SOURCE: Bolton, Betsy. “Placing Violence, Embodying Grace: Flannery O'Connor's ‘Displaced Person.’” Studies in Short Fiction 34, no. 1 (winter 1997): 87-104.

[In the following essay, Bolton examines the relationship between vision and the violence experienced by the characters in “The Displaced Person.”]

Several years ago, Slavoj Zizek, considering the notion that “we live in a post-ideological society,” proposed instead a redefinition of ideology. The most elementary definition, he suggests, is a phrase from Marx's Capital: “Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es” (“they do not know it, but they are doing it”). In place of this definition, he invokes Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason and the following formulation of cynical ideology: “they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it” (Zizek 28-29). News coverage of massacres in Bosnia and other places makes the cynicism of contemporary ideology especially vivid. With images of violence and disaster wired into most American homes, it is difficult to claim that one does not know what is going on—across the world or down the street. In some ways, however the very extent of available information seems to disable action. In the words of Terence des Pres, “[t]hanks to the technological expansion of consciousness, we cannot not know the extent of political torment; and in truth it may be said that what others suffer, we behold” (qtd. in Hartman 29). In a world where all points are equidistant from the TV viewer, all points can seem equally far away. Suffering is everywhere but in the “I” of the beholder.

In this essay, I want to explore the relationship between vision and violence, what is suffered and what beheld, in Flannery O'Connor's short story, “The Displaced Person.” The story is structured around a newsreel image of the Holocaust—the momentarily frozen picture of a room piled high with bodies—and concerns itself both with the attempt to make sense of that vision and with the proliferation of violence that image seems to produce. I will argue that the technology of O'Connor's storytelling offers a (still violent) alternative to the violent technology of images the story explicitly thematizes.

Two quite different essays by Walter Benjamin may help to frame the kinds of technology at work in “The Displaced Person.” “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction” presents him as one modern point of intersection between technology and art. The essay describes film as the art of distraction, altering the “apperceptive apparatus” of modern people, helping them adapt to the changing demands of a newly technical world. “The film is the art form that is in keeping with the increased threat to his life which modern man has to face. … The film corresponds to profound changes in the apperceptive apparatus—changes that are experienced on an individual scale by the man in the street in big-city traffic, on a historical scale by every present-day citizen” (250). Benjamin suggests that people learn to take in and respond to the massive increase in information signals by being exposed to the perceptual techniques of film. Contemplation of paintings gives way in film to a process of tactile appropriation, the kind of process performed by the user of a building: the structure is not contemplated from afar, but appropriated through use, through contact. The contemplation of a painting suggests perception at a distance, while the experience Benjamin wants to capture is a kind of negative distance, a remotely shocking innovation of the self. Time, tide and film wait for no one. “No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested. ‘I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images’” (238). In the process of tactile appropriation, the subject as well as the image may be appropriated. The film constructs the viewer.

Benjamin insists on seeing film as a cure or solution to the increasing shocks that modern flesh is heir to. Yet the imagery of healing is itself somewhat shocking in this text. The critic offers an analogy in which a magician represents the work of a painting; a surgeon, the work of a film:

The magician heals a sick person by the laying on of hands; the surgeon cuts into the patient's body. The magician maintains the natural distance between the patient and himself; though he reduces it very slightly by the laying on of hands, he greatly increases it by virtue of his authority. The surgeon does exactly the reverse; he greatly diminishes the distance between himself and the patient by penetrating into the patient's body, and increases it but little by the caution with which his hand moves among the organs. … [T]he surgeon at the decisive moment abstains from facing the patient man to man; rather, it is through the operation that he penetrates into him.

(233)

Technology penetrates so far into the film (and the viewer) that it vanishes from sight, though its disembodied hand remains at work within the apperceptive organs of the viewer.

“The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction” presents human beings themselves as a certain kind of technology, an apperceptual apparatus that is undergoing alteration. “The Storyteller” mourns the loss of experience, the loss of an earlier mode of perception that could still lay claim to counsel and wisdom. In the twentieth century, information replaces experience; the storyteller gives way to the newspaper—or to the modern novel as an experience of isolation. At one point, Benjamin ties the loss of experience quite directly to war and the technologies of war:

With the [First] World War a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent—not richer, but poorer in communicable experience? … [N]ever has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.

(84)

The rhetoric of this passage fights a kind of rearguard action against the loss of experience, detailing the challenges faced by the “fragile human body” trying to make sense of the contradictions it confronts. That fragile human body remains the kernel of a possible story that could be made out of the war and its aftermath.

