Magical Laughter: Humour and Play as Subtexts in Angela Makholwa's The Blessed Girl (2017)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51415/ajims.v7i2.3709Keywords:
humour, laughter, Makholwa, play, subtextAbstract
Angela Makholwa’s novel, The Blessed Girl (2017), suggests that the blesser-blessee phenomenon is an extreme manifestation of uncurbed lust and unbridled urge for material accumulation. Thus, both the blesser and blessee are figures of discontentment and mirror the dominant attributes of contemporary urban South Africa. Makholwa relentlessly satirises the pervasive spirit of sexual greed and the extreme desire for material goods through her sustained humorous and playful depiction of the infamous South African the blesser-blessee phenomenon. Makholwa’s achievement lies in that humour and play are not dispensable and auxiliary communicative strategies subordinated to a seemingly urgent need to pass moral judgement. Humour and play are integral to the articulation of the thematic concerns of the novel. They serve as the subtext of Makholwa’s fiction that satirises the toxic and destructive nature of the blesser-blessee relationships in order to give, in the Nietzschean formulation, aesthetic delight rather than moral pleasure.
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