark: one of the fascinating things about Darger's writing is that it's so strangely boring. (I hope I'm not getting too cutely paradoxical there. Don't worry -- all will be explained in due time.) MacGregor is very excited about the fact that the Realms were never meant to be read, that here we have this vast collection of a guy's uncensored fantasy life -- more material than you'd get out of even 10 years of psychoanalysis, he exclaims! -- just sitting there in front of us, ready to be mined for insight. But the really remarkable thing is just how little the Realms look like anything one might normally associate with the words "uncensored fantasy." There are, of course, those lurid scenes about Glandelinean brutality, but those only make up something like 1% of the text (MacGregor tells us, right before warning us against "underestimating their importance"). MacGregor doesn't give us a breakdown of the composition of the remaining 99%, but from his account, it sounds like Darger mainly just wrote about endless battles and other military matters, all colored by his trademark fascination with mind-numbing bureaucratic detail. The "other military matters" include a lot of spying missions by the intrepid Vivian Girls and their little friends, which read, bizarrely, like passages from a children's book. The Glandelineans, who are depicted elsewhere as sadistic torturers and murderers, act like a bunch of harmless buffoons in these sections, always getting fooled by some silly disguise-scheme or hiding place the Vivian Girls have thought up. This disconnect in tone and intended audience is deeply unnerving and alien, and I don't see how MacGregor's scheme can account for it. For a text that is supposedly the product of someone's transgressive desires, a lot of the Realms is strangely tame: just a bunch of military-nerd blather and children's-book adventures.
But aren't I being naive? It seems that one of MacGregor's goals is to convince us that Darger was, well, a creepy mofo. Which he was, I'll admit. His obsession with little girls definitely seems to have had carnal aspects, and while it's not clear to me that he actually had sadistic desires, he certainly had a disturbing fixation (desirous or otherwise) on the notion of little girls being strangled, disembowled, or otherwise tortured. (In one of his creepiest paintings, a ghostly image of the head of a girl being strangled appears in the sky above a battle proceeding in the foreground. And in his autobiography -- after it has left him behind and started following the twister "Sweetie Pie" -- there's a description of a storm taking the form of a strangled little girl in the sky. The guy had some weird obsessions, clearly.) In popular press articles about Darger, the sexual aspects of his work is often played up -- after all, what journalist can resist writing about a reclusive old man who painted hundreds of pictures of little girls with penises? Okay, yeah. I get the joke. It's easy to do the typical late-20th-century American culture move and say that it's really all about sex, with all of these "spying missions" and other adventures really just serving as pretexts for Darger to fantasize about seven prepubescent beauties. The Vivian Girls do seem to keep losing their clothes for various flimsy, softcore porn-ish reasons, after all. Except it isn't actually easy to view things that way, because the content of the Realms is, as I said, so frequently and peculiarly boring. 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. This type of explanation just outright fails -- it takes something that is difficult to believe (Henry Darger's creative output) and manages to make it even harder to believe (Henry Darger's creative output as covert sexual fantasy, despite the totally chaste nature of most of that output).
Despite all I've said, MacGregor is an engaging and likable tour guide. But he's also an oddly unimaginative one. He seems inexplicably impressed by Darger's ability to come up with fantastical entities and scenarios without artistic models to work from, which seems to me to be one of the less remarkable aspects of Darger's work. In one particularly silly section about the Blengins, MacGregor runs through a few historical examples of mythical, chimeric beasts -- from classical mythology, etc. -- and then expresses astonishment that Darger was able to come up with chimeras himself, even though he probably had never encountered any of these mythological precursors! How startling is this, really? MacGregor speculates briefly about what sort of impulses might lead people in various times and places to independently arrive at the idea of a beast with different parts taken from different real animals. But come on -- aren't these impulses familiar to anyone who's ever doodled fantastical creatures in the margin of a school notebook? People like coming up with fictional monsters, because they're cool, and a chimera is a particularly easy sort of monster to come up with. MacGregor drastically underestimates the tendency of human beings to come up with all sorts of fantastical things just for the sake of "coolness," without the involvement of sublimated desires or anything like that. His view of creativity is, in fact, crushing and joyless. In his view, people don't ever imagine counterfactual things just for the thrill of the unusual, or because they yearn for experiences that actually don't exist in the real world. No, it's all about sublimated desires. Our fantasies exist so that we can pretend to do things we can't do in the real world; if only we could have the kind of sex we secretly want to have, or beat up the people we want to beat up, or whatever, then BAM! -- there would be no more fantasy worlds, ever.
Or, anyway, there would be no outsider artists. I'm not sure MacGregor really thinks that all creativity is the way I just described, but he certainly seems to think that outsider artists are that way. My impression is that he wants to combat the romantic notion of outsider artists as these noble souls, possessed of the same creative drive as the great artists of history, but stripped of the corrupting influence of popularity and social considerations. MacGregor wants to make sure we know that many outsider artists may not consider themselves "artists" in any traditional sense, and their work is often more like self-administered therapy that just so happens to leave behind physical artifacts which can be viewed as "works of art." Well, fine. But it overstates the case to the point of idiocy to just assume that, if a given artist is an "outsider artist" (which means what, exactly?), then every little facet of their work must serve an identifiable therapeutic purpose, that there is nothing that is simply there because they felt it should be a part of their creation. This is what MacGregor seems to think about Darger.
