Thank heaven for little girls

Art in America, Jan, 1998 by Richard Vine

But whence comes the suffering in The Realms of the Unreal? The traditional theistic explanation is that evil results from sin, which is itself a deliberate turning away from God. (Given his obsessive church-going, Darger must have been thoroughly imbued with such orthodox homilies as well as with the gory biographies of saints and martyrs.) In the throes of the Aronburg crisis, the artist, sounding a bit like Christ in extremis on the Cross, lamented, "I have had to endure too many unfair trials.... God is too cruel to me." This reads suspiciously like blasphemy. One is reminded that many 19th-century commentators accused Milton, Darger's great precursor in the attempt "to justify the ways of God to man," of in fact making Satan the unacknowledged hero of his epic, thus subverting his own avowed purpose. Similarly, Darger invents, and perhaps too rapturously describes, the very dangers from which his child-slaves must be saved. They are punished, it seems, for and by their creator's lewd compulsions. His is a world -- and a mind -- in which horror and sentimentality exist cheek-by-jowl, each forever being overwhelmed by, or turning into, the other at a moment's notice.

Darger probably regarded himself, at some level, as a child enslaved. (After all, who doesn't? -- and he had better grounds than most.) We may never know what ideas, lustful or otherwise, this loner had about flesh-and-blood little girls prancing about in actual schoolyards. But we know for a certainty that he produced a remarkable work of art in which, in an appropriationist gesture of great moral efficacy (and ambiguity), he "used" images of little girls as the most compelling possible symbol of human vulnerability and resourcefulness within a universe that defies ultimate comprehension.

Darger was born just 27 years after the end of the Civil War (comparable, in our own time, to the 23 years that have elapsed since the fan of Saigon). A student of that internecine conflict and a man always attuned to military matters, he lived to see his country engaged in the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War and the Vietnam War. Long before TV brought carnage into our living rooms with the evening news, he depicted -- in images of heartbreaking directness -- the arbitrary carnage of "total war," indeed of all man-made and all natural disasters. That he did so without, in the end, losing either his religious faith or his appreciation for childish beauty suggests a "solution" completely at odds with comforting post-modernist ironies. In his scenario, evil derives from sin, and sin derives from misguided free will. It is only when Darger finally accepts the loss of the Aronburg photo (and, by extension, the loss of his sister and his own juvenile freedom) -- only when he subordinates his illicit desires to an inscrutable Divine Will -- that the war can draw to its proper close, in the hard-won Christian victory that brings a "peace which passeth all understanding."