In “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin proposes film as a mode of transformation, an art that teaches viewers how to exist in a new age of information. In “The Storyteller,” however, he attributes the very possibility of counsel and wisdom to the story—not the modern short story, but the folk story. Stories that embody experience and carry counsel were, he suggests, traditionally told in a rural setting, in a state not of distraction but of boredom, so the listener would focus on the tale and takes it into his or her life, turning it over repeatedly in the mind. Death holds a position of special authority within the world of the story, an authority presented almost in filmic terms:

Just as a sequence of images is set in motion inside a man as his life comes to an end—unfolding the views of himself under which he has encountered himself without being aware of it—suddenly in his expressions and looks the unforgettable emerges and imparts to everything that concerned him that authority which even the poorest wretch in dying possesses for the living around him.

(4)

The cliché of one's life passing before one's eyes suggests that the dying person comes to understand her or his own life more fully through this last minute rerun—and that this deeper understanding is communicated obscurely to those around the deathbed or scene through the mysteries of “authority.”

In relation to Benjamin, one might summarize the technology of film as that which restructures the perceptions (and apperceptive apparatus) of the viewer while the viewer him or herself remains in a state of distraction. The technology of the story requires a slower time scale—the distractions of boredom—and aims at wisdom through a repeated, conscious confrontation with mystery. O'Connor's “The Displaced Person” positions itself midway between these two technologies. The story presents a film image (of horrific death) as the mystery requiring repeated confrontation. But O'Connor's fictive strategies also attempt to reach into the reader as the surgeon cuts open the body of the patient: this storyteller seeks to alter the beliefs of her readers through an appeal to their senses. In a story like “The Displaced Person,” for instance, the threat of displacement and the violence that accompanies it seem to spread uncontrollably, as contagious as the plague. That violence is halted only when it is finally embodied, when author, characters and readers alike manage to “make sense” of displacement by reducing it literally to an experience of the senses.

For O'Connor, fiction demands a technology of sensation, of experience: fiction, she claims, “operates through the senses. … No reader who doesn't actually experience, who isn't made to feel, the story is going to believe anything the fiction writer merely tells him” (Mystery and Manners 91). O'Connor's own fictional technique makes extensive use of violence—and the writer associates that violence both with the experience of reality and, on some level, with its transcendence. O'Connor claims that

violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work. This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader, but it is one which is implicit in the Christian view of the world.

(Mystery 112)

The distracted, casual modern reader is also hard-headed: a violent fictional technique works to return him or her to a reality O'Connor presents in Christian terms.

Within the world of “The Displaced Person,” violence appears most frequently not as action but as aftermath, as frozen tableau. One image in particular structures the rest of the tale, haunting the characters within the story like an afterimage of the sun burned into their eyes:

Mrs. Shortley recalled a newsreel she had seen once of a small room piled high with bodies of dead naked people all in a heap, their arms and legs tangled together, a head thrust in here, a head there, a foot, a knee, a part that should have been covered up sticking out, a hand raised clutching nothing. Before you could realize that it was real and take it into your head, the picture had changed and a hollow-sounding voice was saying, “Time marches on!”

(196)

The newsreel first freezes the violence of the second world war into a static picture, then makes that picture disappear before its meaning can be grasped. The pile of “dead naked people all in a heap” is grotesque both in the common sense of the word and in its fantastical rearranging of body parts; its resistance to common modes of comprehension is sublime. The reader is no more able than Mrs. Shortley to make sense of this tableau of violence: our failure of comprehension underwrites the mysterious effects of violence within O'Connor's fiction, the capacity of violence to move and alter its spectators.

Yet Mrs. Shortley struggles to interpret what she has seen:

This was the kind of thing that was happening every day in Europe where they had not advanced as in this country, and watching from her vantage point, Mrs. Shortley had the sudden intuition that the Gobblehooks, like rats with typhoid fleas, could have carried all those murderous ways over the water with them directly to this place. If they had come from where that kind of thing was done to them, who was to say they were not the kind that would also do it to others?

(196)

Mrs. Shortley's “sudden intuition” captures a partial truth: the violence she remembers does indeed become contagious within the world of the story, but not in the way she imagines. In her interpretation of the newsreel and its relation to the Guizacs, the grotesque wins out over the sublime. The human tragedy of the stacked bodies is ignored, and the Guizacs are dehumanized: in the early pages of the story, Mrs. Guizac appears as a peanut, Sledgewig is considered the name of an insect, and Mrs. Shortley's version of their family name mingles mechanics and hunger. From here to the image of the “Gobblehooks” as rats carrying typhoid fleas is but a short step. Mrs. Shortley's view of the Guizacs—a view that repeatedly transgresses the boundary between human and animal—also prepares for her subsequent collapsing of the border between subject and object of violence: “If they had come from where that kind of thing was done to them, who was to say they were not the kind that would also do it to others?”

