Henry Darger (1892-1973) was a hospital janitor and an immensely productive artist and writer. In the first decades of adulthood, he wrote a 15,145-page fictional epic, In the Realms of the Unreal. He spent much of the rest of his long life illustrating it in astonishing drawings and watercolors. In Darger's unfolding saga, pastoral utopias are repeatedly savaged by extreme violence directed at children, particularly girls. Given his disturbing subject matter and the extreme solitude he maintained throughout his life, critics have characterized Darger as eccentric, deranged, and even dangerous, as an outsider artist compelled to create a fantasy universe. Contesting such pathologizing interpretations, Michael Moon looks to Darger's resources, to the narratives and materials that inspired him and often found their way into his writing, drawings, and paintings. Moon finds an artist who reveled in the burgeoning popular culture of the early twentieth century, in its newspaper comic strips, pulp fiction, illustrated children's books, and mass-produced religious art. Moon contends that Darger's work deserves and rewards comparison with that of contemporaries of his, such as the "pulp historians" H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Howard, the Oz chronicler L. Frank Baum, and the newspaper cartoonist Bud Fisher.
Industry Reviews
"Darger's Resources is a masterful, witty, and moving contribution to Americanist scholarship. It is also an important book, one which will significantly alter the terms of Darger criticism in art history and expand the vocabulary of queer theory in an urgently needed way. Michael Moon links the practice of recuperating texts from punishing or pathologizing interpretations to a context based more on class and religion than on sexuality. In doing so, he provides a model of how to export some of the best innovations of queer studies to other cultural and historical terrain. Moon uses his recuperation of Darger to open up vistas of working-class cultural history." Christopher Nealon, author of Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall "Darger's Resources is an important, lively, and moving book. As he did when writing about Joseph Cornell in his book A Small Boy and Others, Michael Moon takes a difficult figure, this time the rather Cornellish Darger, and refuses to demonize him or normalize him." Carol Mavor, author of Reading Boyishly "Michael Moon explores the work of Henry Darger (1892-1973), the prolific "outsider artist" and writer who created a whole fictive universe populated by phalanxes of little girls perpetually endangered by marauding armies. In his down time from his lifelong work as a janitor, Darger wrote a 15,145-page epic, 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, then went on to illustrate it in drawings and watercolors he created with collaged images from comic books and advertising circulars." Roberto Friedman , Bay Area Reporter, May 17th 2012 "In Darger's Resources, author Michael Moon (who also penned the tome Displacing Homophobia) puts Darger's art in perspective, demonstrating how it was influenced and inspired by other creative works of the times, including comic strips, pulp fiction, and illustrated children's' books (especially Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz books) and freeing us up to appreciate Darger's work without worrying about our own moral compass. Even better, the author tackles Darger's cross-dressing or transgender kids, boys who are discovered to be girls, and nude girl warriors with male genitalia." Diane Anderson-Minshall, Advocate.com, September 27th 2012 "Since 2002, scholarship on the work of Henry Darger (1892-1973), a so-called "outsider artist" has operated within a psychoanalytic discourse, heralding the solipsistic nature of this enigmatic figure's art and writings. In his new book, Michael Moon successfully challenges such dominant pathologizing narratives by contextualizing Darger's written opus, The Realms of the Unreal, within early twentieth-century American culture. Moon reevaluates various material resources appropriated by Darger, not just as aesthetic or stylistic influences, but also as a complex and rich cognitive models." - Journal of American Studies, February 2013
