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

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1997 by Betsy Bolton

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