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PASSAGES  TO ANALYSE_ THE DISPLACED PERSON

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"Like many in the South, O’Connor abhorred racism but was slow to embrace integration, feeling that to rush things would lead to more violence. This stance may have been part and parcel of her attitude toward topical writing. To be topical, she thought, was to risk arguing for social changes that couldn’t be brought about by mere idealism, but by the hard, messy, and sometimes violent work of transforming hearts. "

"And yet “The Displaced Person” is undeniably topical, right down to its title—and its topic makes it peculiarly resonant at present, when governors are vowing to refuse Syrian refugees and Donald Trump has outlined an arrantly bigoted plan to bar all Muslims from entering the U.S."

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At a little more than fifty pages, " The Displaced Person " is one of Flannery O'Connor's least anthologized stories-and if you share her beliefs about what she called "topical" stories, it's also one of the most problematic. O'Connor was wary of stories that focused squarely and perhaps sentimentally on social issues. Her own "Everything that Rises Must Converge," featuring a bigoted white woman riding a newly integrated bus, was, she feared, just such a story-though in a letter to a friend she confided that she "got away with it ... because I say a plague on everybody's house as far as the race business goes."

In the very same letter, O'Connor writes that "the topical is poison," lambasting Eudora Welty's famous story "Where Is the Voice Coming From," written from the point of view of the man who assassinated the civil rights leader Medgar Evers. "It's the kind of story that the more you think about it the less satisfactory it gets," O'Connor wrote. "What I hate most is its being in the New Yorker and all of the stupid Yankee liberals smacking their lips over typical life in the dear old dirty Southland."

Like many in the South, O'Connor abhorred racism but was slow to embrace integration, feeling that to rush things would lead to more violence. This stance may have been part and parcel of her attitude toward topical writing. To be topical, she thought, was to risk arguing for social changes that couldn't be brought about by mere idealism, but by the hard, messy, and sometimes violent work of transforming hearts.

And yet "The Displaced Person" is undeniably topical, right down to its title-and its topic makes it peculiarly resonant at present, when governors are vowing to refuse Syrian refugees and Donald Trump has outlined an arrantly bigoted plan to bar all Muslims from entering the U.S.

O'Connor takes her title from the Displaced Persons Act, which, between 1948 and 1952, permitted the immigration of some four hundred thousand European refugees into the United States. President Truman signed the bill with "very great reluctance" for what he saw as its discriminatory policy toward Jews and Catholics: the Act stipulated that, in order to be eligible, one must have entered Germany, Italy, or Austria before December 22, 1945, which, according to Truman, ruled out 90 percent of the remaining Jewish people displaced by the war. Similarly excluded were the many Catholics who'd fled their largely Communist countries after the December 22 deadline.

"The bad points of the bill are numerous," Truman wrote. "Together they form a pattern of discrimination and intolerance wholly inconsistent with the American sense of justice." He called the decision to enforce the December 1945 deadline "inexplicable, except upon the abhorrent ground of intolerance."

Despite the bill's restrictions and limits, the public was deeply concerned, as some Americans are now, with the possibility that "subversives" might infiltrate the country under the Act-and that the huge influx of refugees would take jobs from American workers.

According to Brad Gooch's biography , the Matysiaks, a Polish family of four who would become the basis for O'Connor's story, arrived in rural Georgia in 1951, having been eligible for immigration under the Act. They settled in the tiny town of Gray, Georgia, and they met Regina O'Connor, Flannery's mother, at Sacred Heart Church in Milledgeville, the only Catholic Church for miles. By the fall of 1953 they'd moved into a three-room shack at Andalusia, the O'Connor homestead. Their new home had a stove, but no indoor plumbing, and its curtains were made from feed sacks-not much different from the houses James Agee and Walker Evans had documented nearly twenty years earlier in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

The Matysiaks were not a complete anomaly. The pastor of Sacred Heart, Father John Toomey, had worked through the Catholic Resettlement Commission, an international organization created by Pope Pius XII, to help other refugee families settle in the area. But O'Connor, who didn't like to travel much because of her lupus, drew her inspiration from those who were closest to her-and so the Matysiaks, having settled almost literally in her backyard, captured her imagination.

