SOURCE: Carroll, Rachel. “Foreign Bodies: History and Trauma in Flannery O'Connor's ‘The Displaced Person’.” Textual Practice 14, no. 1 (2000): 97-114.

[In the following essay, Carroll asserts that repressed memories of crisis surface through the unconscious in “The Displaced Person.”]

We must presume … that the psychical trauma—or more precisely the memory of the trauma—acts like a foreign body which long after its entry must be continued to be regarded as an agent that is still at work.

(Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud)¹

History and the irrational are revealed to exist in intimate proximity in O'Connor's texts: the past haunts the present by returning through the unconscious. The role of history in O'Connor's narratives could be addressed by drawing an analogy between the persistence of the unresolved conflicts of the past and the return of the repressed in the form of the uncanny. Freud defines the uncanny as ‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’² and as that which ‘ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light’ (‘The uncanny’, p. 345). The material which is subject to this mechanism of repression and return in O'Connor's fiction is history, and its violent disruptions reveal their imprint on the unconscious in the form of trauma.

History and psychoanalysis have traditionally been perceived as being at odds with each other. However, as Maud Ellmann has written, they are two discourses which urgently require a language through which to speak to each other: ‘What history needs is a science of tropes—that is, a psychoanalysis—to understand the ways in which the conflicts of the world are reconfigured in the conflicts of the mind.’³ An encounter between a crisis in subjective and historical memory is theorized in the concept of trauma. Cathy Caruth proposes the following definition of trauma:

Trauma describes an overwhelming experience of sudden, or catastrophic events, in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, and uncontrolled repetitive occurrence of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena.⁴

According to Caruth, the quality of ‘latency’, which characterizes Freud's understanding of the deferred symptoms of shock, also defines the ‘structure of experience’ constituted by trauma: ‘The event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. To be traumatised is precisely to be possessed by an image or event.’⁵ O'Connor's fiction is ‘possessed’ by history: the oppressions and conflicts of history return from repression and register their violence in the memory in the form of trauma. The historical experience of the American South is constituted, in O'Connor's fiction, by denials and displacements. Indeed, in a number of narratives, and most significantly in ‘The Displaced Person’ (1954), the repressed crises of American history, both past and present, find displaced expression in an event of profound historical crisis: the Holocaust. The memory of the Holocaust becomes the screen on which unresolved conflicts are re-enacted. Thus, a powerful model of history as trauma can be found in O'Connor's writing. As Caruth writes, trauma is ‘not so much a symptom of the unconscious, as it is a symptom of history’ (‘Introduction’, American Imago, p. 4).

THE MARCH OF TIME: MODERNITY AND TRAUMA

In ‘The Displaced Person’, the visual evidence of the Holocaust, in the form of a cinematic screening of documentary footage of liberated concentration camps, is registered in a traumatic manner: the sudden and shocking image of a mass grave sweeps over Mrs Shortley's consciousness, ‘before [she] could realise that it was real and take it into [her] head’.⁶ Yet the image does return, compulsively and intrusively, in the form of an unsummoned memory: it thereby fulfils Caruth's definition of trauma. Mrs Shortley is visited by the memory of a liberated concentration camp:

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.

(CS [The Complete Stories] p. 196)

The dispassionate quality of this description, with its grotesque motifs of fragmentation and dismemberment, suggests a stunned incomprehension. The violence that the image records seems immanent in the very medium which forcefully imprints it on the viewer's ill-prepared consciousness: the cinematic image has the uncanny stillness of a freeze frame or traumatic flashback. By an association which, in the course of the narrative, becomes fatal, Mrs Shortley places the Polish refugees (who have been resettled on her land) in the monochrome, two-dimensional plane of the screen as if they were shadowy simulations: ‘you reckon they'll know what colours even is?’ (CS, p. 196). The deadly progress of the deportation trains seems to represent the dreadful and interminable progress of history, and both are captured in the coffin-like confinement of each individual frame of film. The motto of the newsreel—‘Time marches on!’ (CS, p. 196)—identifies these images as belonging to the March of Time documentary series, but its heroic optimism is here in terrible juxtapostion with an apparently barbaric regression.

It is significant that in O'Connor's texts the experience of the Holocaust is mediated through two central signifiers of modernity: the cinema and the railway. The cinema transmits the visual documentary evidence of genocide. The railway is both a literal instrument and a symbolic signifier of the Holocaust.⁷ For O'Connor's deeply reactionary characters, the complicity of this apparatus of modernity in historical catastrophe only confirms their own revolt against the modern. Hence O'Connor's texts demonstrate a powerful problematic: that the Holocaust not only explodes a liberal myth of history as progress, but is itself enlisted by reactionary impulses in a renunciation of history as a process of change. Furthermore, the role allotted to the cinema and the railway in this problematic of history and modernity does not seem to be entirely accidental: both are implicated in the construction of the experience of modernity as shock. Moreover, they assume a compelling significance in their contribution to the relationship between trauma and historical experience.

