Placing violence, embodying grace: Flannery O'Connor's "Displaced Person."

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1997 by Betsy Bolton

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 f6r the living around him. (4)

The cliche of one's life passing before one's eyes suggests that the dying person comes to understand her or his own fife 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.