Time marches on, the newsreel reminds us, and carries murderous ways into the present, in part because the effects of violence have not yet been adequately realized on either a conceptual or an artistic level. Robert Fitzgerald wrote of the newsreel passage, “It is cool work, this writing, in which not one but several human abysses are skated over with an ironic flick, and all in Mrs. Shortley's mind” (Fitzgerald 22); John Ruskin would have said rather that both O'Connor and Mrs. Shortley were holding back from a full perception of the terrible. The abyss has not been skated over—it has merely been skirted. O'Connor approaches the reality of those stacked bodies the way Mrs. McIntyre approaches the figure of the Displaced Person: slowly and with considerable caution. The image structures the story as a whole, shading perceptions of religion and language and shaping the descriptions of Mrs. Shortley's stroke, Guizac's death, and Mrs. McIntyre's reaction to his murder.

The proliferation of violence within “The Displaced Person” is motivated in part by the characters' failure of comprehension and communication. These failures are presented through an ongoing focus on visual perception. Mrs. Shortley characterizes the foreigners as “people who were all eyes and no understanding” (204-05), but the real problem is that the Guizacs do not understand the manners of the region; they do not know what to understand and what to close their eyes to. The incomprehension of the blacks is, by contrast, a gesture of courtesy, a demonstration of their fine grasp of country etiquette. Just as the Shortleys know better than to mention Sulk's stealing—and just as both sides ignore the other's bootlegging still—so Sulk and Astor know better than to draw attention to the Shortleys' departure: “they looked straight at the car and its occupants but even as the dim yellow headlights lit up their faces, they politely did not seem to see anything, or anyhow, to attach significance to what was there” (212-13). This lack of comprehension is to be understood as passive courtesy, as an acceptance of the world as others make it.

The lack of understanding that develops between Guizac and the other inhabitants of “the place,” on the other hand, is taken as willful misunderstanding. Guizac tells of Sulk's stealing on the one hand, and tries to marry his cousin to him on the other. The first mistake is a foolish but minor transgression; the second an unthinkable violence to the conventions of “the place.” Worse yet is the fact that he will not back down and admit that he is wrong. When Mrs. McIntyre confronts him, calling him a monster, he responds simply: “‘She no care black,’ he said. ‘She in camp three year’” (223). The violence of Guizac's transgressions evokes an answering, if muffled violence:

“They're all the same,” she muttered, “whether they come from Poland or Tennessee. I've handled Herrins and Ringfields and Shortleys and I can handle a Guizac,” and she narrowed her gaze until it closed entirely around the diminishing figure on the tractor as if she were watching him through a gunsight. All her life she had been fighting the world's overflow and now she had it in the form of a Pole. “You're just like all the rest of them,” she said, “—only smart and thrifty and energetic but so am I. And this is my place,” and she stood there, a small black-hatted, black-smocked figure with an aging cherubic face, and folded her arms as if she were equal to anything. But her heart was beating as if some interior violence had already been done to her.

(224)

Mrs. McIntyre, in keeping with her refusal to allow black and white to intermarry, compares the Pole not to the “Negroes” but to white-trash. Her ability to “handle a Guizac” is here linked to her capacity for violence—at first, merely a violence of vision, as her gaze narrows to the form of a gunsight. The omniscient narrator's description (“as if”) conflates aggression and sight, giving outlet to Mrs. McIntyre's strong feelings while maintaining the safety of a figural account. Mrs. McIntyre herself is a less canny rhetorician: the words she uses to describe her conflict with Guizac attempt to make him manageable by equating him with the chain of workers she has managed in the past. Yet those same words do more to highlight the commonalities between Guizac and herself: “You're just like all the rest of them,” she said, “—only smart and thrifty and energetic but so am I.” The similarities of intelligence and thrift and energy once granted, the difference between protagonists is hard to re-establish: in metaphysical terms, the story challenges anyone's right to claim, “this is my place”; while on a more concrete level, what Mrs. McIntyre most resents about Guizac by the end of the story is his refusal to concede her place, his failure to leave of his own accord. As a result of this unexpected identification, Mrs. McIntyre becomes the recipient as well as the purveyor of violence.

The threat of spreading violence pervades the story, but violence is explicitly named only through the hypothetical world of “as if” or in the form of a negation. Mr. Shortley “was not a violent man but he hated to see a woman done in by a foreigner. He felt that that was one thing a man couldn't stand by and see happen” (230). Of course, according to his own interpretation of affairs, that is more or less what Mr. Shortley has already done—lain by and watched his wife done in by a foreigner: “‘I figure that Pole killed her,’ he said. ‘She seen through him from the first. She known he come from the devil. She told me so’” (227). Telling, from Mr. Shortley's perspective, is as good as proving, and the stories he tells are in turn designed to localize violence in the figure of the Pole—perhaps because the violence he himself has experienced through the death of his wife and his own displacement seems so difficult to pin down.