The first image in "The Displaced Person" is news-reel footage 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": victims, the reader should intuit, of the Holocaust. The image is stunning, and the story's protagonist, Mrs. Shortley, reacts to it with a deep fear, setting the tone for the rest of the story. Whatever evil had caused the death of all those people, she thinks, has infected these refugees, and is now in danger of infecting America:

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? The width and breadth of this question nearly shook her. Her stomach trembled as if there had been a slight quake in the heart of the mountain and automatically she moved down from her elevation and went forward to be introduced to them, as if she meant to find out at once what they were capable of.

The word Holocaust is never used in the story-nor are Jew and Hitler. In the absence of specificity, the mass murder feels somehow even more mysterious, senseless, and unspeakable. But it also puts the reader more firmly in Mrs. Shortley's perspective: completely lacking any context that would move her to see this heap of bodies as victims, as human, as people like her.

Mrs. Shortley's husband is the caretaker and general handyman on a farm owned by the widow Mrs. McIntyre. The Shortleys oversee Astor and Sulk, two black men who have been hired hands for some time. Mrs. Shortley treats them like wayward children-in her eyes, they should be handled in a way that's consistent with "their limitations."

But trouble begins when Mrs. Shortley dies of a stroke and a refugee named Mr. Guizac, known throughout the story as only the Displaced Person, threatens to upset the social order. With Mr. Shortley gone attending to the funeral arrangements, Mrs. McIntyre hires the Displaced Person to assume authority over Astor and Sulk; they complain bitterly that he's working them too hard. The rest of the story focuses on Mrs. McIntyre and her struggle to get rid of the Guizacs. "I will not have my niggers upset," Mrs. McIntyre says, confronting the Displaced Person. "I cannot run this place without my niggers. I can run it without you."

The story is full of such barbs, suggesting that the perceived racial pecking order ultimately overrules any notions of Christian charity. "I am not responsible for the world's misery," Mrs. McIntyre thinks to herself as she scolds Guizac.

*

"The Displaced Person" brims with overt criticism of Christian racists-but there seems to have been an even deeper personal and spiritual need for O'Connor to write about the Matysiaks. In December 1953, just a few months after the displaced family arrived, O'Connor received a Christmas gift from Catholic Worker magazine, the publication arm of the movement founded by the Catholic activist Dorothy Day. The gift was a prayer card printed with "A Prayer to Saint Raphael":

O Raphael, lead us towards those we are waiting for, those who are waiting for us! Raphael, Angel of Happy Meetings, lead us by the hand towards those we are looking for!

. . . Lonely and tired, crushed by the separations and sorrows of earth, we feel the need of calling to you and of pleading for the protection of your wings, so that we may not be as strangers in the Province of Joy, all ignorant of the concerns of our country.

According to Gooch's biography, the prayer became a favorite of O'Connor's, eventually working its way so deep into her imagination that it inspired some of the rhetoric and imagery in the final section of "The Displaced Person." Mr. Shortley, feeling that his job might be at risk, begins complaining to Mrs. McIntyre, asking her why the Displaced Person should be afforded better treatment than someone who had "fought and bled and died in the service of his native land."

O'Connor is so often remembered as a misanthropic homebody-but she was comforted by the idea of a God that gave preferential treatment to the most vulnerable among us. The very concept of displacement-to be without a community to care for you-rises to the surface in this story, and, as in much of O'Connor's work, ostensibly Christian characters lose the courage of their convictions.

When a priest tries to calm Mrs. McIntyre down, to help her see the lack of charity in her thinking, he evokes a version of John 3:16: "When God sent his Only Begotten Son ... " McIntyre interrupts with words that shake the foundations of the story:

"Father Flynn!" she said in a voice that made him jump.

"I want to talk to you about something serious!"

The skin under the old man's right eye flinched.

"As far as I'm concerned," she said and glared fiercely, "Christ was just another D.P."

Reading O'Connor's work with broader notions of displacement in mind, you begin to see it in nearly every story, and even in her personal life. The traveling Bible salesman in "A Good Country People," the one-armed con man in "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," the senile and disoriented Civil War vet in "A Late Encounter with the Enemy"-and especially the misfit and grandmother from O'Connor's most famous story, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," the former an escaped convict who cannot recollect "all he done to deserve the punishment he got" and the latter a "good Christian woman" who reflects sentimentally on the old order of the South, an order that is now, in one of O'Connor's most hilarious jokes, "Gone with the Wind."

