Henry Darger and Joseph Cornell

In considering both Henry Darger and Joseph Cornell this week, we see two artists who strive to depict idealized childhood in their work, but instead give their audiences a window into the world of pathological child worship and the prisons they make for the girls at the heart of their imagery.  As we’ve seen in both the cases of J.M. Barrie and Lewis Carroll, the imaginatively gifted Cornell and Darger express their love of idealized childhood through great works of art and literature.  Work that is, at least in the eyes of these artists, meant to allow childhood to ascend to its rightful place upon the top of the developmental ladder.  However, as we view their pieces – understanding the fact that we bring the passing of time and our own lenses and prejudices with us to this viewing – disturbing obsessions, fetishes, desires and symbolisms rise to the surface.

In Cornell we find a man driven simply by the desire to document, catalogue and present to the world the childhood perfection that has been captured by visual and material culture during his lifetime.  His collected work The Crystal Cage [Portrait of Berenice] is, in the words of Jodi Hauptman, “a search for Berenice” those “documents, photographs, prints, memorabilia, etc” of young girls who are, in the eyes of Cornell,  “symbolical of perpetual youth” (Hauptman, pg. 163).  Cornell obsessed over the idea that “seeing a child is evanescent” and in the artist’s own words, “over in a flash” (Pg. 168).  Cornell’s response to this ephemera was to collect, bottle, box, film, and otherwise capture the children (both famous and ordinary) he felt represented the fictional Berenice, or child of perfect youthful imagination, brilliance, beauty and innocence, he so passionately created and housed (or imprisoned?) in the crystal pagoda.

Yet there seems to be a more troubling side to the nearly compulsive clipping, pasting, collecting and observing of Cornell.  While believing he was seeing these children of Hollywood or print media as they really were, he lacks the perspective of Hauptman who states that, by its very nature, the look or arrangement or collecting by an adult “fixes and defines” these children on the terms of the adult.  By framing and presenting the children – and his perceptions and desires about them – Cornell could manipulate their childishness to serve his own needs.  He could deny their inevitable maturation, he could deny their passions, and ultimately, he could deny both their undefined, threatening sexuality and his apparent discomfort with his own.  So in the end, as Hauptman so astutely argues, the crystal pagoda becomes not only the telescopic-microscope through with the adult can understand the being and wisdom of childhood perfection, but the lens through which his audience can better come to know Cornell himself.

Similarly, Henry Darger struggled to capture the evanescence of childhood through his representation of young girls both is his collages and in his fictional tome In the Realms of the Unreal.   While Cornell clung to idealizations of childhood with the ultimate hope of stopping the passage of time, Darger collected the images of little girls as if he was adopting them, bringing them into the world of his expansive imagination.  The world these girls inhabited was seemingly borderless and full of adventure, but it was also dark and the setting in which Darger allowed for the fulfillment of his often violent and sexually devious fantasies.  Throughout his rich and often intense fiction and in his collage paintings of the scenes that he created, we see the confusion and anger within Darger – the result of a traumatizing childhood, although Deleuze might not agree with such a formulaic diagnosis – expressed artistically.  Hermaphroditic little girls (reproductions of the images he saved over a lifetime) are cut and pasted into scenes of either intensely beautiful landscapes or intensely graphic violence, often featuring disembowelment.  In the end, Darger’s fantasies about a life for the little sister he never had, and his anger at a God who seems to have forgotten his pain, lead Darger to seek the same possession of childhood we see in Cornell, but where Cornell self-identified as innocent and as asexual as any child and sought to remove the child from life and the passing of time, Darger adopted his imagery as his own and painted or wrote these fictional little girls into lives of adventure, violence and often death.  Once again, the images of childhood presented by Darger tell us little about the actuality of the girls we see, but volumes about the man behind the lens.

