Misregarding Henry
This is gonna be a “big idea” article, hopefully the first of several. By the end, this one will connect Outsider Art, Star Trek-style fandom, The Wizard of Oz and documentary filmmaking. Fun, huh?
In the Realms of the Unreal is a 2004 documentary by filmmaker Jessica Yu. It’s subject is “Outsider Artist” Henry Darger (1892-1973). As a child, he spent time in an asylum, and worked his entire adult life as a janitor in a Catholic hospital in Chicago.
When Darger passed away, his landlords found his tiny apartment absolutely jammed with his manuscripts and hundreds of illustrations. His magnum opus was a lavishly illustrated manuscript: The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. You won’t find this in your neighborhood Borders anytime soon: It’s 15,145 single-spaced, legal-sized pages long. (The unfinished sequel is over 5,000 pages long.)
Darger’s landlords, Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner, happened to be bohemian artist types. They immediately recognized Darger as an “Outsider Artist,” a self-taught creative genius. His works are displayed as fine art and sold for thousands of dollars. His remarkable story inspired Jessica Yu to make her film about his life and art.
Her documentary is superb. It’s enamored in the mystery of Darger’s life, and has a tone that is plainly inquisitive, thoughtful and as spooky as a David Lynch film. Dakota Fanning narrates a good deal of it, which– along with some uncannily animated Darger illustrations– definitely gives it a look and feel unlike any documentary I’ve ever seen.
Having extolled it’s virtues, I’ll venture another, opposing opinion: The filmmaker, as well as the art community in general, have gravely misread Henry Darger.
I’m paraphrasing Stephen Prokopoff, curator of a Darger exhibition, who summarized his giant manuscript thusly:
Written as a children’s book, the story recounts the wars between nations on an enormous and unnamed planet, of which Earth is a moon. The conflict is provoked by the Glandelinians, who practice child enslavement. The heroines of Darger’s history are the seven Vivian sisters, Abbiennian princesses. They are aided in their struggles by a panoply of heroes. The battles are full of vivid incident: charging armies, ominous captures, alarms and explosions, and the appearances of supernatural beings.
Does any of this sound familiar?
In 1901, L. Frank Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It was a huge success, and spawned thirty-nine more Oz books. The popularity of his fantasy children’s books coincided with Darger’s childhood and adolescence. Like his magnum opus, they describe an alternate universe of conflict, magical creatures and unlikely heroes. And like Darger’s Vivian Girls, the stories are centered on strong, brave girls: Dorothy and Ozma. Oz books were found in Darger’s apartment.
In life, Henry Darger wasn’t an author or an artist– not in the elevated, refined sense defined by his fine-art aficionadoes and documentarians. He worked as a janitor and was never published.
Henry Darger was a fanboy, a fanshipper, the world’s first fanfic writer.
Baum’s vivid fantasy universe must have had a powerful effect on young Henry Darger, a lonely boy living in an institution. I’m drawing not only from the derivative relationship of Darger’s work from Baum’s, but from contemporary fan fiction I’ve read, fan art I’ve seen, and the way I’ve known some hardcore fan types to live (that is, in squalor). It’s all there: the lack of draftsmanship in his illustrations (Darger compensated for this with collages and photo-reproductions, much as some modern fan art uses PhotoShop manipulation), the manic, obsessive drive to create, and his breathless, loopy, unedited writing style.
Art historians and doc filmmakers have forged Darger’s image as a maverick artist and love to dissect his work looking for psychosexual content or autobiographical evidence of childhood torments. Apply Occam’s Razor to that baby: He was a hardcore Oz fan before fandom was invented, and way before it was considered appropriate for an adult to carry a deep connection to children’s entertainment.
Which, in it’s way, may be the tragic element of Henry Darger’s life story. Who knows how much more connected and healthy his life might have been with fan clubs and communities to join, and an Internet on which to share his prolific, enthusiastic creative proclivities?
–Skot C.
July 18th, 2007 at 9:20 am
I think you’re on to something here, Skot, though I would caution you about using modern terms (fanboy) to describe something historical, no matter how accurate the label might be.
One of the things that stayed with me after seeing the documentary is that Darger drew little girls with little penises. Now wait… he wasn’t a pervert… as the documentary points out, he probably NEVER saw a naked woman, so he only had himself as a reference to what might lie between the legs of another person. To me this illustrates the man’s incredibly limited life experience, and underscores his manic obsession with childrens fantasy literature.
July 18th, 2007 at 9:28 am
On the subject of applying modern terms to historical figures…
I watched “In Search of Mozart” this last weekend. As we all know from watching (and loving) the film, “Amadeus,” little Wolfie was a mincing, sex-crazed pervert with a filthy potty-mouth.
The film (In Search of…) is quick to point out the historical inaccuracies of the other film (Amadeus), amongst which is the fact that Papa Leopold and Wolfgang’s dear mother wrote love letters rife with filthy toilet humor, one extolling the other to go to bed and “shit and make it burst,” whatever that means. Another letter describes humans as mere “vessels for food and feces.”
And apparently everyone else in Salzburg, and probably all of Europe, during Mozart’s time loved to talk about poop and pee. Does this mean that we are more or less evolved with our comparitively Puritan feelings about bathroom humor?
July 18th, 2007 at 10:00 am
“In Search Of Mozart”… did anyone look behind the refrigerator?
I too saw that documentary in theatres several years back, and can recommend THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON as a similar peek into a troubled artistic mind. Johnston is a lot less rococco than Darger though, and has exhibted more violent tendancies. If you’re into that kinda thing.
Eagerly awaiting installment 2.
July 24th, 2007 at 8:05 am
[...] I was reflecting on the Henry Darger article previously and it got me thinking about Frank Baum’s Oz books. I read them all– My family inherited my great-grandmother’s original hardbounds, and they were the first full-sized books I ever read. Producers, I’m throwing out this challenge: produce the Oz Books as a movie series! Here are a few reasons why: [...]