Héphaïstos l’africain
Hephaestus the African

Author(s): Bessem Aloui
Subject(s): Social Sciences, Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Sociology, Studies in violence and power, Theory of Literature
Published by: Editura Junimea
Keywords: Africain literature; Violence; Laugh; Irony; Tragic; Labou Tansi;
Summary/Abstract: For Labou Tansi, literature is a process that takes form necessarily through laughter. Unlike the Nietzschean laughter which proposes the annihilation of all things, it is a creative laughter that calls into being the experience of reconstruction. Laughter does not only draw on the comic, but it digs into the tragic and weaves affinities with the demonic in a complicity that desacralizes the universe and establishes a joyful story of horror announcing an apocalyptic vision which haunts the fictional universe of this Congolese writer. We laugh because the violence associated with this laughter exceeds our consent. Laughing, for Labou Tansi, is a duty of / against violence. By its brilliance, it rejects the norms, meets the forbidden and wants to be excess and delirium. It is colorful, ambivalent and acts on a reader who, in front of this show of opposites, is always torn between crying and laughing.

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