Honestly, I think MacGregor's perspective on outsider artists might change if he learned a bit more about science fiction and fantasy. (MacGregor has a large stake in his position on outsider artists -- his other major academic work is about them, and they're kind of his hobby-horse -- so it seems significant, to me, that his attitude on them is so questionable.) MacGregor never ceases to be amazed at the notion that people can create elaborate and detailed fantasy worlds, especially when they do it without explicit models. Because, he thinks, any detail of a fantasy world that doesn't come from some explicit model must have come burbling up from the unconscious. And if that's its source, then it must tie in to some repressed desire. But if that's true, then how the heck does Darger come up with all this pedantic, dry proper-names-and-numbers-filled stuff, which seems to have nothing to do with drives or anything like that? To MacGregor, then, Darger is a tough nut to crack -- but one he believes he can crack if he supplies a heroic quantity of psychoanalytic effort. But here's something that would really make MacGregor freak out: people everywhere in the world are constantly coming up with detailed, well-oiled, verisimilitude-loaded fantasy worlds. It's a thing people like to do! Hang around any group of science fiction fans, and you'll soon find them exuberantly discussing the little details of fictional worlds, even when those details have nothing to do with scandalous desires -- it's almost as if they care about the worlds in themselves!
Now this is not to say that people do not have their own motivations, often quite primal and/or sexy, for being interested in any given fantasy world in the first place. But (and this is pretty much my main point about Darger) the reasons that one originally becomes interested in something do not have to animate every single instance of engagement with that thing. When you first meet someone, you may decide at first to spend time around them solely because they make witty comments, but as time goes on you will start to value even the non-witty things they say (indeed, even things they say that would have no value whatsoever if said by a stranger), because they are someone you care about, and hence you care about what they say (whatever it may turn out to be). Similarly, you may develop an interest in a fantasy world because it seems like a more pleasant place than the real world, but after a while you will find yourself interested even in its least pleasant aspects. That's what it's like to be interested in something.
Take J.R.R. Tolkein -- a Darger-ish man, in certain ways -- and his legions of fans. It's clear that there were psychologically potent forces that led Tolkein to get as invested as he did in LotR: frustration with modernity, a preference for medieval literature over anything that came after it, etc. And of course it's easy to read into the fact that he himself claimed to be "like a hobbit," given that his story is one in which those little, unassuming hobbits play a pivotal role in the world's salvation, despite being surrounded by tons of larger, seemingly more dignified and important people. But not every detail of LotR has to stem, in rigid mechanical fashion, from these psych factors. At a certain point, Tolkein just cared about Middle-Earth, and liked elaborating it.
And that is my theory about Darger, too. It is clear that the Realms of the Unreal were designed to be more palatable to Darger than were the realms of the real (so to speak). MacGregor focuses on the most scandalous manifestations of this, but really it's everywhere. Darger was obsessed (carnally or not, but it certainly went beyond just that) with little girls, and expresses a certain nostalgia for childhood that suggests that he wishes he himself were still a child; thus, in his world, a team of little girls plays a pivotal role in world history. (Compare: hobbits.) In real life, he was discharged from the army for vague psychological reasons; in the Realms of the Unreal he splits in two, so that he can be both a general and a war correspondent. He was obsessed with wars, with tactics and precise numbers of casualties; his fiction is focused around military officers who have much reason to talk at length about these things.
More fundamentally, Henry Darger had abnormal fixations, and the Realms were a place where these fixations mattered. We all have "obsessions" in a certain sense, but they're the normal ones, so they don't count. Food, sex, sleep. On a less basic level: the social interactions of people we know. Politics. Sports. Our hobbies. Darger had no social life, no hobbies in any normal sense. For him these normal topics of constant thought were replaced with abnormal ones. Storms. Battles and the bureaucratic details of battles, names of generals and regiments, numbers of wounded and dead. (He loved the American Civil War, and obsessed about these aspects of it, just as he obsessed about these aspects of his fictional battles.) And most importantly, the loss of a picture of a little girl. Now, I don't know why he cared about that. MacGregor, pathetically, doesn't really try to explain it. (How could he, given his preconceptions?) It's just so inexplicable, in terms of normal human motivations. He didn't have any special attachment to the picture, so why did he care so much about its loss that it shaped the majority of his life?
I don't know. He had a weird mind, one we may never understand. Maybe, at some point early in life, a protein zigged when it should have zagged in the course of neural development, producing a mind that cared not about the normal things but instead about storms, battles, pictures of little girls. The cause may be forever lost to time. What matters is that if you are such a person, you can't exactly live in the realms of the real. You can't have conversations with normal people if you're the sort of person whose day is filled up with thoughts about how frustrated you are at God for stealing a newspaper clipping from you. This is the best explanation I can think of for the Realms, and the Realms they describe: they are a place where Darger's concerns matter, where the loss of a photograph really can start a war.
But after one decides to create a fantasy world for such a reason, another type of motivation kicks in, the motivation to make the world seem real. This is what MacGregor doesn't get. He thinks that the Realms of the Unreal are not a world but something like a "fantasy" in the literal sense, like a sexual fantasy: a set of disconnected elements, not tied together by any real chain of logic, each of which plays to some immediate desire. And indeed much of Darger's work may be like that. Given a man who cares about battles the way some people care about food and sex, it makes sense that he would write in an excitable, inconsistent, daydreamy way about battles. (Which he did.) But there's also an urge among many constructors of fantasy worlds to make their worlds seem realistic. Not "be" realistic, though there are those who do that too -- fantasy and science fiction writers who, say, devote lots of energy to working out how the economies and social structures in their worlds might work. But I'm talking about something else, not realism but verisimilitude. The desire, not to make an accurate picture of anything in particular, but to make something that merely looks like it might be an accurate picture of something. Critics of Tolkein often complain that his world does not have realistic economics or social structures, that it is a child's view of the world writ grotesquely large. This is fine as far as it goes, but I think one of the things about Tolkein's world that appeals to so many people is that, for something so unreal, it feels so oddly "realistic." It's not something that could ever happen -- but it has the scholarly detail, the funny words and names, the multiple levels of history layered complexly over one another, that a real world might have. It's sort of like . . . impossible things can't exist, but if they could, this is what history textbooks about them would look like. A social-scientifically realistic fantasy is like a carefully rendered portrait of a carefully considered scene; Middle-Earth is like a carefully rendered portrait of an optical illusion.