In employing the railway as a signifier of the Holocaust, O'Connor captures the indelible imprint made on contemporary consciousness by its transformation from a benign agent of human mobility into an instrument of terror: the freedom of movement granted by the arrivals and departures of travel is forever haunted by the fact of mass deportations and the gates of Auschwitz. This alienation constitutes a translation of the uncanny from the subjective to the historical plane; the Holocaust casts into crisis the history in which we were ‘at home’. Elaine Scarry captures this quality of modern estrangement when she writes of the conversion of domestic objects—the window, the door, the chair, the bed—into instruments of torture:

The appearance of these common domestic objects in torture reports … is no more gratuitous and accidental than the fact that so much of our awareness of Germany in the 1940s is attached to the words ‘ovens,’ ‘showers,’ ‘lampshade,’ and ‘soap’.⁸

Nor is this horror entirely irrational. It is a lucid recoil from the barbaric destination at which the advance of rationality has arrived. Indeed, in one sense, the liquidation of human beings inflicted by the Holocaust represents the triumph of technology over the body; as such it is the ‘end’ of modernity not in the sense of its failure but as its product.⁹ Both film and the locomotive are implicated in a modernity which inflicts a certain violence on the body. Miriam Hansen characterizes modernity as the ‘traumatic reorganisation of perception’;¹⁰ the technology of the cinema, like that of the railway, imposes on consciousness the shocks inflicted on the body and senses by the automated mechanism of industrial capitalism:

With its dialectic of continuity and discontinuity, with the rapid succession and tactile thrust of its sounds and images, film rehearses in the realm of reception what the conveyor belt imposes upon human beings in the realm of production.

(p. 184)

Hence, the cinema and the train are two of a number of new technologies which ‘contribute to the detachment or dissociation of the subject from the space of perception’ (p. 190).¹¹

Both the railway and the cinema contribute to an association between modernity and shock; they assume a significant role in the development of theories of shock and trauma. The earliest accounts of the pathology of shock emerged out of studies of railway accidents, the shell-shock of First World War neuroses being the second major contribution made by the twentieth century to the evolution of shock. According to Wolfgang Schivelbusch, the first accounts of shock, in relation to the railway accident, describe a ‘sudden and powerful event of violence that disrupts the continuity of an artificially/mechanically created motion or situation, and also the subsequent state of derangement’.¹² It is the very fact of human assimilation to the mechanized motion of the locomotive which makes such a shock possible: the passengers are absorbed into their surroundings as if to a second nature.

In O'Connor's fiction, it could be said that history, conceived as inexorable advance, is the second nature to which subjects succumb, as if to the soporific motion of the train. Relinquishing individual agency, they are possessed by its dynamics but all the while lulled by the impression of movement; the effortless conveyance that the train delivers mimics the myth of history as progress. The condition of shock is induced by a disruption of this continuity, but the experience is constituted by a failure to assimilate it into consciousness: it exerts its presence by eruptions from the unconscious in the form of flashbacks. As Caruth writes, ‘the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, and uncontrolled repetitive occurrence of hallucinations’ (‘Unclaimed experience’, p. 181).

Latency, the delayed effect, is the defining characteristic of shock—one which Caruth takes from Freud. Freud takes the railway accident as his example to illustrate his theory of shock. Significantly, he articulates this proposition within a history, in ‘Moses and monotheism’, of the captivity, exile and return of the Jewish people:

It may happen that someone gets away, apparently unharmed, from the spot where he has suffered a shocking accident, for instance a train collision. In the course of the following weeks, however, he develops a series of grave psychical and motor symptoms, which can be ascribed only to his shock or whatever else happened at the time of the accident. He has developed a ‘traumatic neurosis’. This appears quite incomprehensible and is therefore a novel fact. The time that elapsed between the accident and the first appearance of symptoms is called the ‘incubation period’, a transparent allusion to the pathology of infectious disease. … It is the feature one might term latency.¹³

The period that has elapsed between the event and the symptom seems to suggest that the experience has been forgotten; the person was unharmed and so the delayed effects are incomprehensible. However, as Caruth suggests, it is ‘only in and through its inherent forgetting that [the traumatic event] is first experienced at all’ (‘Unclaimed experience’, p. 7). Caruth's theory of trauma is informed both by theories of shock and by the testimonies of survivors of the Holocaust. Hence, trauma provides a psychoanalytic account of the impact of catastrophic historical events. Trauma is constituted by unassimilated historical experience, but this is not to suggest that the past is lost to the oblivion of forgetfulness: on the contrary, history is preserved in the unconscious because it is not resolved and discharged by the conscious mind. Such a privileged role for the unconscious in the transmission of history is supported by Freud's distinction between unconscious memory and the conscious act of recollection, such that the latter has, as Fredric Jameson has described it, the effect of ‘destroying or eradicating what the former was designed to preserve’.¹⁴

In trauma, memory erupts from the unconscious in the form of intrusive symptoms which include the vivid visual memory. The cinematic technique of the flashback could be read as resembling this traumatic return of memory. Caruth writes that the ‘flashback, it seems … provides a form of recall that survives at the cost of willed memory or of the very continuity of conscious thought’ (‘Introduction’, American Imago, p. 418). The flashback preserves because it alienates; it disrupts the static present with the otherness of the past.¹⁵ In the particular case of the Holocaust, the failure to assimilate experience, when consciously chosen by a witness, could indicate an ethical reaction: a refusal to admit any philosophical system which could accommodate such an atrocity. Claude Lanzmann has spoken of a ‘refusal of understanding’ as a profoundly ethical position:

