Darger's resources

170 Pages·2012·4.104 MB·English

by  Michael Moon

Darger’s resources

Michael Moon Darger’s resources
Duke University Press
Durham anD LonDon
2012
© 2012 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of
the College of Arts and Sciences, and the James T. Laney School
of Graduate Studies, both at Emory University, which provided
funds toward the production of this book.
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper ♾
Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan
Typeset in Quadraat by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data appear
on the last printed page of this book.
Frontispiece: Darrell McClure. “Little Annie Rooney.”
Newspaper clipping altered by Darger from the collection
of Henry Darger. Collection American Folk Art Museum,
New York. © Kiyoko Lerner 2003.
To the memory of henry Darger,
with gratitude and admiration, and
yet once more to Jonathan goLDberg,
with thanks, as Setsuko Hara says in
Ozu’s Late Spring, for these years.

contents
Preface ix
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 ..... Darger’s Book of Martyrs 25
Chapter 2 ..... Rotten Truths, Wasted Lives, Spoiled Collections:
Darger’s Work and the Brontës’ Juvenilia 43
Chapter 3 ..... Abduction, Adoption, Appropriation:
Darger and the Early Newspaper Comic Strip;
or, Reading Around in the Ruins of a Proletarian
Public Sphere 79
Chapter 4 ..... Weird Flesh, World’s Flesh:
Darger and the Pulps 101
Notes 131
Bibliography 141
Acknowledgments 145
Index 149

Preface
Darger: classic or
PostconteMPorary?
soMe PreliMinary
consiDerations
When I first started studying Henry Darger’s work in earnest about a decade
ago, there was a lot of heat around the question of whether he might have
perpetrated the kinds of acts he depicts in some passages of his writings
and in his paintings that show children being strangled and eviscerated by
sadistic adults. During the years since, some needful breathing space has
opened up, in which most of those who write about the work seem less in-
clined to take the depiction of a fantasy as evidence of the commission of an
act, or even of the intention to commit it. It is my hope that this book may
contribute to the consideration of Darger as someone who, by virtue of his
massive and lifelong project of writing and art, took on the role of witness to
the terrible ordinariness of violence in the history of the twentieth century—
especially violence against children, and specifically against girls.
Much of the public discourse around Darger of a decade ago proceeded
in a fairly tight loop between points of paranoid suspicion: on the one hand,
in paying attention to and enjoying Darger’s work, might we (after the fact,
anyway) somehow be aiding and abetting a pedophile serial killer, either
actual or would-b e? On the other hand is the defensive response, which often
says that to appear to be obsessed with certain forms of violence does not