And that's what I see in Darger as well. Partly in his obsessive detail, and his psuedo-scholarly and pseudo-journalistic techniques, his "Treatise on Blengins" and his fictional newspaper articles from the pen of Henry Darger, war correspondent. These all work to make the Realms of the Unreal seem oddly realistic for something so obviously Unreal. More importantly, there's Darger's need to make everything big and important. One of the tics of Darger's amateurish writing style -- repeated numerous times in the bits quoted by MacGregor -- is his tendency to say that things are so extreme that they cannot be described, or that they exceed anything that has happened in the real world. Again and again he tells us that some battle was so catastrophic that the best writers in the world could not describe it, or so catastrophic that it eclipsed all battles that have ever happened in reality. (This isn't all negative, either. The beauty and virtue of the Vivian girls are described with the same type of superlatives.) On one level this is just a cheap way to get powerful effects when you're not a good enough writer to achieve them directly. But it also forms a repeated refrain that affirms, again and again that despite their fundamental Unreality, the Realms are still bigger and more important than the real world. The Realms are far larger than Earth. The battles there involve millions of combatants. The stakes there are higher, the catastrophes bigger, the heroines more beautiful, the good military leaders more brave, the bad military leaders more vicious.
That last one is a very important point. The Glandelinean torture scenes are a major fulcrum of MacGregor's argument. To MacGregor, these scenes are examples of what Darger wanted to do but couldn't. We can tell that he really had these horrible, violent desires, because why else would he have spent hundreds of pages detailing such shocking, horrible scenes? Nobody in their right mind, MacGregor seems to suggest, would write about horrible stuff like that. (MacGregor even says that Darger "essentially had the mind of a serial killer," or something bizarre like that.) I dunno, maybe I have the mind of a serial killer, but the torture scenes described in the book didn't make that much of an impression on me. Horrible, yes. But humans write about horrible, violent things all the time, even horrible things happening to children. Has MacGregor never heard of Grimm's Tales? Moreover, depictions of sadistic violence are a classic way to convince your reader that a particular character is a bad, evil person. The Glandelinean torture scenes make perfect sense if we view them as symmetrical with all the platitudes about how wonderful the Vivian girls are, how virtuous the Catholics are, etc. (MacGregor doesn't, because his worldview is uninterested in morality as a source of psychological motivation, except insofar as it selects which desires must be repressed.) Darger really, really wants us to believe that his heroes are virtuous, his villains vicious, his war all-consuming. That all of this is a big thing that matters. So his villains are horrible, sadistic monsters. I hear that's pretty normal, for villains. It's not an exception to any particular rule.
This post is very, very long. (Though not as long as the Realms. *Rimshot!*) It's clear that I am kind of obsessed with Darger. And very annoyed with John MacGregor, though that's mostly because when you read (most of) a 700-page book with a persistently annoying author, you build up a lot of collected frustration. I guess the crux of the issue is that Darger's strangeness, his alienness, is precisely what makes him captivating to me. Most humans spend most of their time doing the same things, over and over again. It is exciting to hear tell of a man who broke the pattern, who did something else. As whimsical as this might sound, it is easy for me to enter a state of mind in which is seems inequitable that only one man has spent his life in the Realms of the Unreal, when billions of us spend ours in the same real world. I want to imagine new possibilities, new universes, places -- and ways of being -- that no one has ever been. And, to put it a bit dramatically, people like John MacGregor do not understand this: they want every fantasy of true escape to reduce ultimately to a failure of this little world to match up to some little, ordinary desire. For all of Darger's creepy and perverse tendencies, the image of him sitting there in his room, bounding through the endless Realms of the Unreal with his seven girl companions -- running off at a right angle to all real things, deeper and deeper into uncharted territory -- is an inspiring one. Not everything comes back to sex, anger, death, the things we've failed to do in the here and now. Sometimes we just want to run away to somewhere truly different.
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 fifteen 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 5000-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 seven 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.
This stuff fascinates me, for reasons that I hope are obvious. It may or may not fascinate you. (If it doesn't, you probably won't enjoy the rest of this post.) After I discovered Darger on Wikipedia, my fascination led me to poke around online for more info, and it soon became evident that the one really serious academic book on Darger was John MacGregor's 700-page tome Henry Darger: In The Realms Of The Unreal. It took me a while, but I've finally gotten around to reading it -- or, most of it, anyway. (I turned it back to the college library because someone had put a hold on it, and it was around finals week, and I worried that they might need it for a final, or something.)
