An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies
An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies is about the so-called outsider artist Henry Darger (1892-1973), who for decades spent his days as a custodian mopping floors at various Chicago hospitals, his nights writing (one of his novels, In the Realms of the Unreal, is 15,145 pages long; all went unpublished) and making over 350 collages (also never seen by another human in his lifetime) depicting the horrific adventures of the hermaphroditic Vivian Girls whose mission was to save a world filled with child slaves, a metaphor for the one which Darger inhabited.
Olsen’s novel, accompanied by discordant images by collagist Andi Olsen, is interested in capturing Darger’s radical interiority, his non-sequitur imagination, through an intensely subjective first-person point of view.
Looking to writers like Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, and José Saramago for companionship, An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies raises questions about for whom we really create at the end of the day; about reading as problem; about the importance of serious art as a hospital for soothing hurt rather than as a business privileging quantity over quality.
“Time slips from one past into another past, provoking us, reminding us, sometimes with an ache as deep as an ocean, sometimes with a joy that floats in the air like the petal of a yellow flower. Lance Olsen’s An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies guides us into a dark tunnel of life and fills it with light. And wonder. The soul, as a concept, has gone out of fashion but this book imagines the word anew, as a realization, a dedication, a gift.”
—John Haskell, author of I Am Not Jackson Pollock and Trying to Be
—Christopher Sorrentino, author of The Fugitives and Now Beacon, Now Sea
“Henry Darger’s consciousness is an uncharted territory with portals to the terrifying and terrified children of his imagination. There is no better guide to this landscape than Lance Olsen’s An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies. Olsen accesses the reclusive Darger with both sharpness and compassion, mining the artist’s memory of trauma, moving seamlessly between Darger’s last days, his life as a hospital custodian, and the hidden world of his art and prose epics, the adventures of the Vivian Girls. Darger imagined he was creating art for an audience of one. Olsen flips the switch on that inner projector and with this gorgeous narrative gives the artist’s mysterious consciousness a map and a voice.”
—Susan Daitch, author of The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir, Siege of Comedians, and The Adjudicator
—Joanna Scott, author of Follow Me, Careers for Women, and Excuse Me While I Disappear
“To step inside Olsen’s Dargerverse is to step inside a mapparium of the twentieth century—genomic with harm and pleasure, rainy with war and work, as singular and mesmerically inclusive as paper money or the tinsel stars that drift from the draped interior ceiling of a lowdown side-show tent.”
—Joyelle McSweeney, author of Death Styles
“Exploring imaginative landscapes of radical interiority, Olsen’s An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies celebrates art’s transformation of trauma’s invisible wounds into worlds of allegorical wonder.”
–Aimee Parkison, Body of Evidence and Girl Zoo
“Lance Olsen is an ever more dazzling magician of the mind.”
—Melanie Rae Thon, author of Sweet Hearts and As If Fire Could Hide Us
“Lance Olsen’s new novel An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies is about the ultimate outsider artist, Henry Darger. Darger’s soulfully deranged narration offers comedy layered over horror, braced by a poet’s sense of the music of language. He resides “in an archeological dig composed of his own ruins,” but how rich Olsen makes the digging and how wondrous the ruins. In the end, however, like Federico Fellini before him, Olsen creates ‘in order to find himself free.’”
—Curits White, author of The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves and Requiem