A tree full of hillbillies: grotesque humor in Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper explores humor in Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf, a novel radically different from other South African novels of the 1990s. In fact, Triomf recalls works by American Southern grotesque writers, for example the incest and devolution of families and cultures in Faulkner. Even more compelling is the resemblance between Van Niekerk’s novel and Flannery O’Connor’s fiction. In comparing Van Niekerk’s singular achievement to the effects of O’Connor’s fiction, I want to differentiate effects of the grotesque. Using similar techniques—grotesque bodies, racism, misogyny, violence, criminality, and corrosive humor—both writers create discomfort for the reader, but with a much different effect. We laugh at the white-trash Afrikaner Benades in Triomf, but we also laugh with them; they are abjectly corporeal characters set in a wickedly ironic social and political allegory. Skillfully using humor, Van Niekerk maintains the perfect proximity, enabling readers to get close enough to understand the Benades while preventing a false, simplistic empathy.