There is an absolute obscenity in the very project of understanding. Not to understand was my iron law during all the eleven years of the production of Shoah. I had clung to this refusal of understanding as the only possible ethical and at the same time the only possible operative attitude.¹⁶

In O'Connor's texts, however, this ‘refusal of understanding’ indicates a failure of witnessing. O'Connor's American characters are not actual victims, bystanders or perpetrators of the Holocaust, yet such is the impact of the visual revelation of the Holocaust that they assume fantastic identifications as if obeying an unconscious injunction. Initially victims only of an overpowering fear, O'Connor's characters are transformed into agents of an arbitrary violence as if to evade becoming its victim.

‘THE DISPLACED PERSON’: FALSE WITNESS AND HISTORY

The statelessness of the Displaced Person renders him strange and ominous on American soil; his reception is one evoked by Julia Kristeva in Strangers to Ourselves: ‘He is a foreigner: he is from nowhere, from everywhere.’¹⁷ He is a person without origins: that is, without the family, ‘blood’ and soil which constitute the rootedness of identity in the rural American South. In Strangers to Ourselves, Julia Kristeva identifies a paradox that emerges out of the common genealogy shared by the concepts of the universal ‘rights of man’ and of nationalism: the person without a state is a person without a claim to humanity. Kristeva concurs with Hannah Arendt in a belief that ‘the national legacy served as guarantee for Nazi criminality’ (p. 151). Arendt's lament for the fate of those deprived of the protection of nationality but subject to the extremities of nationalism captures the plight of the ‘displaced person’, both the refugee in the modern world and the character in O'Connor's text: ‘The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human. … It seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man’ (quoted in Strangers to Ourselves, pp. 151-2). The perverse symbolic transformation of Guizac from a victim into a perpetrator, through Mrs Shortley's identifications, accords with a recurrent pattern of displacement evident in O'Connor's narratives. ‘The Displaced Person’ is indeed a narrative about displacement, not merely of people but of history, memory and guilt. That it is the Holocaust—with its place in an irrational ideology of racial purity and heredity—which revives this mechanism is revealing of the content of repressed historical material in this American context. That is, it exposes a persistent racial anxiety compounded by historical denial.

The trauma of the Holocaust, both as an event and as knowledge, encounters the suppressed conflicts of American history in O'Connor's fiction; the responses of O'Connor's characters carry this unresolved history and unwittingly re-enact it. The sequence of displaced identifications which O'Connor depicts in her narratives, especially in ‘The Displaced Person’, fulfil Robert Jay Lifton's account of ‘false witness’. Lifton suggests that when a witness to violence in turn becomes an instigator of violence, it is a result of ‘false witness’, a ‘compensatory process which is very dangerous’.¹⁸ The death anxiety provoked by such an experience is suppressed and converted into a desire to kill: that is, in order to ensure safety from violence, the victim adopts the extreme measure of assuming the role of agent of that violence. Lifton's proposition is an attempt to account for the disturbing phenomenon that the lesson of violence is not inevitably that violence must cease. In the midst of the trauma of violence, the subject may make a choice as if the roles of victim and perpetrator were the only positions available.

Lifton writes that this process of displacement proceeds through the production of ‘designated victims’—a process which draws its material from the historically specific scene in which it occurs:

False witness tends to be a political and ideological process. And really false witness is at the heart of most victimisation. Groups victimise others, they create what I now call ‘designated victims’, the Jews in Europe, the Blacks in this country [the US]. They are people off whom we live not only economically, as is often the case, but psychologically. That is, we reassert our own vitality and symbolic immortality from denying them their right to live and by identifying them with the death-taint, by designating them as victims. … That's what false witness is. It's deriving one's solution to one's death anxiety from extreme trauma, in this case in an extreme situation [the My Lai massacre], by exploiting a group of people and rendering them victims, designated victims for that psychological work.

(‘Interview with Robert Jay Lifton’, p. 166)

In O'Connor's narratives history is shown to proceed through this mechanism of false witness: a mechanism to which the foreign body of the displaced person, in the narrative of that title, falls victim. The image of the Holocaust becomes the site on which these displacements and repressions are reproduced.

