Bosman’s Humorous Art and Existential Grace
摘要
This chapter discusses Bosman’s work in connection with existential grace: the redemptive or being-fulfilling emergence of a thing’s deeper truth. This discussion includes the way in which even terrible human failing and hardship can be treated from a redemptive perspective without failing to do justice to its harsh and ugly realities. The chapter focuses in particular on the racism in Bosman’s stories, since this ugly reality is both characteristic of the relevant South African context and, consequently, prominent in his writing. The argument, most basically, is that our morally negative features contain their own condemnation in their very nature as wrongs. As a result, to understand them truly means to understand their own self-rejection, with the outcome and message that not they but their opposites are true of life. This logic is also the foundation for the more general possibility of the being-fulfilling emergence of a thing’s deeper truth.