MacGregor's book is an extensive study of Darger and his work -- part biography, part literary analysis, but mostly just an account of what Darger wrote and painted, and what it says about his peculiar mind. On the one hand, it's great that something like this exists. There are other Darger books out there, but most of them are not very informative and focus too much on his paintings. (This is material for another rant entirely, by the way. Darger has become well-known after his death as, essentially, a modern artist. His paintings are sold for large sums at art auctions, presumably because they look "interesting" in a sort of modern art-ish way. Never mind that that unique, weird look was produced because he couldn't draw and was forced to rely on tracing photographs -- and that the paintings were not standalone "works" but illustrations to his novel, which gets weirdly little attention despite being a far more interesting achievement than the paintings.) John MacGregor is a good writer, and he's interested in Darger in an obsessive, detail-oriented way, which is great: he reports vast amounts of information about Darger's writing and quotes many scenes from the text.
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. And this account is all jumbled up with that juicy exposition I mentioned earlier. Darger's work is so long that MacGregor can't possibly substantiate the generalizations he makes: when he tells us that Darger usually does something, or never does something else, we just have to trust him. (MacGregor hasn't read all of the Realms -- in all likelihood, no one ever will -- but he says he's read a lot of it, and at least rested his eyes on every individual page.) But MacGregor's generalizations are often tinged by his (annoying, implausible) psychological thesis, so that it's hard to tell how reliable they are.
The rest of this post will consist mostly of me ranting about MacGregor, followed by a sketch of a theory that I think explains Darger better than MacGregor manages to. I don't really know why you'd be interested in reading such a thing, unless you, I dunno, want more evidence that I'm still alive or something. (Like most people, I post on Facebook a lot more than LJ these days.) But if a long rant about an obscure academic book sounds like your cup of tea, then come on in!
Now, before I start wailing on MacGregor, I want to mention some more gee-whiz facts about Darger. (I would have put this above the cut, but the pre-cut segment of this post was already getting long enough to be potentially annoying.) I'm just going to make a big list of really weird things about Darger and his work. Part of the reason I'm doing this is just to show that, however much I may bitch about it later on, the MacGregor book is really interesting. (If these Darger-facts whet your appetite, there are plenty more where they came from, in other words.) I have a more serious point, though, which is basically:
Henry Darger was ridiculously weird.
Now, this might seem obvious. Eccentric recluse, wrote longest book ever, blah blah blah. He's weird. Duh. What more needs to be said? But one of the things I learned when I read the MacGregor book is that Darger -- like the character Andrew Loeb in Cryptonomicon -- was fractally weird. No matter how close you look, he just keeps getting weirder and weirder. There are a few broad traits and tendencies that capture the overall gist of his weirdness -- for instance, he was (as you might imagine) obsessive as all hell, which explains the length of his written works and also a good deal of their oddly repetitive content. But the difference between Darger and you-and-me is not just "obsessiveness," or anything else. The more you examine his actions, the less explicable they seem. (It's sad and ironic that MacGregor is so successful at producing this impression of Darger, since it actually undermines MacGregor's own psychological thesis. But more on that later.) So, without further ado, here are some interesting things about Henry Darger:
- In the Realms, there are numerous characters named after Darger. There's a framing device in which the text is supposed to have been written by a journalist named Henry Darger who followed around the Christian troops, though this is often abandoned. There's a Christian general named Henry Darger, and the leader of a secret society, the Gemini, is named Hendro Dargar. (The names slip sometimes, so that certain characters are sometimes Darger, sometimes Dargar.) There's also a Glandelinean General Henry Darger. There's mention of someone named Dargarius, a name which Darger (for some reason) sometimes used in real-world correspondence. 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. (This accords with nothing in the text; the Vivian girls lose their clothing from time to time, but there's no stipulation that they just go around naked all the time.) The little girls usually, but not always, have penises. (They're pretty clearly supposed to be girls, though, and there's no mention of genitals anywhere in his writing, much less an explanation for the anomalous genitals he laboriously drew onto each of his female heroines.)
- Darger collected lots of random junk in the course of his menial job. He was particularly fond of photographs of children, and kept many of them, sometimes giving them a fictional caption relating to his fantasy world. (There's a figure in the MacGregor book that shows a photo of a few seated children, below which has been scrawled something about how the children were going to be killed by Glandelineans but were rescued.)
- 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. In his mind, Elsie Paroubek and Annie Aronburg seem to have merged: in the text, characters occasionally refer to the loss of a picture of Annie Aronburg, and some of the characters contend that the anger of some man named Darger on account of this loss -- rather than the actual death of Annie Aronburg -- is the true cause of the war. (The characters are understandably baffled as to how the loss of a picture could cause a war, and they are also confused as to whether the Darger in question is the Christian general or the Glandelinean general. Near the end of the story, it is revealed that the two men both claim ownership of the lost picture.) Again and again in his journal he threatened God, telling him that if the picture wasn't returned, he might let the Glandelineans win the war. He never found the picture. (There are hauntingly beautiful passages in which the ghost of Annie Aronburg appears to Darger, beseeching him to give up his anger at God. But she never convinces him.)
- At one point, the Vivian girls discover an odd, messy room that contains a number of large books. They discover that these books are a history of the very war they have been fighting -- that is, they have stumbled into Darger's room, and found the books in which they themselves are characters! They also notice that this mysterious historian collected pictures of children, and one of the sisters declares: "He must have been a strange man indeed."
- Among the odd artifacts found in Darger's room are a number of letters in which addresses, names and pronouns have been scribbled out in pen and replaced, so that the letters -- originally addressed to Darger -- now appear to have been written to one of his fictional characters.
- Darger was really interested in weather. He kept a weather journal, kept close track of weather predictions in newspapers, and wrote numerous scenes in the Realms in which vast storms or fires wreak destruction on a vast scale.