O'Connor depicts a society in thrall to a myth of a golden age to which it yearns to return. The advance of history is perceived, in the words of the ossified General in ‘A Late Encounter With the Enemy’ (1953) as ‘deadly as the River Styx’ (CS, p. 134). Post Civil War history is resentfully perceived as a process of accumulating debt, the South being engaged in a futile pursuit of recuperation; in ‘The Displaced Person’, the Judge's desire for a ‘return’ to a society without money—as Astor, an African American labourer, wryly remarks, “‘Judge say he long for the day when he be too poor to pay a nigger to work’” (CS, p. 215)—implicitly advocates a return to slavery. Like Judge Clane's scheme to pursue compensation for the loss of confederate money in Carson McCullers' Clock Without Hands (1961), this preposterous grievance betrays an incapacity to interpret the emancipation of the slaves as anything other than an outrage against property rights. As Leonard Olschner writes: ‘History and seeming timelessness are the antagonistic forces … it is history which breaks into the assumed unshakable, static social order of the American South in the years following World War II.’¹⁹ The past persists in attitudes of uncanny suspension. Conversely, modern mass culture conveys its icons into the depths of the rural South in a radically remote fashion. The faded sweatshirts sported by a number of characters function as distant and decomposing snapshots of a distant American mythology: the ‘faded cowboy on a horse’ (CS, p. 276) worn satirically by Joy in ‘Good Country People’ (1955), the ‘silver stallion’ (CS, p. 126) rearing from a murderer's chest in ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’ (1953), and the ‘faded destroyer’ (CS, p. 179) sinking into a boy's hollow ribs in ‘A Circle in the Fire’ (1954).

Suspended in time but possessed by history, the uncanny stasis of O'Connor's South is ghost-ridden by the past. The devastation of history has a protracted and belated quality. Indeed, with its motifs of dislocation and depopulation, O'Connor's fiction gathers within itself the residues of successive historical crises. The ubiquity of single women managing farms in the absence of men in her writing is broadly suggestive of the disruption of war but, in O'Connor's narratives, it evokes most potently the American Civil War. It records the emergence, out of the idealized fragility of the ‘white southern lady’, a generation of indomitable women.²⁰ Returning war veterans also punctuate O'Connor's narratives. In ‘The Displaced Person’, Mr Shortley is a First World War veteran who habitually characterizes himself as returned from the dead: “‘If everyone was as dead as I am,’” he declares, “‘nobody would have no trouble’” (CS, p. 206). In ‘A Stroke of Good Fortune’ (1949), Ruby's brother's experience of war fails to make him a ‘somebody from somewhere’ (CS, p. 95) but, on the contrary, deprives him of all origin; he returns to find his home town has simply disappeared, presumably due to depopulation. In O'Connor's novel Wise Blood (1952), Hazel Motes experiences the same uncanny projection of war's destruction. His four years in the army are a vacuum in the novel, but perhaps a critically defining absence. His experience is characterized entirely by loss. Forgotten by the army in foreign places, he is remembered only long enough for the removal of a fragment of shrapnel whose form nevertheless lingers in his body. This phantom is like a double which haunts and avenges; it compounds the sense of loss—of being bereft and dispossessed—which pervades O'Connor's fiction.²¹ The impact of Motes' war experience is constituted by a profound ambiguity suggestive of an overwhelming experience which exceeds representation: ‘He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him’ (Wise Blood, p. 68).

The wilful quality of incomprehension which characterizes the historical experience of the South in O'Connor's narratives bears the imprint of denial. In the aptly titled ‘A Late Encounter With The Enemy’, the General's conviction is expressive of this denial: ‘He didn't have any use for history because he never expected to meet it again’ (CS, pp. 135-6). However, the effort to maintain the repression of the past is persistently met with uncanny returns, heralded by the irrational.

The ethical ambivalence of Mrs Shortley's recollection of a liberated concentration camp captures this dimension of disavowal. Her description temporarily maintains the frozen quality of shock—‘a head … a foot, a knee’ (CS, p. 196)—but it holds a latent revulsion. Her refusal of understanding indicates a slide into a generalized phobic disgust rather than the adoption of a position of moral outrage. The dense claustrophobia of the image and its excess of death is overwhelming and threatens to engulf the spectator in a tide of horror. As Julia Kristeva has written, in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, the corpse threatens to throw its witness into a vertiginous crisis of identity:

In that compelling, raw, insolent thing in the morgue's full sunlight, in that thing that no longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything, I behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders: fainting away. The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject.²²

The uncanny reproduction of images—whether mechanical or unconscious—is spuriously traced, by the logic revealed in this narrative, to the swarming disintegration and pollution of the corpse. As Elisabeth Bronfen has written on the relationship between death and representation: ‘As the unheimlich liminality of the corpse translates into its own double in the form of representation, this repetition will either perform a safe fixture or preserve threatening oscillation.’²³ The cinematic medium becomes a casualty to the contagion of trauma. The apparently austere and disembodied quality of the image is belied by its susceptibility to contagion as it becomes a vehicle of infection. Caruth has written of the ‘danger … of the trauma's “contagion”, of the traumatisation of the ones who listen’ (‘Introduction’, American Imago, p. 10). The danger is here even more troubling: it is a contagion borne not out of empathy but out of aversion and denial.

The alien character of Guizac's language, Polish, is perceived as complicit in this uncanny proliferation of anxiety. Moreover, it is posited as an agent of its immanent violence. Guizac's name is wilfully mispronounced as ‘Gobblehook’, evoking archaic fears of devouring and tearing. Refusing to harbour foreign sounds within her mouth, Mrs Shortley attaches a superstitious dread to the possession of a second language: ‘knowing two languages was like having eyes in the back of your head’ (CS, p. 233). Moreover, its doubling productions are here equated with the manufacture of death. ‘Not without reason’, writes Bronfen, ‘does the word corpus refer both to the body of a dead human or animal and to a collection of writings’ (Over Her Dead Body, p. 257). The corpse and the dead letter are collapsed into one figure of contagion in ‘The Displaced Person’. Guizac's foreign words are revenants; an uncannily animated script which, in Mrs Shortley's imagination, is mobilized and advancing:

She 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 high up in a room, all the dead dirty words, theirs and hers too, piled up like the naked bodies in the newsreel.

