Henry Darger: The Royal Historian of Oz

This last Thursday I had the opportunity to visit New York City and the American Folk Art Museum on 53rd St. where I got to see some original Henry Darger artwork. 

Wikipedia describes Darger, (1892-1973) as “a reclusive American writer and artist who worked as a custodian in Chicago, Illinois.

He has become famous for his posthumously discovered 15,145-page, single-spaced fantasy manuscript called 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, along with several hundred drawings and watercolor paintings illustrating the story.

Darger’s work has become one of the most celebrated examples of outsider art.”

Darger’s magnum opus is about peaceful Catholic Kingdoms under assault from Glandelinians, who practice the horrible crime of Child Slavery. According to Pil and Galia Kollectiv, who wrote and Essay on Darger:

…for all the bizarre situations and the unique style of The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, as Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, Darger invented nearly nothing. The twisted narratives, the excruciatingly detailed sadistic battle descriptions, the romantic plots and the adventurous exploits of his protagonists were more often than not copied verbatim from such classics as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Wizard of Oz, plagiarised from historical accounts and newspaper clippings, mostly revolving around the Civil War but also regarding the matters of the day. These stories were meshed into a fictional narrative so convoluted and complicated that even Darger was unable to arrange it in any coherent order.

Darger’s appropriated from children’s literature not only ideas, but characters. Darger was a huge fan of L. Frank Baum’s, but more importantly, Darger was continuing Baum’s legacy. Darger reportedly greatly prized the Baum books in his collection.

When Baum died, the mantel of “Royal Historian of Oz” was passed to Ruth Plumly Thompson, a capable if uninspired writer too often given to formula and romance. Though she wrote under the L. Frank Baum byline, the stories she contributed to the series never lived up to the original 14 novels Baum produced. The magic, it seems, had gone out of Oz.

But not out of Darger. While Baum’s publisher, Reilly and Lee, sought to promulgate the fiction that Ruth Plumly Thompson was somehow the Royal Historian, in truth that job would fall to Henry Darger. His dark visions charted the exploits of a new and more dangerous space in the meme world of children’s literature. No longer were we in the safe realms of children’s fantasy, we were in the realms of the unreal, where fantasy and horror abutted one another uneasily.

Darger wrote of Child slavery, child murder, and explored his own confusion about, violence, sex, identity, good and evil. Darger didn’t idealize childhood, he confronted it, fighting the demons of childhood horror with the angels of fantasy. His Vivian Sisters, seven perfect little blond cherubs who fought fierce, deadly Civil War inspired battles with the evil, child enslaving soldiers sits thematically comfortable with Dare Wright’s Lonely Doll series or with the mythology of the Myths over Miami news report, in which street kids create an elaborate, dangerous and deadly mythology that reflects their situation.

As I write this I realize that I am weaving together a very complex tapestry that, like Darger’s epic work, is getting away from me. I will leave you with just a few final thoughts. The repurposing of children’s literature into something darker and more adult is something we are very familiar with today.  Comic book characters such as Batman have been treated with adult seriousness since well before Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight and Alan Moore’s Watchmen, so we are more used to seeing them today.

The difference is that most of these later works are conscious of the wider psychological implications of such work, where as Darger seems to be shooting straight from the Id, without filter or embarrassment. Perhaps this is because he never truly believed anyone else would ever read or view his work, and his lack of self-consciousness has allowed himself to explore where few of us are ready to go.