- Darger's 5000-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.
- In the text of the Realms, the Blengins are described as giant, chimeric, dragon-like creatures: they have serpent-like bodies with small stubbly legs and (often) butterfly wings that make them capable of flight, as well as heads and other body parts that come from various existing animals. (There is a type of Blengin that has the head of a housecat. It's kind of cute.) Some of Darger's paintings depict the Blengins this way, but in many of them, the creatures identified as "Blengins" (in captions next to the paintings) are simply little girls with ram-like, curving horns. There are numerous pictures with these horned-girl Blengins, but they're never explained anywhere in Darger's massive corpus of writings.
- Characters frequently hide their gender in Darger's work, with strangely unbroken success. One of the little boy heroes in the Realms, a friend of the Vivian girls, is revealed near the end of the story to have been a girl in disguise. Her disguise was so successful, in fact, that she managed to fool her own sister for years.
- 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.
- Though he seems to have spend a large fraction of his life writing and painting, Darger is pretty much silent about these activities in The History of My Life and in his journals -- in the latter he mostly just records things like going to church. The only time he actually acknowledges his own artist-status is in some little remark about how some back problem (or something like that) is making it hard for him to apply paint to his big canvases.
Essentially, the problem is this. Before we can get an idea of how Darger's circumstances produced his actions, we need an understanding of how Darger's mind worked. That is, before we can start saying "situation X made Darger do Y" for particular Xs and Ys, we need some sense of how Darger's mind generally paired Ys to Xs. With most biographical subjects, this is a moot point, because the author and reader's common-sense assumptions about human psychology are usually sufficient to make the connection between X and Y transparent. If we write, "he was hungry, so he went to the kitchen to make a sandwich," we don't have to follow this up with a paragraph explicating our subject's tendency to respond to hunger with food-seeking patterns of behavior. Of course biographical subjects have personalities -- patterns of tendencies beyond just the ones that most humans have -- and these deserve comment from the biographer. But with Darger this task is orders-of-magnitude more important and difficult than with most people, because the standard personality categories we have are not capable of picking out any type of mind that looks remotely like Darger's. With Darger, common-sense psychology is not adequate, because by all signs Darger was actually a really weird guy, in a sense not really reducible to circumstances. (We can't, that is, explain all of his bizarre Ys by reference to some set of equally exceptional Xs. Yeah, his childhood was weird, but not that weird.) And yet this is what MacGregor wants to do.
In MacGregor's work, it's never quite clear whether the psychological theory working in the background is just standard old biographical intuitive-psych ("when people are hungry, they seek food," etc., etc.) or something more Freudian. Either way, the psychological theory is never really brought into the open; we know that MacGregor is a Freudian (because he tells us), but he never comes out and says "these are my assumptions," followed by some list of Freudian postulates (or, I dunno, something else). In some ways, this is kind of nice: the book is mostly free of jargon, and MacGregor seems intent on making his arguments palatable to general readers, not just to people who are theoretically aligned with him. But he doesn't really succeed at this effort; when stripped of the jargon and the explicit theoretical assumptions, MacGregor's Freudian arguments just look like strangely bad common-sense arguments.
As I was saying, one of these hidden assumptions is the notion that the behavior of a strange man like Darger is the result of the interaction between exceptional circumstances and the ordinary mechanisms of the human mind. MacGregor thinks, basically, that Darger wrote all that weird stuff because of he had a set of desires that could he could not satisfy in real life (because they were socially unacceptable, or immoral, or simply not feasible). So he created a fantasy world in which he could carry out those desires, usually with some sort of narrative or setting-based pretext that rendered them more acceptable than they would have been in the real world. For instance, MacGregor believes that Darger really had a sort of sadistic sexual obsession with harming little girls, particularly through strangulation, and that the brutal scenes set in the Glandelinean slave camps served as a means to depict such child-targeted violence in a morally acceptable way -- because, see, he's just showing you how horrible and brutal those Glandelinean bastards are! MacGregor paints a picture of Darger as, basically, a very frustrated and unhappy man, traumatized by his early experiences in an asylum and unable to live happily in the real world. MacGregor's explanation for the singular qualities of Darger's work, the dizzying length, the bizarre content, the obsessive tendencies, all of it -- MacGregor's explanation for all this stuff is that, well, that's what happens when there's a gap this huge between someone's desires and the things that the world is willing to provide for them. We all sublimate our share of desires, but for most of us, this just leads to some weird fantasies and occasionally, maybe, a bit of weird creative work. But Darger just had way more stuff to sublimate -- more desires! bigger desires! transgressive-er desires! -- and (says MacGregor) the sheer mental weight of all this stuff-he-couldn't-do was great enough to produce the vast and violent Christian-Glandelinean war, the horrors of the child slave camps, the Blengins, the proliferation of weirdly-named Darger analogues, the little girls with penises, the obsessional drive to write day after day after day until the text had become one of the longest things ever written by a human being . . .
No. That can't be right. It just doesn't work that way. You can't say, "he was just so frustrated and so full of transgressive desires that he decided to spend his life writing and illustrating an incredibly violent war epic starring seven little angelic Catholic girls." Because no circumstance, even a really frustrating one, could possibly make you or I do that. It's like saying that a man was so pissed off that he decided to wear bananas as if they were shoes. Certainly it is conceivable that being angry might lead to wearing bananas on one's feet, but still -- some additional explanation is required. Trauma, powerful as it may be, is not a catch-all explanation for any type of unusual behavior.