(CS, p. 209)

This image captures an insidious shift of culpability so that the victim, Guizac, becomes the perpetrator, and the bystander, Mrs Shortley, becomes the victim. Its origins can be traced to the numb ambivalence of Mrs Shortley's memory which allows the corpse to become the source as well as the destination of violence. ‘Piled’ and ‘tangled’ in a ‘heap’, they not only represent but also inflict an assault on the dignity of the human form. The ‘dead naked people’ provoke an ambivalent revulsion: the recoil from the euphemistic ‘part’ suggests a phobic recoil incapable of making ethical distinctions. The logic which attaches a generalized dread to the victim rather then to the perpetrator similarly casts the Guizacs as envoys of horror, whose passage across the Atlantic harbours contagion. The pathos of Guizac's escape out of the nightmare of European history into life in the new world is transformed into an uncanny survival of death in life. Mrs McIntyre reads Guizac's face as a microcosm of the crimes committed in the ‘devil's experiment station’ (CS, p. 205). His face, like Frankenstein's monster, seems assembled from the dead fragments of violated graves: ‘his whole face looked as if it might have been patched together out of several others’ (CS, p. 222). The implication of pollution and contagion conspires to a ‘plague motif’ which, according to René Girard, ‘illuminates but a single aspect: the collective character of the disaster, its universally contagious nature’.²⁴ Indeed, in ‘The Displaced Person’, the Guizacs are associated with pestilence: the girl's name, Sledgewig, is metonymically collapsed into an association with the bollweevil, which devastated Southern farm lands. Moreover, Mrs Shortley has the ‘sudden intuition’ that ‘like rats with typhoid fleas’ they may have ‘carried all those murderous ways over the water with them’ (CS, p. 196).

Leonard M. Olschner has written of the historical context within which this narrative is placed. The reception of European refugees in the US was often reluctant and even hostile. Olschner quotes the Texan Congressman, Ed Gossett, voicing objections in 1947:

‘While a few good people remain in these [Displaced Person] camps, they are by and large the refuse of Europe. The camps are filled with bums, criminals, black-marketeers, subversives, revolutionists, and crackpots of all colours and hues.’

(‘Annotations on history and society’, p. 65, my italics)

The ‘march of the Displaced Persons’, as it was described in a Life magazine of 1945,²⁵ took the form of an invasion in the popular imagination. Indeed, the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 incorporated such prejudices in the form of discrimination against Catholics and, moreover, Jews. The sight of a corpse may evoke responses which are, in many ways, universal reactions. However, the implicit assault on the very construction of the body evoked by the corpse also challenges the body's historically specific determinants. As Kristeva writes:

The corpse (or cadaver: cadere, to fall) … upsets even more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance … as in true theatre, without make up or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. … There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being.

(Powers of Horror, p. 3)

The theatre of masks in O'Connor's fiction is expressive of a preoccupation with differentiation which is predominantly racial.

O'Connor's characters engage in an obsessive ritual of invocation of categories: ‘sometimes Mrs Turpin occupied herself at night naming the classes of people’ (CS, p. 491). In ‘Revelation’ (1964), Mrs Turpin inflicts on herself the purely academic, but somehow titillating, dilemma of a choice between the equally abhorred fates of being ‘white trash’ or black. The agony of this decision is prolonged with illicit relish and its conclusion is presumably meant to deliver a sense of her own lofty moral sensibility: she chooses to be a ‘neat clean respectable Negro woman, herself but black’ (CS, p. 491). However, the compulsive quality of this naming ritual betrays the fragility of these categories. It performs a function of reinforcement which paradoxically casts into doubt the stability of the whole structure. Mrs Cope's litany of blessings registers her gratitude at being white and wealthy: ‘They might have had to live in a development themselves or they might have been Negroes or they might have been in iron lungs or they might have been Europeans ridden in boxcars like cattle’ (‘A Circle in the Fire’, CS, p. 190).²⁶ The Holocaust, simply denoted by the boxcars, becomes a symbol of this anxiety of differentiation. The clinically hierarchized society of Nazi Germany might be assumed to be the envy of the racist mentality, but the Holocaust reveals both the violence immanent in such segregation and its fundamentally arbitrary nature. A totalitarian society has the simultaneous aspect of both supreme order and supreme disorder in its implacable adherence to its own strict but irrational logic. The gratitude for social and racial privilege which O'Connor's characters express transparently exposes a sense of its fragility, even its illegitimacy, and fear of its loss. The leisurely deliberation in which Mrs Cope indulges in her waking hours haunts her in more exacting form in her sleep: ‘Usually by the time she had fallen asleep all the classes of people were moiling and roiling around in her head, and she would dream they were all crammed in together in a box car, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven’ (‘A Circle in the Fire’, CS, p. 492). The historical displacements of the white South—whose very identity is grounded in the often violent and institutional subjection of racial others—are both a symptom and a defence against this arbitrary quality.

