“Am I Dead?”: Slapstick Antics and Dark Humor in Contemporary Immigrant Fiction

Abstract

Nearly a century later, Aleksandar Hemon’s fiction, particularly his novella Blind Jozef Pronek and the Dead Souls, in the collection The Question of Bruno (2000), and his novel The Lazarus Project (2008) reinvents the mirror scene. Hemon transforms the physical comedy of the Marx Brothers into a form of slapstick capacious enough to include pathos in order to dramatize the threat and reality of death in immigrant lives. Like Junot Díaz, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Teju Cole, Dinaw Mengestu, Edwidge Danticat, among others, Hemon is part of a new wave of immigrant writers that, while working in the US, nevertheless rejects the predominant trajectory of its immigrant narratives—“stories of upward mobility tinged with nostalgia for the motherland and animated by the character’s struggle to balance individual desires and the demands of the family or community.”5 Instead, Hemon narrates the lives of those who barely survive displacement and eulogizes those who perish altogether. The immigrant figure has been represented, at least in American fiction, as a Whitmanesque character that can contain if not multitudes at least two or more cultural traditions of response to events in the world. Hemon explores the possibility of the immigrant as a figure of stasis struggling with reinvention, turning his attention to the dark loneliness and comic absurdity of individuals who often fail to contain disparate realities.