Alice, Carroll, and Deleuze

In considering this week’s readings, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground in particular, we are able to consider the character of Alice from a new perspective.  Much like the character of Peter Pan in J.M. Barrie’s classic by the same name, there is much more to Alice than what meets the eye.  She is a seemingly ordinary girl for her time, but more importantly she is a young girl that embodies a number of our cultural archetypes surrounding children.  Alice’s natural curiosity, her commonness, her innate ability to commune and converse with animals and even her precociousness reflect the idealized and romanticized childishness that Carroll not only captured with his pen, but captured in his provocative photography of young boys and girls as well.  Alice undoubtedly represents a romanticized vision of childhood on the exterior, but as we delve not only into the rabbit hole but into the psyche of Alice as well, darker possibilities begin to wash up on the shore.

Gilles Deleuze looks at Alice’s Adventures through a different lens in his critique “Thirteen Series of the Schizophrenic.”  As the title suggests, Deleuze recognizes this darker side as “the language of schizophrenia” (Deleuze, pg. 84).  We can see throughout Alice’s adventure the shadow of this disorder in her apparent inability to feel comfortable in her own skin and the nagging sense of loss surrounding her own identity.  Deleuze lists “body-sieve, fragmented body, and dissociated body” as “the three primary dimensions of the schizophrenic body” (Pg. 87).  We see in Alice at least two of these body types as she seems to lose track of her feet, shoulders, arms and hands at various points throughout her adventures (the fragmented body) and is unable to frame her own dimensionality at several other points along the way (the dissociated body).  Further evidence of Alice’s bifurcated concept of self is seen in her internal dialogue as she scolds herself, consoles herself and even questions herself in the company of the caterpiller: "I—I hardly know, sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since that" (Carroll, lines 49-50).

These seemingly schizophrenic moments leave us questioning just who was the dreamer, or even the schizophrenic in the tale of Alice, the title character herself, or Carroll; simply fulfilling the “becoming” of Deleuze and Guattari.  Ultimately, as we follow Alice down the rabbit’s hole, we are left with as many questions about Carroll as about Alice; questions of childhood, adulthood, the journey between and the disruption of the self-identity of the mind – the clarity that Alice finds upon her awakening eludes us.

** The image is from a Vogue magazine spread featuring Alice in Wonderland

the boy who would never grow up

In J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, we’re told the story of a boy who turns his back on adulthood in favor of the simple fun and innocence of an endless childhood.  However, it is not the plot lines or twists and turns of Peter, Wendy and the Lost Boys of Never Land that speak to the truth of what an everlasting childhood might mean.  As Jacqueline Rose argues in The Case of Peter Pan, what goes unsaid or is left to be read between the lines is what truly shines the light of inquiry on this subject.  It becomes clear that Barrie’s tale is more one of adult ideas about an idealized (even desired) childhood, than it is a story for children about some supposedly shared cultural experience called “growing up.”

Without question, Rose’s assertion that children’s fiction is a “soliciting, a chase, or even seduction” (Rose, pg. 2) is quite clearly seen in Peter Pan.  Barry creates a world that is both utterly safe and utterly adventurous, where children can remain playful, innocent, imaginative and free of adult seriousness endlessly.  Where little boys can fight pirates and catch mermaids and little girls can mother the Lost Boys of Never Land to their heart’s content.  Aside from the obvious recognition within the play that little boys and girls have gender roles to fulfill as they grow and mature, the young characters of Peter Pan are making it clear that there exists a distinct sexuality to childhood that cannot simply be ignored or trivialized (Pg. 14).  So the question of what adult audiences – or in the case of Barrie, authors – are either consciously or subconsciously trying to accomplish with this fictional “solicitation” comes to the fore.

The answer to that question seems to lie within the character of Peter Pan himself.  Pan is weightless, he cannot be touched, he has a masterful imagination, no need for memory and is the object of desire for at least 2 female characters (Tiger Lily making 3), yet can conceive of no relationship to them other than one of son to doting mother.  He can play the role of caring father as easily as the role of savior, both of which, in the eyes of Pan, pale in comparison to the childish joy of adventure and the playing of his hand made pan-pipes.  And so, as we see a boy who is hardly more than an idea, so we see the reflection of adult desires for childhood and the innocence, undeveloped sexuality, and permanence so often ascribed to it in the guise of children’s fiction.

welcome to the attic...

The time will come
When, with elation,
You will greet yourself arriving
at your own door...

Derek Walcott