In ‘The Artificial Nigger’ (1955) the process of Nelson's education in racism begins on the train when he feels a ‘sudden keen pride’ (CS, p. 257) in his grandfather's racist wit. Nelson converts a humiliation inflicted by his own grandfather into a blame, directed at the guiltless black railroad passengers, that speaks of envy: ‘he hated him [the ‘Negro’] with a fierce raw fresh hate; and also, he understood now why his grandfather disliked them’ (CS, pp. 255-6). The ‘artificial nigger’, however, restores their solidarity: ‘some great mystery, some monument to another's victory that brought them together in their common defeat’ (CS, p. 269).²⁷ The language of deliberance and martyrdom, so suggestive of anti-slavery discourse, is appropriated to construct the myth of the South as besieged and wronged. O'Connor depicts a white society whose seemingly unconscious ruse is to sustain the smart of defeat and the abject aspect of the vanquished as a facade beneath which the exercise of privilege and power endures. The recurring complaint of white landowners against the thankless burden of authority and the ingratitude of dependants is compulsively articulated as if in response to an unceasing but unspoken reproach. So pervasive is this logic that even, or perhaps especially, dissent is caught within its framework and reproduces its structures. White liberalism is satirized by O'Connor for its complicity with myths of martyrdom and deliverance and the motives of its champions are deeply suspect. For example, Julian and Asbury (in ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge’ (1961) and ‘The Enduring Chill’ (1958)) are white men of privileged ancestry whose adoption of a liberal outlook is partially motivated by the integral offence it will cause to their despised mothers. The scene of the historic Civil Rights movement is merely a stage on which to play out white fantasies, and individuals are deployed as props for dramatic effect. Racial equality and desegregation are perceived by these ‘progressives’ as the absorption of blacks into white culture—a gesture of accommodation which anticipates some reparation or reward. The attempt to identify with the oppressed is an effort to enjoy simultaneously the perceived moral authority of the victim and the elation of the victor. The masochistic identification with suffering—‘go ahead and persecute us’ (‘Everything That Rises Must Converge’, CS, p. 414) which thrills Julian—necessarily displaces the historical experience of the other and demonstrates little authentic investment in political change. On the contrary, Julian gains ‘a certain satisfaction to see injustice in daily operation’ (CS, p. 412). Moreover, a cultural envy seems to be at work in the appropriation of narratives of suffering: Mary George acidly comments of Asbury, ‘the artist arrives at the gas chamber’ (‘The Enduring Chill’, CS, p. 363).

‘The Displaced Person’ was published in 1954 and so preceded the emergence at the end of the decade of a growing literature of witness and testimony to the Holocaust. It can be placed rather within the collective amnesia of Cold War hysteria. From this vantage point it explosively portrays the eruption of the implicitly racial displacements and denials at the heart of the historical experience of the American South. The appalling reproduction of violence in ‘The Displaced Person’ seems to belong to an irrational script of sacrifice as that outlined by René Girard. Girard writes that ‘any community that has fallen prey to violence or has been stricken by some overwhelming catastrophe hurls itself blindly into the search for a scapegoat’ (Violence and the Sacred, p. 79). However, the production of a scapegoat in O'Connor's text is articulated within a highly specific historical language. Frederick Asals reads O'Connor's text through Girard's Violence and the Sacred; he comments that the recurrence of corpses in O'Connor's texts seems to suggest the arrest of history:

The point is not merely the insistence in these parallels on the moribund, on American corpses that recall the vision of Europe, but also on the unchanging, on the rigor mortis that inhabits the living as well as the dead, the ferocious insistence that in all the ways that matter, time does not march on.²⁸

Asals rather coldly remarks on the ‘failure’ of the act of sacrifice in O'Connor's text and attributes this to the decline of religion. However, I would suggest that O'Connor's text is not absorbed by the mechanisms, be they historical or ritual, that it depicts. If a failure is to be identified, it is a failure of historical understanding of which O'Connor's text is not a symptom but a critique.

In ‘The Displaced Person’, as soon as Guizac's industrious efforts begin to threaten the social and racial hierarchy, Mrs McIntyre's pity for him is swiftly withdrawn. Her sentiments embark on an ominous decline through resentment into violent retribution: ‘she had had a hard time herself. … People ought to have to struggle. … He had probably not had to struggle enough’ (CS, p. 219). In the circulation and appropriation of roles of suffering and perpetration in ‘The Displaced Person’, the distribution of culpability becomes crucially blurred.