Mrs. McIntyre's experience of violence in relation to the Pole is communicated through the omniscient narrator's choice of figures, but Mr. Shortley proceeds to take the figures of violence into his own hands:

Mr. Shortley said he never had cared for foreigners since he had been in the first world's war and seen what they were like. He said he had seen all kinds then but that none of them were like us. He said he recalled the face of one man who had thrown a handgrenade at him and that the man had had little round eye-glasses exactly like Mr. Guizac's.

“But Mr. Guizac is a Pole, he's not a German,” Mrs. McIntyre said.

“It ain't a great deal of difference in them two kinds,” Mr. Shortley had explained.

(227)

Mr. Shortley's words attempt to replace the free-floating contagion of the Pole's transgressions and displacements with a concrete image of violence. His story is an extended analogy designed to connect two points in the visible (Mr. Guizac and a German soldier) through the further displacement of metonymy: both men are reduced to their common denominator—foreigners with little round eye-glasses. His description can be read as an attempt to embody his experience of violence in the person of the D.P., a figure vulnerable to the reciprocal effects of violence.

The violence the D.P. brings with him to “the place” is the violence of displacement. Just as Hazel Motes in Wise Blood insists on the universality and ubiquity of this phenomenon—

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place.

“Nothing outside you can give you any place,” he said. “You needn't to look at the sky because it's not going to open up and show no place behind it. You needn't to search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can't go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy's time nor your children's time if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you've got.”

(Wise Blood 165-66)

—so O'Connor forces the characters in “The Displaced Person” to search in time, in space and finally in their own bodies for a place to be. The women, Mrs. Shortley and Mrs. McIntyre, experience the conflict with the Displaced Person as a struggle for place; Mr. Shortley experiences it as a struggle between stasis and change.

Through the first section of the story, the hired man is a recurrent figure of stasis. While courting his future wife, he “had sat on her porch steps, not saying a word, imitating a paralyzed man propped up to enjoy a cigarette” (200). As Mrs. Shortley tries to involve him in a discussion of the D.P. problem, “Mr. Shortley folded his hands on his bony chest and pretended he was a corpse. … ‘Don't worry me now,’ Mr. Shortley said. ‘I'm a dead man.’ … ‘If everybody was as dead as I am, nobody would have no trouble,’ Mr. Shortley said” (206). The Pole, by contrast, is a figure of motion and change—a man who understands machinery, is impatient with the slowness of the black laborers, and is always working. With the Displaced Person as a catalyst, Mr. Shortley is not allowed to remain dead—the narrative uncovered and recounted by his wife galvanizes him into momentary action:

She had found out what the Displaced Person was up to through the old man, Astor, and she had not told anybody but Mr. Shortley. Mr. Shortley had risen straight up in bed like Lazarus from the tomb.

“Shut your mouth!” he had said.

“Yes,” she had said.

“Naw!” Mr. Shortley had said.

“Yes,” she had said.

Mr. Shortley had fallen back flat.

(208)

The narrating of transgression is itself a kind of violence, capable of momentarily raising the dead—though it will take stronger measures to resurrect Mr. Shortley in a more permanent fashion.

Language, along with vision, is the dominant technology, the practical art, at work in “The Displaced Person.” When Mrs. Shortley passes away, “displaced in the world from all that belonged to her” (214), Mr. Shortley is in turn dispossessed of his native realm of death-like paralysis, forced into the world of the living and the makers of narrative: “Since he didn't have Mrs. Shortley to do the talking any more, he had started doing it himself and had found that he had a gift for it. He had the power of making other people see his logic” (232). He carries his battle against the Displaced Person into a war of words, a war foreseen by his wife, though once again in a manner somewhat different from what eventually comes to pass. When it appeared that Mrs. McIntyre was considering bringing another Polish family to the farm, Mrs. Shortley

began to imagine a war of words, to see the Polish words and the English words coming at each other, stalking forward, not sentences, just words, gabble gabble gabble, flung out high and shrill and stalking forward and then grappling with each other. She saw the Polish words, dirty and all-knowing and unreformed, flinging mud on the clean English words until everything was equally dirty. She saw them all piled up in a room, all the dead dirty words, theirs and hers too, piled up like the naked bodies in the newsreel.

(209)

Here the word is made flesh in a grotesque perversion of the Incarnation. Language is reduced to its materiality; stripped of their cover of meaning, words are left naked, displaced and dead like the bodies in the newsreel. The conventions that order language and make communication possible disappear—there are no sentences, just words that gabble, gabble, gabble like the Gobblehooks themselves.