So MacGregor's problem, as I said, is that he tries to explain Darger by looking at what happens when you take a (Freudian) model of normal human psychological functioning and put it through a wringer of trauma and shame. But all of the evidence about Darger suggests that this will never work because his mind did not, even in his happier moments, obey the rules of "normal human psychological functioning." When reading about Darger -- particularly at the lush level of detail that MacGregor provides -- I'm always struck by his alienness, the numerous peculiarities of his actions that, by being less comprehensible, are far more unnerving (to me) than all of the lurid stuff with the child slaves and the violent battles. Let's consider those battles, for instance. MacGregor gives us a seemingly intuitive explanation for them: they were expressions of Darger's intense pent-up frustration and rage, which he was only able to express by, effectively, crashing action figures into one another on the page. That's fine -- Darger was angry, angry people like causing chaos. (When I'm angry, I really like tearing up pieces of paper.) 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.
This is something that deserves a longer remark: one of the fascinating things about Darger's writing is that it's so strangely boring. (I hope I'm not getting too cutely paradoxical there. Don't worry -- all will be explained in due time.) MacGregor is very excited about the fact that the Realms were never meant to be read, that here we have this vast collection of a guy's uncensored fantasy life -- more material than you'd get out of even 10 years of psychoanalysis, he exclaims! -- just sitting there in front of us, ready to be mined for insight. But the really remarkable thing is just how little the Realms look like anything one might normally associate with the words "uncensored fantasy." There are, of course, those lurid scenes about Glandelinean brutality, but those only make up something like 1% of the text (MacGregor tells us, right before warning us against "underestimating their importance"). MacGregor doesn't give us a breakdown of the composition of the remaining 99%, but from his account, it sounds like Darger mainly just wrote about endless battles and other military matters, all colored by his trademark fascination with mind-numbing bureaucratic detail. The "other military matters" include a lot of spying missions by the intrepid Vivian Girls and their little friends, which read, bizarrely, like passages from a children's book. The Glandelineans, who are depicted elsewhere as sadistic torturers and murderers, act like a bunch of harmless buffoons in these sections, always getting fooled by some silly disguise-scheme or hiding place the Vivian Girls have thought up. This disconnect in tone and intended audience is deeply unnerving and alien, and I don't see how MacGregor's scheme can account for it. For a text that is supposedly the product of someone's transgressive desires, a lot of the Realms is strangely tame: just a bunch of military-nerd blather and children's-book adventures.
But aren't I being naive? It seems that one of MacGregor's goals is to convince us that Darger was, well, a creepy mofo. Which he was, I'll admit. His obsession with little girls definitely seems to have had carnal aspects, and while it's not clear to me that he actually had sadistic desires, he certainly had a disturbing fixation (desirous or otherwise) on the notion of little girls being strangled, disembowled, or otherwise tortured. (In one of his creepiest paintings, a ghostly image of the head of a girl being strangled appears in the sky above a battle proceeding in the foreground. And in his autobiography -- after it has left him behind and started following the twister "Sweetie Pie" -- there's a description of a storm taking the form of a strangled little girl in the sky. The guy had some weird obsessions, clearly.) In popular press articles about Darger, the sexual aspects of his work is often played up -- after all, what journalist can resist writing about a reclusive old man who painted hundreds of pictures of little girls with penises? Okay, yeah. I get the joke. It's easy to do the typical late-20th-century American culture move and say that it's really all about sex, with all of these "spying missions" and other adventures really just serving as pretexts for Darger to fantasize about seven prepubescent beauties. The Vivian Girls do seem to keep losing their clothes for various flimsy, softcore porn-ish reasons, after all. Except it isn't actually easy to view things that way, because the content of the Realms is, as I said, so frequently and peculiarly boring. 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. This type of explanation just outright fails -- it takes something that is difficult to believe (Henry Darger's creative output) and manages to make it even harder to believe (Henry Darger's creative output as covert sexual fantasy, despite the totally chaste nature of most of that output).
Despite all I've said, MacGregor is an engaging and likable tour guide. But he's also an oddly unimaginative one. He seems inexplicably impressed by Darger's ability to come up with fantastical entities and scenarios without artistic models to work from, which seems to me to be one of the less remarkable aspects of Darger's work. In one particularly silly section about the Blengins, MacGregor runs through a few historical examples of mythical, chimeric beasts -- from classical mythology, etc. -- and then expresses astonishment that Darger was able to come up with chimeras himself, even though he probably had never encountered any of these mythological precursors! How startling is this, really? MacGregor speculates briefly about what sort of impulses might lead people in various times and places to independently arrive at the idea of a beast with different parts taken from different real animals. But come on -- aren't these impulses familiar to anyone who's ever doodled fantastical creatures in the margin of a school notebook? People like coming up with fictional monsters, because they're cool, and a chimera is a particularly easy sort of monster to come up with. MacGregor drastically underestimates the tendency of human beings to come up with all sorts of fantastical things just for the sake of "coolness," without the involvement of sublimated desires or anything like that. His view of creativity is, in fact, crushing and joyless. In his view, people don't ever imagine counterfactual things just for the thrill of the unusual, or because they yearn for experiences that actually don't exist in the real world. No, it's all about sublimated desires. Our fantasies exist so that we can pretend to do things we can't do in the real world; if only we could have the kind of sex we secretly want to have, or beat up the people we want to beat up, or whatever, then BAM! -- there would be no more fantasy worlds, ever.