From his first reception in the American South, Guizac demonstrates a reckless disregard for racial distinction: ‘he shook their hands, like he didn't know the difference, like he might have been as black as them’ (CS, p. 207). As a consequence, he is quickly designated the target of a racially marked narrative of sexual violation. National differences symbolically substitute for racial difference. Mr Shortley's First World War experience informs him that there were ‘all kinds then but that none of them were like us’ (CS, p. 227); he conflates the Polish Guizacs with the Germans from whom they have fled. His declaration that he will not stand idle and witness ‘a woman done in by a foreigner’ (CS, p. 230) sexualizes the conflict in terms familiar to the South. Indeed, it is Guizac's plan to marry his niece to the black labourer Sulk—in order to secure her release from a camp—which is the pivotal point in the channelling of violence against him. The revelation of this news to Mrs McIntyre induces a sense of immediate and intimate jeopardy: her heart beats ‘as if some interior violence had already been done to her’ (CS, p. 224).

The phantom rape of white women by black men is the metaphorical apex in the construction of the white South as wronged and violated. Olschner writes that sexual relations between black men and white women ‘represented the violation of a virtually unassailable taboo in Southern culture, the violation of idealised white womanhood’ (‘Annotations on history and society’, pp. 71-2). The significant violation is not so much of a woman's body as of the racial segregation of the South: the issue of sexual consent is irrelevant in terms of white racist national myth. This violation has the power to provoke collective racial violence in the form of lynching: in ‘The Displaced Person’ this collective violence finds its displaced target in Guizac. A pervasive fear of racial intermingling, through violence or through the assumed desire of blacks to ‘improve their colour’ (‘Revelation’, CS, p. 496) in mixed marriage, is registered throughout O'Connor's texts. In ‘The Displaced Person’, Sulk's tongue ‘describing little circles’ (CS, p. 219) and his ‘half grin’ (CS, p. 220), as he covets a photo of the niece, suggests a lascivious idiocy which simultaneously infantilizes and demonizes black male sexuality. The ‘bland and composed eyes’ (CS, p. 220) of the girl in her First Holy Communion dress, her blonde hair crowned by a ‘wreath’ (CS, p. 220), evokes the figures of a child bride and corpse: this frozen image, snatched out of death, gathers the horrors of child sexual abuse and necrophilia into the taboo of miscegenation. Mrs McIntyre's response is apoplectic and vicious: ‘You would bring this poor innocent child over here and try to marry her to a half-witted thieving black stinking nigger! What kind of a monster are you!’ (CS, p. 222).

At the culmination of the narrative in ‘The Displaced Person’, Guizac's posture echoes the cruel bodily fragmentation of the Holocaust, as recollected by Mrs Shortley, and anticipates his own fate: ‘feet and legs and trunk sticking impudently out from the side of the tractor’ (CS, p. 234). Guizac's murder seems to be compelled by an uncanny logic. However, the wilful disavowal of autonomy which it betrays resembles the passive complicity of a witness to an atrocity:

[Mrs McIntyre] 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 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 for ever, and she had heard the little noise the Pole made as the tractor wheel broke his backbone.

(CS, p. 234)

Thus history seems to compel its own repetition. The latent symptoms of historical crisis fail to emerge into ethical comprehension but instead act as the material of further violence. The slow motion of catastrophe in the final moments of ‘The Displaced Person’ conspires to suspend its actors in a final frame of traumatic incomprehension, ‘froze[n] in collusion for ever’ (CS, p. 234).

FOREIGN BODIES: AN ETHICS OF HISTORY

‘The violent, catastrophic aspect the encounter with the foreigner may assume’, writes Kristeva in Strangers to Ourselves, ‘is to be included in the generalising consequences that seem to stem out of Freud's observations on the activating of the uncanny’ (p. 190). The foreigner is strange and unassimilated and yet familiar; in O'Connor's narrative, his otherness is feared and extinguished. In making this revelation, O'Connor's texts render themselves unacceptable: they reproduce a violence against the other and, moreover, they implicate the reader in this violence. Yet to blame O'Connor for the perpetration of textual atrocities, by accusing her of perversity and distortion as many critics have done, is to become complicit in the production of scapegoats. The violence of O'Connor's texts has its origin in history. The power and significance of her narratives arises from their ability to challenge the reader's passive collusion in the displacements of history. The strangeness of her fiction preserves otherness and difference whether in identity or in history. If her narratives compel the reader to will the extinction of that troubling strangeness in her texts, they only reveal all the more profoundly the violence that an eclipse of difference can release.

Freud's driving curiosity about the elusive effect of the uncanny might be read as an obsession with the baleful and the irrational. By producing a text which names the uncanny, he has been assigned the role of author and originator of its alienating effects. However, Kristeva insists that his project is far from being a mission to render our world alien and inhospitable:

One cannot hope to understand Freud's contribution, in the specific field of psychiatry, outside of its humanistic and Romantic filiation. With the Freudian notion of the unconscious, the involution of the strange in the psyche loses its pathological effect and integrates within the assumed unity of human beings an otherness that is both biological and symbolic and becomes an integral part of the same. Henceforth, the foreigner is neither a race nor a nation. … Uncanny, foreignness is within us: we are our own foreigners.