Mrs. Shortley considers this negative incarnation the result of the Polish invasion, but the language of the place has long been moribund, frozen into the sayings once used by Mrs. McIntyre's first husband, the Judge. Most of the characters on the farm are adept at manipulating the conventions of this language: Mrs. Shortley, for instance, uses the Judge's sayings simultaneously to win her mistress's approval and to mock her blindness. Mrs. McIntyre remarks that she may have to get rid of some of her other help in order to pay Guizac a higher wage:

Mrs. Shortley nodded to indicate she had known this for some time. “I'm not saying those niggers ain't had it coming,” she said. “But they do the best they know how. You can always tell a nigger what to do and stand by until he does it.”

“That's what the Judge said,” Mrs. McIntyre said and looked at her with approval. … She always spoke of him in a reverent way and quoted his sayings, such as “One fellow's misery is the other fellow's gain,” and “The devil you know is better than the devil you don't.”

“However,” Mrs. Shortley remarked, “the devil you know is better than the devil you don't,” and she had to turn away so that Mrs. McIntyre would not see her smile.

(208)

The act of citation cuts in both directions: the respect implied by Mrs. Shortley's first quotation disappears into mockery with her second comment and her hidden smile.

When Astor invokes exactly the same saying in response to Mrs. McIntyre's assertion of power, it becomes clear that the Judge's sayings are themselves weapons and soldiers in a quiet, more local war of words.

“What you colored people don't realize,” she said, “is that I'm the one around here who holds all the strings together. … You're all dependent on me but you each and every one act like the shoe is on the other foot.”

It was not possible to tell from his face if he heard her. Finally he backed out with the wheelbarrow. “Judge say the devil he know is better than the devil he don't,” he said in a clear mutter and trundled off.

She got up and followed him, a deep vertical pit appearing suddenly in the center of her forehead, just under the red bangs. “The Judge has long since ceased to pay the bills around here,” she called in a piercing voice.

He was the only one of her Negroes who had known the Judge and he thought this gave him title.

(217)

Status is awarded through languages: Astor, having known the Judge and his sayings, is entitled to talk back to his widow. The Judge himself bears a certain resemblance to O'Connor's stock devil-figure, though in somewhat tarnished form: he wears the trademark Panama hat, yellowed rather than white, and “when he died his estate proved to be bankrupt. He left her a mortgaged house and fifty acres that he had managed to cut the timber off before he died. It was as if, as the final triumph of a successful life, he had been able to take everything with him” (218). O'Connor's devils take their power from the inert and the familiar: the Judge's sayings continue to wield a certain power because, like the figure of the Judge himself, sunk in the cornfield with his family, they may be long dead but they are always at home.

Against this backdrop of language reduced to its material aspects—the devil one knows—arises a language of mystery and revelation—the devil one does not know. Mrs. McIntyre, watching the Displaced Person work, is moved to exclaim, “That man is my salvation!”

Mrs. Shortley looked straight ahead as if her vision penetrated the cane and the hill and pierced through to the other side. “I would suspicion salvation got from the devil,” she said in a slow detached way.

“Now what do you mean by that?” Mrs. McIntyre asked, looking at her sharply.

Mrs. Shortley wagged her head but would not say anything else. The fact was she had nothing else to say for this intuition had only at that instant come to her.

(203)

Speech comes without thought, separate from thought—and its meaning remains equivocal. Whatever she may have said to her husband, Mrs. Shortley stops short of telling her boss that Guizac himself is salvation sent from the devil: her comment could, after all, be applied as tellingly to Mrs. McIntyre's marriage with the Judge—a solution that brought only a very limited salvation. The threat and the force of Mrs. Shortley's intuitive language are its indirectness; it offers meaning through insinuation and juxtaposition rather than direct statement.

Language is as contagious as violence within “The Displaced Person.” After her vision of the war of words, Mrs. Shortley begins to read her Bible with a new attention. She pores over the Apocalypse and the Prophets and the words she reads come to life in a vision of her own:

Suddenly while she watched, the sky folded back in two pieces like the curtain to a stage and a gigantic figure stood facing her. It was the color of the sun in the early afternoon, white-gold. It was of no definite shape but there were fiery wheels with fierce dark eyes in them, spinning rapidly all around it. She was not able to tell if the figure was going forward or backward because its magnificence was so great. She shut her eyes in order to look at it and it turned blood-red and the wheels turned white. A voice, very resonant, said the one word, “Prophesy!”

(209)

The artificiality of this vision is emphasized by its stage curtain and by its duplication of the conventions of Biblical vision: Mrs. Shortley's experience of transcendence is refracted by the limits of her comprehension. The voice she hears is resonant, however, and the command to prophesy calls forth a rejuvenated language:

She stood there, tottering slightly but still upright, her eyes shut tight and her fists clenched and her straw sun hat low on her forehead. “The children of wicked nations will be butchered,” she said in a loud voice. “Legs where arms should be, foot to face, ear in the palm of hand. Who will remain whole? Who will remain whole? Who?”