Or, anyway, there would be no outsider artists. I'm not sure MacGregor really thinks that all creativity is the way I just described, but he certainly seems to think that outsider artists are that way. My impression is that he wants to combat the romantic notion of outsider artists as these noble souls, possessed of the same creative drive as the great artists of history, but stripped of the corrupting influence of popularity and social considerations. MacGregor wants to make sure we know that many outsider artists may not consider themselves "artists" in any traditional sense, and their work is often more like self-administered therapy that just so happens to leave behind physical artifacts which can be viewed as "works of art." Well, fine. But it overstates the case to the point of idiocy to just assume that, if a given artist is an "outsider artist" (which means what, exactly?), then every little facet of their work must serve an identifiable therapeutic purpose, that there is nothing that is simply there because they felt it should be a part of their creation. This is what MacGregor seems to think about Darger.
Honestly, I think MacGregor's perspective on outsider artists might change if he learned a bit more about science fiction and fantasy. (MacGregor has a large stake in his position on outsider artists -- his other major academic work is about them, and they're kind of his hobby-horse -- so it seems significant, to me, that his attitude on them is so questionable.) MacGregor never ceases to be amazed at the notion that people can create elaborate and detailed fantasy worlds, especially when they do it without explicit models. Because, he thinks, any detail of a fantasy world that doesn't come from some explicit model must have come burbling up from the unconscious. And if that's its source, then it must tie in to some repressed desire. But if that's true, then how the heck does Darger come up with all this pedantic, dry proper-names-and-numbers-filled stuff, which seems to have nothing to do with drives or anything like that? To MacGregor, then, Darger is a tough nut to crack -- but one he believes he can crack if he supplies a heroic quantity of psychoanalytic effort. But here's something that would really make MacGregor freak out: people everywhere in the world are constantly coming up with detailed, well-oiled, verisimilitude-loaded fantasy worlds. It's a thing people like to do! Hang around any group of science fiction fans, and you'll soon find them exuberantly discussing the little details of fictional worlds, even when those details have nothing to do with scandalous desires -- it's almost as if they care about the worlds in themselves!
Now this is not to say that people do not have their own motivations, often quite primal and/or sexy, for being interested in any given fantasy world in the first place. But (and this is pretty much my main point about Darger) the reasons that one originally becomes interested in something do not have to animate every single instance of engagement with that thing. When you first meet someone, you may decide at first to spend time around them solely because they make witty comments, but as time goes on you will start to value even the non-witty things they say (indeed, even things they say that would have no value whatsoever if said by a stranger), because they are someone you care about, and hence you care about what they say (whatever it may turn out to be). Similarly, you may develop an interest in a fantasy world because it seems like a more pleasant place than the real world, but after a while you will find yourself interested even in its least pleasant aspects. That's what it's like to be interested in something.
Take J.R.R. Tolkein -- a Darger-ish man, in certain ways -- and his legions of fans. It's clear that there were psychologically potent forces that led Tolkein to get as invested as he did in LotR: frustration with modernity, a preference for medieval literature over anything that came after it, etc. And of course it's easy to read into the fact that he himself claimed to be "like a hobbit," given that his story is one in which those little, unassuming hobbits play a pivotal role in the world's salvation, despite being surrounded by tons of larger, seemingly more dignified and important people. But not every detail of LotR has to stem, in rigid mechanical fashion, from these psych factors. At a certain point, Tolkein just cared about Middle-Earth, and liked elaborating it.
And that is my theory about Darger, too. It is clear that the Realms of the Unreal were designed to be more palatable to Darger than were the realms of the real (so to speak). MacGregor focuses on the most scandalous manifestations of this, but really it's everywhere. Darger was obsessed (carnally or not, but it certainly went beyond just that) with little girls, and expresses a certain nostalgia for childhood that suggests that he wishes he himself were still a child; thus, in his world, a team of little girls plays a pivotal role in world history. (Compare: hobbits.) In real life, he was discharged from the army for vague psychological reasons; in the Realms of the Unreal he splits in two, so that he can be both a general and a war correspondent. He was obsessed with wars, with tactics and precise numbers of casualties; his fiction is focused around military officers who have much reason to talk at length about these things.
More fundamentally, Henry Darger had abnormal fixations, and the Realms were a place where these fixations mattered. We all have "obsessions" in a certain sense, but they're the normal ones, so they don't count. Food, sex, sleep. On a less basic level: the social interactions of people we know. Politics. Sports. Our hobbies. Darger had no social life, no hobbies in any normal sense. For him these normal topics of constant thought were replaced with abnormal ones. Storms. Battles and the bureaucratic details of battles, names of generals and regiments, numbers of wounded and dead. (He loved the American Civil War, and obsessed about these aspects of it, just as he obsessed about these aspects of his fictional battles.) And most importantly, the loss of a picture of a little girl. Now, I don't know why he cared about that. MacGregor, pathetically, doesn't really try to explain it. (How could he, given his preconceptions?) It's just so inexplicable, in terms of normal human motivations. He didn't have any special attachment to the picture, so why did he care so much about its loss that it shaped the majority of his life?
I don't know. He had a weird mind, one we may never understand. Maybe, at some point early in life, a protein zigged when it should have zagged in the course of neural development, producing a mind that cared not about the normal things but instead about storms, battles, pictures of little girls. The cause may be forever lost to time. What matters is that if you are such a person, you can't exactly live in the realms of the real. You can't have conversations with normal people if you're the sort of person whose day is filled up with thoughts about how frustrated you are at God for stealing a newspaper clipping from you. This is the best explanation I can think of for the Realms, and the Realms they describe: they are a place where Darger's concerns matter, where the loss of a photograph really can start a war.
