(There has to be) a way out

A dysfunctional family tries to make sense of their lives

So my sister Ada is close to getting her college degree in visual art. Her diploma work is a comic book about a girl called Darlene, her abusive mother, her negligent father, and her way out of it all. The comic will be available at the Hungarian Comic Market on October 13. Here's my review/teaser/opinion on it. If you'd like to avoid minor spoilers, only read the last section, titled "Overall".

The first disclaimer should be that I'm no artist, nor a conoisseur, so any artistic references or relation to any of the "ism''s are hopelessly lost on me. I'm writing this piece mostly to promote my sister's work, but also because I think abuse in the family is a topic in great need of a broader societal discussion. The second disclaimer is that, as far as I'm aware, this isn't a true story.

Violence is ownership

Abuse in the family, especially that of children, is different from all other physical or emotional violence I know of because there is no legal, practical, or socially acceptable way for its survivors to escape from it. Unless the family is very poor and the level of violence is very visible, the abusers can do pretty much whatever they want with their victims without fear of reprisals. Corporal punishment of children for instance is so common and so accepted that you can literally take your child, smack him/her around in a public place and no one is going to move a single muscle to stop you. Even if they did, there's nothing any onlooker, or any government authority for that matter, can do to improve the child's situation.

21st century human societies are still built around the fundamental building block of family, therefore, neither our institutions nor our collective psyche is adequately prepared to deal with violence within it. So, unlike the moral (non-)issues that dominate day-to-day discussions like gay marriage, abortion, animal rights, premarital sex, euthanasia, drinking from plastic cups, or frigging stem cell research, violence against children by their parents doesn't get much attention. To even attempt to rectify the situation would require a questioning of the view that parents have complete legal authority of their children.

Sounds unthinkable? Consider the following: Most of us agree that violence is bad in our society. Most of us probably even agree that violence against children is bad in our society. When it comes to violence, however, the unfortunate reality is this:

Violence may occur on every single link of our social network.

Complete strangers, colleagues, friends, spouses, and close family members all have the capacity to hurt one another. Moreover, the more time you spend in someone's vicinity, the more chance they have to hurt you. Therefore, by far the most obvious source of violence is one's own family.

It is probably true that we've made major strides as a species to put an end to physical violence, and the biggest steps along the way came when we ended the ownership of humans. By parting with the idea that people belonged to the ruler of the land they lived in we ended arbitrary violence between the state and the citizens, an achievement barely 200 years old. When we ended legal slavery we ended violence at work, an achievement about 150 years old. In the last century we've been mostly successful in criminalizing spousal abuse. Just like lords no longer owning serfs, plantation managers no longer owning slaves, modern husbands do not own their wives. In every aspect of our society we strive towards the ideal of a partnership of equals where participants are free to sever any link of their social network. But not with children, not yet.

It is clear to me that the question of ending violence against children isn't just about how we feel about slapping a child in order to teach them discipline and what can laughingly be called respect. The question is

are we ready to redefine the rights of parents towards their children?

I assert that there will be no advance against child abuse until we are.

Ada doesn't go this far in her comic. Nevertheless, her work touches upon this idea subtly and beautifully. Both Darlene and her father Fred are trying to find their way out of the family. For the father - who, incidentally, is also suffering from a lack of a sense of achievement in his mundane work which he could legally quit at any time - the way out involves putting on a sad face, seeking out a surprisingly jovial divorce lawyer, and signing some papers. For Darlene, this is a much more problematic journey. Will she get on a bus that will take her to her father? Will she seek therapy to painfully confront her anxiety that's been haunting her? Will she simply hang herself? According to the extended title, there has to be a way out for her as well, but can any of the ways out bring any improvement to her life?

And what becomes of the infant brother, who may have developed a taste for hanging plush toys by their necks and who, no matter what happens to Darlene, remains in the mother's care?

Very good stuff.

There is way out but there is no end

To me, the true punch of the comic is at the end. More precisely, in how it does not end. After decades of conditioning by mass culture I suspect most people have an idea in mind about how stories should end. Stories end with some sort of a confrontation between the protagonist and the antagonist, followed by a catharsis. Whether or not it's a happy end is immaterial in this case.

The problem is that it would be extremely dishonest for stories about abuse to end this way. Both the confrontation and the catharsis require the principal characters to seek to impose their will on the other and gain something from the confrontation.

Think about the ending of Carrie by Stephen King (warning: 40 year-old spoilers). Carrie is emotionally and physically abused by her caricature of a fundamentalist religious mother who sees her as a spawn of the devil. Carrie in turn develops telekinetic powers which manifest when she is in distress. At the end of the story, after Carrie is humiliated by her school bullies and she ends up destroying the school, the bullies, and much of the town, she finally confronts her mother. She seeks justice for the torment she had endured while her mother admits to the abuse but seeks to justify them as God's will. They're very much on the same page on the fact that the abuse happened but their view on it is - obviously - different. Confrontation. The scene ends with the mother attacking Carrie with a knife and Carrie killing her by stopping her heart with her powers. Catharsis.

As much as I liked Carrie when I read it, this scene bothers me immensely. The less important reason for this is that it gives the impression that child abuse is the work of religious nutcases. While I'd find it easy to believe that abuse is associated with religious parents, this is a lazy oversimplification. Abusive parents can be otherwise very loving and completely non-religious. More important is the fact that, very often, the abuser's perspective of events is so different from the victim's that the abuser, instead of justifying his/her actions, does not even acknowledge them. There is no confrontation, because that would require a mutual understanding, which is simply lacking in most cases. The abuser is understandably not incentivized to face the victim. Achieving catharsis, be it forgiveness, a mutually beneficial split, or even a Stephen-Kingian final fight (let's not talk about murder) is impossible for the victim. The abuse thus remains meaningless and unforgiven. It never dies.

Again, Ada hits the nail right on the head when it comes to the resolution, or lack thereof, of abuse. Darlene seemingly leaves her mother but there is clearly not a hint of a possibility for a tearful reconnection, or even a final fight, be it physical or verbal, between them. They don't even say goodbye. Her final confrontation takes place in a therapy session where she reluctantly begins to talk about her ordeals and banish her anxiety. This is contrasted with the mother's story. The story of the abuse she endured in her own childhood ends only when news of her abuser's death reaches her. She feels nothing to hear the news and carries on her aggressive behavior in the next scene. Catharsis of any kind is absent both times.

It's tough. A part of our brain is hardwired to find meaning in everything, to decrypt the randomness that surrounds us, to make sense of all the wonder and horror. There is a yearning in victims to find meaning in their abuse just like there's a yearning by our conditioned brains for a catharsis at the end of a story. The readers of this short comic are denied that. Just like the victim, they keep yearning, and fearing, a satisfying conclusion.

Overall

In a perfect world, most readers will get very little out of Ada's comic. The quality of the drawings is inconsistent, there is no plot, the text is minimalistic, and the story zig-zags a lot between the three characters.

Yet, and I say this honestly, with by bias as a brother put aside as much as I can, Ada's comic is more meaningful and more nuanced than any other work I remember reading, seeing, or hearing in this subject matter. For a person with an average knowledge about family drama in art who is looking to gain an in-depth understanding of dysfunctional families, this is well worth the read. And well worth the price of 3 euros at the Hungarian Comic Market on October 13 :)

If you're not able to attend but you are interested, write me and we'll figure it out.

October 11, 2019

Comments and questions should be addressed at peter.bayer7@gmail.com.