(210)

The conventional form (and content) of the prophecy gives Mrs. Shortley a way to “realize” the haunting image of the newsreel. While the imagined war of words turned language into image, divorcing the word from its structure and meaning, prophetic language here succeeds in making the newsreel image new and real and meaningful. And while the prophecy is spoken outwardly, these words drive Mrs. Shortley to a deeper internalization of the threat of violence and dismemberment: “Who shall remain whole? Who?”

In the world of “The Displaced Person,” no one remains whole—but it is Mrs. Shortley and Mrs. McIntyre who suffer the disruptions of grace most explicitly. The aftermath of violence, the tableau of stacked bodies, is dramatically realized in two very different ways by the two women. The after-image of dismembered bodies hovers over the story's two attempts at closure—Mrs. Shortley's stroke and Mrs. McIntyre's decline after Guizac's death—and the earlier moment of closure is oddly the more final. Unlike the reader and Mrs. Shortley, Mrs. McIntyre has not been haunted by the image of the newsreel; her exposure to violence-as-tableau begins with her participation in the reenactment of that violence:

She heard the brake on the large tractor slip and, looking up, she saw it move forward, calculating its own path. Later she remembered that she had seen the Negro jump silently out of the way as if a spring in the earth had released him and that she had seen Mr. Shortley turn his head with incredible slowness and stare silently over his shoulder and that she had started to shout to the Displaced Person but that she had not. She had felt her eyes and Mr. Shortley's eyes and the Negro's eyes come together in one look that froze them in collusion forever, and she had heard the little noise the Pole made as the tractor wheel broke his backbone.

(234)

Motion and stasis seem to collude with the human actors in this dramatization of sudden death. The tractor calculates its own rapid path, while Mrs. McIntyre's sight fixes and freezes her in collusion “forever.” Celluloid has no more permanent recording power.

That experience of frozen time immediately disrupts the sequentiality of Mrs. McIntyre's perceptions. As with Mrs. Shortley's experience of the newsreel, the image of violence is at once static and too quickly past to be comprehended. Mrs. McIntyre faints (stasis) and then runs (motion), perhaps to the house, but then she loses all grasp of her own narrative: “she could not remember what for or if she had fainted again when she got there.” The priest comes to give the dying man last rites, but even his figure is unfamiliar to her, and she mistakes him at first for the doctor. Even when she succeeds in “placing” him, her mind remains oddly impervious to new impressions.

She looked first at his bloody pants leg and then at his face which was not averted from her but was as withdrawn and expressionless as the rest of the countryside. She only stared at him for she was too shocked by her experience to be quite herself. Her mind was not taking hold of all that was happening. She felt she was in some foreign country where the people bent over the body were natives, and she watched like a stranger while the dead man was carried away in the ambulance.

(235)

Mrs. McIntyre has lost her place in the story and her sense of belonging on the farm—as have all who colluded in Guizac's death. The other conspirators (except for Astor, apparently doomed or determined to outlast them all) leave that night, and Mrs. McIntyre is left to an endless physical reenactment of the aftermath of violence. The dismemberment prophesied by the newsreel and by Mrs. Shortley invades Mrs. McIntyre's body: “A numbness developed in one of her legs and her hands and head began to jiggle and eventually she had to stay in bed all the time with only a colored woman to wait on her. Her eyesight grew steadily worse and she lost her voice altogether” (235).

Mrs. Shortley's stroke is the counterpoint to this realization of violence—or, rather, it is the realization to which Mrs. McIntyre's actions are the belated counterpoint. O'Connor offers her readers a choice, not between violence and peace, but between violence with comprehension and meaning and violence without. Mrs. Shortley prophesies, giving voice to vision; Mrs. McIntyre loses her voice and vision altogether.

Mrs. Shortley's stroke seems to start with the realization of her own displacement, with the repetition of the unanswerable question, “Where we goin?”

“Where we going?” Mr. Shortley repeated and when she didn't answer again, he turned and looked at her.

Fierce heat seemed to be swelling slowly and fully into her face as if it were welling up now for a final assault. She was sitting in an erect way in spite of the fact that one leg was twisted under her and one knee was almost into her neck, but there was a peculiar lack of light in her icy blue eyes. All the vision in them might have been turned around, looking inside her. She suddenly grabbed Mr. Shortley's elbow and Sarah Mae's foot at the same time and began to tug and pull on them as if she were trying to fit the two extra limbs onto herself.

Mr. Shortley began to curse and quickly stopped the car and Sarah Mae yelled to quit but Mrs. Shortley apparently intended to rearrange the whole car at once. She thrashed forward and backward, clutching at everything she could get her hands on and hugging it to herself, Mr. Shortley's head, Sara Mae's leg, the cat, a wad of white bedding, her own big moon-like knee; then all at once her fierce expression faded into a look of astonishment and her grip on what she had loosened. One of her eyes drew near to the other and seemed to collapse quietly and she was still.

