Abstract
This essay argues that absurdist humor, so often theorized as a challenge to metaphysical and identitarian claims, in fact supports such claims within the context of anticolonial nationalist melodrama. In his Trilogy of the Bells [2019], Palestinian writer Ibrahim Nasrallah uses the conventions of melodrama to make an epistemological claim specific to Palestinian experience. Confronting a regime that has been largely successful in determining the internationally accepted common sense about the conflict, Nasrallah aims to present the external world with a narrative of Palestinian history, experience, and aspirations. The Manichean distinctions, spectacular displays of pathos, and manifestations of suppressed secrets proper to melodrama constitute a dramaturgy of the truth amidst a situation in which such truth-claims often cannot be heard. Rather than undermining the totalizing claims about national identity and justice that melodrama stages, humor indexes and manages the tensions that emerge to trouble these understandings. In particular, humor here responds to two kinds of dangers, the collaborator and the seemingly invincible oppressor. By representing the collaborator as a guileless figure, more ridiculous than dangerous, Nasrallah affirms that national unity cannot be threatened by internal prevarications; conversely, by depicting an overbearing Israeli military commander as susceptible to humiliation by Palestinian cunning, he suggests that the barriers to the manifestation of Palestinian truth-claims in the international public sphere are not insuperable. Absurdist humor may thus corroborate melodramatic ends by satirizing colonial rule as unreasonable and by identifying the truths suppressed by such rule as a source of collective joy.
Recommended Citation
Spanos, Adam V
"Melodramatic Joy in Ibrahim Nasrallah’s Trilogy of the Bells."
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
26.2
(2024):
<https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.4073>
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