(Strangers to Ourselves, p. 182)

‘Delicately, analytically,’ writes Kristeva, ‘Freud does not speak of foreigners: he teaches us to detect foreignness in ourselves’ (p. 191). So it is with O'Connor's difficult and disconcerting texts: the crisis they engender is not only within the text but also within the subject. O'Connor's texts do not themselves offer a route through which the reader can emerge from alienation; they demand of the reader a form of reading which will construct its own ethics. It is strange, and yet therefore fitting that O'Connor's anti-humanism approaches, as if in reverse, the lesson which Kristeva draws from Freud's uncanny: that is, the necessity for a concept of human dignity that ‘implies not only rights but desires and symbolic values’; one that ‘falls within the province of ethics and psychoanalysis’ (Strangers to Ourselves, p. 153).

Notes

1. Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, trans. James and Alix Strachey (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1974), pp. 56-7.

2. Sigmund Freud, ‘The uncanny’, in Albert Dickson (ed.) Art and Literature (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 340.

3. Maud Ellmann, ‘Introduction’, in Maud Ellmann (ed.) Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism (London: Longman, 1994), p. 28.

4. Cathy Caruth, ‘Unclaimed experience: trauma and the possibility of history’, in Claire Nouvet (ed.) Yale French Studies 79: Literature and the Ethical Question (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 181.

5. Cathy Caruth, ‘Introduction’, American Imago: Psychoanalysis, Culture and Trauma (Part One), 48.1 (1991), p. 3.

6. Flannery O'Connor, The Complete Stories (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), p. 196. Hereafter abbreviated in text as CS.

7. This role is at odds with its traditional association with progress. As Susan Buck-Morss writes: ‘Railroads were the referent, and progress the sign, as spatial movement became so wedded to the concept of historical movement that these could no longer be distinguished’ (The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (London: MIT Press, 1989), p. 91).

8. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), p. 41.

9. See Zygmunt Bauman: ‘The unspoken terror permeating our collective memory of the Holocaust (and more than contingently related to the overwhelming desire not to look the memory in its face) is the gnawing suspicion that the Holocaust could be more than an aberration, more than a deviation from an otherwise straight path of progress, more than a cancerous growth on the otherwise healthy body of the civilized society; that, in short, the Holocaust was not the antithesis of modern civilization and everything (or so we like to think) it stands for’ (Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), p. 7).

10. Miriam Hansen, ‘Benjamin, cinema and experience: “The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology”’, New German Critique, 40 (1987), p. 189.

11. Indeed, Mary Ann Doane has noted the affinity between the railway and the cinema. The earliest moving pictures took the motion of trains as their subject, instituting the ‘persistent fascination of the classical cinema with trains and railroad stations, its narrative fixation upon moments of arrival and departure’; Doane attributes this affinity to an analogy of experience: ‘The railway passenger, like the cinema spectator, is subjected to a succession of images mediated by a frame’ (Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1986), p. 188).

12. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Anselm Hollo (Oxford: Basil Blackwell), 1977), p. 151.

13. Freud, quoted in Caruth, American Imago, 48.1 (1991), p. 6.

14. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 62-3.

15. The flashback as a metaphor for historical understanding is also evoked by Walter Benjamin, who proposes the ‘shock effect of the film’ (Walter Benjamin, ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), p. 232). Benjamin suggests an analogy between Freudian theory and film's contribution to the field of perception: ‘The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses’ (Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 230). The work of this ‘optical unconscious’, to use Rosalind Krauss' phrase, from The Optical Unconscious (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), could be detected in Benjamin's comments on the comprehension of the past in his ‘Theses on the philosophy of history’: ‘The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognised and is never seen again. … To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognise it “the way it really was” (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger’ (Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 247).

16. Claude Lanzmann, quoted in Caruth, ‘Introduction’, American Imago, 48.4 (1991), p. 421.

17. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon Roudiez (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p. 30.

18. Robert Jay Lifton, ‘Interview With Robert Jay Lifton’, with Cathy Caruth, American Imago, 48.1 (1991), p. 166.

19. Leonard M. Olschner, ‘Annotations on history and society in Flannery O'Connor's “The Displaced Person”’, The Flannery O'Connor Bulletin, 16 (1987), p. 62.

20. Olschner writes of Mrs McIntyre in ‘The Displaced Person’ that she is: ‘reminiscent of plantation owners' wives during and after the Civil War, wives who, after their husbands died or after the slaves were emancipated, were forced to manage plantations and themselves do physical labour while their husbands were at war’ (‘Annotations on history and society’, p. 70).

21. Elizabeth Grosz writes that the phantom limb is ‘an expression of nostalgia for the unity and wholeness of the body, its completion. It is a memorial to the missing limb, a psychical delegate that stands in its place’ (Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1994), p. 73).

22. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 4.

23. Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 257.

24. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), p. 77.

25. See Olschner, p. 64.

26. The ‘boxcars’ in which ‘Europeans’ are deported are also suggestive of Soviet deportations, but no explicit reference is made.

27. The ‘plaster figure of a Negro’ is described as follows: ‘It was not possible to tell if the artificial Negro were meant to be young or old; he looked too miserable to be either. He was meant to look happy because his mouth was stretched up at the corners but the chipped eye and the angle he was cocked at gave him a wild look of misery instead’ (CS, p. 268).

28. Frederick Asals, ‘Differentiation, violence and “The Displaced Person”’, The Flannery O'Connor Bulletin, 13 (1984), p. 10.