(213)

This description combines elements of Mrs. Shortley's vision with a reenactment of the newsreel. The wheels of the vision are replaced by the wheels of the car; eyes are peculiarly lit and mobile; with the fierce heat welling up into Mrs. Shortley's face, her color changes from white to bloodred. At the same time, the reversal of Mrs. Shortley's vision (looking in rather than looking out) also reverses the sense of opacity that marked Mrs. Shortley's view of the displaced, people she used to say were “all eyes and no understanding.” The dismemberment of the newsreel is here rewritten as accretion: Mrs. Shortley is shown as trying to fit the extra limbs onto a self that still retains some illusion of organic unity. And the senseless confusion of the bodies seen in the newsreel becomes, in queerly domestic terms, an attempt “to rearrange the whole car at once.” The frozen tableau of the newsreel is animated by Mrs. Shortley's stroke, but that animation is given meaning only by the narrator's figures of description.

The reenactment of the newsreel ends only when Mrs. Shortley's “grip on what she had loosened”—and at that moment, O'Connor's grip on the story—tightens:

The two girls, who didn't know what had happened to her, began to say, “Where we goin, Ma? Where we goin?” They thought she was playing a joke and that their father, staring straight ahead at her, was imitating a dead man. They didn't know that she had had a great experience or ever been displaced in the world from all that belonged to her. They were frightened by the gray slick road before them and they kept repeating in higher and higher voices, “Where we goin, Ma? Where we goin?” while their mother, her huge body rolled back still against the seat and her eyes like blue-painted glass, seemed to contemplate for the first time the tremendous frontiers of her true country.

(214)

O'Connor here transgresses boundaries that normally limit her third-person narration in order to add meaning to this reenactment of violence. She steps beyond the figure of “as if” in order to assert that Mrs. Shortley has indeed had a great experience and been displaced in the world from all that belonged to her. For just a split-second, O'Connor herself takes on the role of the wife of the countryside. “True country” is an image prevalent in O'Connor's essays, one that is often linked to the notion of the writer and his or her vision—while the narrator's voice retreats to the world of “seems,” the imagery of this sentence serves to conflate writer and character. O'Connor's narrative transgression here creates a powerful effect—one that has to be contained within the further course of the narrative. Mrs. Shortley's death carries authority of mystery for those around her, her husband and daughters; to the reader, on the other hand, her “eyes like bluepainted glass” bear the mark of authorial revelation. The story cannot stop here, but must return to the more distant and measured description of Mrs. McIntyre's ending.

In “The Storyteller,” Benjamin gives one example of a story and its “germinative power.” The story he cites is from Herodotus: the tale of the conquered Psammenitus unmoved by the spectacle of his daughter being treated as a maid, or his son being taken to execution. “But when afterwards he recognized one of his servants, an old impoverished man, in the ranks of the prisoners, he beat his fists against his head and gave all the signs of deepest mourning” (90). Benjamin goes on to list various possible interpretations: Montaigne, for instance, suggests that the king is so full of grief that this last episode bursts the dam of his self-control. Benjamin himself suggests that the king might be unmoved by the fate of his children, since this is but an extension of his own fate—or, alternately, that there's a staginess to the spectacle of the servant that moves the king more than “real life” could do—or, that seeing the servant allows the king to relax, and with that relaxation, his grief breaks forth. “Herodotus offers no explanations. His report is the driest” and therefore the most potent.

O'Connor's story includes within itself both the incomprehensible seed of the tale—the newsreel image—and the various interpretations that seed has produced. What counsel the story has to offer comes from this combination of mystery and manners: the impossibility of grasping the enormity of the holocaust, and the interpretations of that enormity produced by the characters of the story in their daily responses.

The technologies at work in “The Displaced Person” include the technology of film, the “apperceptive apparatus” of the people at “the Place,” and the techniques of storytelling and fiction writing. The image from the newsreel penetrates Mrs. Shortley, eventually restructuring her life—and death. Yet the same image seems to penetrate Mrs. McIntyre (who may never have seen the newsreel) as a state of distraction marked by numbness, jiggling limbs, loss of eyesight and voice. That newsreel image also penetrates O'Connor's (distracted) reader through the structure of its repetition, which unifies the story. In many ways, the story is not about the displaced person at all, but rather concerns itself with the ways in which people respond to spectacles of suffering—both at a distance and at closer range. The technology at issue is not the technology of film, nor even the technology of a distant war, but rather the technology of human perception in its most local forms, with its inherent violence and its dehumanizing approach to the unfamiliar.