But after one decides to create a fantasy world for such a reason, another type of motivation kicks in, the motivation to make the world seem real. This is what MacGregor doesn't get. He thinks that the Realms of the Unreal are not a world but something like a "fantasy" in the literal sense, like a sexual fantasy: a set of disconnected elements, not tied together by any real chain of logic, each of which plays to some immediate desire. And indeed much of Darger's work may be like that. Given a man who cares about battles the way some people care about food and sex, it makes sense that he would write in an excitable, inconsistent, daydreamy way about battles. (Which he did.) But there's also an urge among many constructors of fantasy worlds to make their worlds seem realistic. Not "be" realistic, though there are those who do that too -- fantasy and science fiction writers who, say, devote lots of energy to working out how the economies and social structures in their worlds might work. But I'm talking about something else, not realism but verisimilitude. The desire, not to make an accurate picture of anything in particular, but to make something that merely looks like it might be an accurate picture of something. Critics of Tolkein often complain that his world does not have realistic economics or social structures, that it is a child's view of the world writ grotesquely large. This is fine as far as it goes, but I think one of the things about Tolkein's world that appeals to so many people is that, for something so unreal, it feels so oddly "realistic." It's not something that could ever happen -- but it has the scholarly detail, the funny words and names, the multiple levels of history layered complexly over one another, that a real world might have. It's sort of like . . . impossible things can't exist, but if they could, this is what history textbooks about them would look like. A social-scientifically realistic fantasy is like a carefully rendered portrait of a carefully considered scene; Middle-Earth is like a carefully rendered portrait of an optical illusion.
And that's what I see in Darger as well. Partly in his obsessive detail, and his psuedo-scholarly and pseudo-journalistic techniques, his "Treatise on Blengins" and his fictional newspaper articles from the pen of Henry Darger, war correspondent. These all work to make the Realms of the Unreal seem oddly realistic for something so obviously Unreal. More importantly, there's Darger's need to make everything big and important. One of the tics of Darger's amateurish writing style -- repeated numerous times in the bits quoted by MacGregor -- is his tendency to say that things are so extreme that they cannot be described, or that they exceed anything that has happened in the real world. Again and again he tells us that some battle was so catastrophic that the best writers in the world could not describe it, or so catastrophic that it eclipsed all battles that have ever happened in reality. (This isn't all negative, either. The beauty and virtue of the Vivian girls are described with the same type of superlatives.) On one level this is just a cheap way to get powerful effects when you're not a good enough writer to achieve them directly. But it also forms a repeated refrain that affirms, again and again that despite their fundamental Unreality, the Realms are still bigger and more important than the real world. The Realms are far larger than Earth. The battles there involve millions of combatants. The stakes there are higher, the catastrophes bigger, the heroines more beautiful, the good military leaders more brave, the bad military leaders more vicious.
That last one is a very important point. The Glandelinean torture scenes are a major fulcrum of MacGregor's argument. To MacGregor, these scenes are examples of what Darger wanted to do but couldn't. We can tell that he really had these horrible, violent desires, because why else would he have spent hundreds of pages detailing such shocking, horrible scenes? Nobody in their right mind, MacGregor seems to suggest, would write about horrible stuff like that. (MacGregor even says that Darger "essentially had the mind of a serial killer," or something bizarre like that.) I dunno, maybe I have the mind of a serial killer, but the torture scenes described in the book didn't make that much of an impression on me. Horrible, yes. But humans write about horrible, violent things all the time, even horrible things happening to children. Has MacGregor never heard of Grimm's Tales? Moreover, depictions of sadistic violence are a classic way to convince your reader that a particular character is a bad, evil person. The Glandelinean torture scenes make perfect sense if we view them as symmetrical with all the platitudes about how wonderful the Vivian girls are, how virtuous the Catholics are, etc. (MacGregor doesn't, because his worldview is uninterested in morality as a source of psychological motivation, except insofar as it selects which desires must be repressed.) Darger really, really wants us to believe that his heroes are virtuous, his villains vicious, his war all-consuming. That all of this is a big thing that matters. So his villains are horrible, sadistic monsters. I hear that's pretty normal, for villains. It's not an exception to any particular rule.
This post is very, very long. (Though not as long as the Realms. *Rimshot!*) It's clear that I am kind of obsessed with Darger. And very annoyed with John MacGregor, though that's mostly because when you read (most of) a 700-page book with a persistently annoying author, you build up a lot of collected frustration. I guess the crux of the issue is that Darger's strangeness, his alienness, is precisely what makes him captivating to me. Most humans spend most of their time doing the same things, over and over again. It is exciting to hear tell of a man who broke the pattern, who did something else. As whimsical as this might sound, it is easy for me to enter a state of mind in which is seems inequitable that only one man has spent his life in the Realms of the Unreal, when billions of us spend ours in the same real world. I want to imagine new possibilities, new universes, places -- and ways of being -- that no one has ever been. And, to put it a bit dramatically, people like John MacGregor do not understand this: they want every fantasy of true escape to reduce ultimately to a failure of this little world to match up to some little, ordinary desire. For all of Darger's creepy and perverse tendencies, the image of him sitting there in his room, bounding through the endless Realms of the Unreal with his seven girl companions -- running off at a right angle to all real things, deeper and deeper into uncharted territory -- is an inspiring one. Not everything comes back to sex, anger, death, the things we've failed to do in the here and now. Sometimes we just want to run away to somewhere truly different.