The bottom line of the story's structure distinguishes quite sharply between Mrs. McIntyre and Mrs. Shortley, and offers as authority for this differentiation the ends to which they come. Mrs. McIntyre, having helped (by omission) to kill a man, becomes alienated from herself: she “felt she was in some foreign country where the people bent over the body were natives, and she watched like a stranger” (235). Mrs. Shortley, by contrast, finds herself unexpectedly coming home at the moment of her death: “displaced in the world from all that belonged to her,” she nonetheless “contemplate[s] for the first time the tremendous frontiers of her true country” (214). O'Connor prepares for these moments of judgment by distinguishing throughout the story between the two characters' approaches to vision and to speech. As we have seen, Mrs. McIntyre's gaze is narrow, and as violent as a gunsight. At the beginning of the story, Mrs. Shortley's vision oscillates between that kind of narrow focus and a broader view: “Mrs. Shortley's vision narrowed on him and then widened to include the woman and the two children in a group picture.” But her view also widens to include a somewhat ludicrous world of imaginative connections:

The first thing that struck her as very peculiar was that they looked like other people. Every time she had seen them in her imagination, the image she had got was of the three bears, walking single file, with wooden shoes on like Dutchmen and sailor hats and bright coats with a lot of buttons. But the woman had on a dress she might have worn herself.

(195)

By the time she sees her vision, midway through the story, the lesson of these “Displaced Persons” has been driven home quite thoroughly: the question “Who will remain whole?” acknowledges Mrs. Shortley's new sense of vulnerability. Mrs. McIntyre, by contrast, sums up her disdain for the Guizacs and religion both in a pithy, Judge-like proverb: “‘As far as I'm concerned’ she said and glared at [the priest] fiercely, ‘Christ was just another D.P.’” (229). Mrs. McIntyre's choice of phrasing shows her siding with the devil she knows: the moribund materiality of the Judge and his sayings. The remark is as prophetic of her death-in-life as Mrs. Shortley's prophecy is of her own ending.

“What others suffer, we behold.” As Geoffrey Hartman remarks, this statement bears the precision of a proverb. In the world of O'Connor's fiction, the moribund density of a proverb makes it dangerous: for these words to give life, they must be unpacked, experienced through the senses. What does it mean to “behold” suffering? Is the possibility of active identification distanced by the comfort of material possessions? Be/hold: we distinguish ourselves from others according to what we possess: we are what we hold onto. “The Displaced Person” shows the futility of attempting to define oneself through one's holdings, through any claim to place. “This is my place!” Mrs. McIntyre asserts, and at the end of the story, she is the only one remaining there—but that place has become to her a foreign land.

“What others suffer, we behold”: perhaps the difficulty lies in a gap between the self and what that self can encompass, a gap between being and holding. John Hershey's Hiroshima describes how, after the bombing, survivors at first stayed clustered in small groups of family members or friends, because they could not comprehend a wider circle of misery. How much misery can a person hold, how much suffering can she or he behold? Mrs. Shortley summarizes the moral dilemma: “Legs where arms should be, foot to face, ear in the palm of hand. Who will remain whole? Who will remain whole? Who?”

“What others suffer, we behold”—but what remains unbeheld, unperceived? O'Connor's “Displaced Person” suggests that the local reception of violence works to obscure connections: the pile of bodies in a room haunts Mrs. Shortley, and Mrs. McIntyre has heard from the priest of the atrocities committed in Europe, but neither figure seems willing to connect those atrocities to the figure of Guizac's niece, who has been in a camp for three years. Likewise, both women focus (in different ways) on the cultural distance separating them from the Guizacs. A focus on the spectacle of suffering obscures the role of the spectator, the violence of contemporary human technologies of perception, and the extent to which “we” penetrate the image on the TV even as it penetrates “us.” “Beholding” formalizes and distances the act of vision. O'Connor's fictional techniques draw the reader's attention to the “apperceptive apparatus” of the characters in her stories—and, by extension, to the reader's own techniques for experiencing (or not experiencing) reality. What others suffer, we may behold quite passively; but “The Displaced Person” suggests that the path to action also lies through (a reform of) vision. As O'Connor wrote to the poet Robert Lowell, “Prophecy is a matter of seeing, not saying, and is certainly the most terrible vocation” (Habit of Being 372).

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Harcourt, 1968.

Fitzgerald, Robert. “The Countryside and the True Country.” Sewanee Review 10 (1962), 380-95.

Hartman, Geoffrey. “Public Memory and Its Discontents.” Raritan 13: 4 (Spring 1994): 24-40.

O'Connor, Flannery. “The Displaced Person.” The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, 1971. 194-235.

———. The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor. Ed. Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, 1979.

———. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Sel. and ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, 1961.

———. Wise Blood. New York: Farrar, 1962.

Sloterdijk, Peter. Critique of Cynical Reason. Trans. Michael Eldred. Theory and History of Literature, v. 40. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.

Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso, 1989.