All of these characters are displaced, if not literally, then figuratively. They're either morally rudderless, existentially lost, or both; they cannot accept that the world has changed and passed them by. These displaced persons are dark agents of change. Their pitifulness causes them, and the reader, to confront the radical command to love our neighbor as ourselves, to be like the Good Samaritan who sets aside deeply engrained bigotry to minister to the needy.

But the Guizacs' displacement is different. Mr. Guizac and his family are unique in O'Connor's fiction in that they are the only Catholics, and they're the most blameless of any of O'Connor's displaced characters. They are in need of refuge and willing to work hard to earn their keep. The judgment they confront is the result of what the theologian Kelly Johnson calls "the fear of beggars," a distrust and anger that stems from all that the indigent make us contemplate in ourselves: our deficiencies, our brokenness. These encounters end, at best, in neglect, but they can also lead to violence.

As she grew older, O'Connor became more and more displaced herself. While her friends and contemporaries were winning grants and traveling abroad, she was marooned in Georgia. Her only romantic relationship-at least the only one we know about-was with Erik Langkjaer, a Norwegian traveling book salesman, likely the inspiration for Manley Pointer in "Good Country People." He visited her at Andalusia whenever he was in the area, bringing with him news of the outside world. He had lived in New York and had an aunt closely connected to Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, which is how O'Connor came to subscribe to their magazine. In a letter recounting one of her visits with Langkjaer, O'Connor writes, "The only conclusion we came to about [ministering to the poor] was that Charity is not understandable ... Strange people turn up."

Indeed, Christian charity is a constant challenge. Its necessity arises not from any soggy sense of guilt or social responsibility but from Jesus's description of the final judgment, found in the twenty-fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. Only those who fed the hungry, gave water to the thirsty, clothed the naked, welcomed the stranger, cared for the ill, and visited the imprisoned will be gain eternal life. And yet an overwhelming number of Americans, if polls are still to be believed, consider themselves Christian and believe America to be a Christian nation, one where the nativity scene is as recognizable as the Stars and Stripes: a tableau intended to remind even nonbelievers of the virtue of giving shelter to the weary traveler.

Many of our self-styled Christian leaders would do well to seek out "The Displaced Person," which, like O'Connor's best work, carries a dark moral force without recourse to didacticism or sentimentality. In its dogged focus on the obligation of Christians to help the oppressed, the story shrugs off its topical elements; O'Connor dwells not on the abominations of the Third Reich but on the long shadow cast by this kind of evil. In this way, Mrs. Shortley was, in a sense, correct when she looked upon that pile of bodies in the news reel-violence is a contagion, as the late René Girard theorized, begetting more violence, which begets more violence, and on and on and on.

Dave Griffith is the author of A Good War Is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America. He lives in Northern Michigan, where he directs the creative-writing program at Interlochen Center for the Arts.

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Reading Flannery O'Connor in the Age of Islamophobia

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At a little more than fifty pages, " The Displaced Person " is one of Flannery O'Connor's least anthologized stories-and if you share her beliefs about what she called "topical" stories, it's also one of the most problematic. O'Connor was wary of stories that focused squarely and perhaps sentimentally on social issues.

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Nobody does Southern grotesque better than Georgia author Flannery O'Connor. Characters with missing limbs, mysterious bulges, wooden legs and faces blue with acne. Her stories are a never-ending freak show, and she's quoted as saying "Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers, particularly, have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one." We came up with a list of her top 8 freaks for Halloween, and all would make great last-minute costume ideas.

1. The Misfit
Escaped convict "The Misfit" may be O'Connor's most chilling character. He shot his own father and proceeds to murder an entire family in A Good Man is Hard to Find. When the grandmother in the story tries to offer him money not to shoot her, he tells her, "There never was a body that give the undertaker a tip."

2. Tom T. Shiftlet
Mrs. Crater first believes Tom T. Shiftlet to be "a tramp and no one to be afraid of," and he proves her right about the tramp part by the end of The Life You Save May be Your Own. With only half an arm in his left coat sleeve, this carpenter arrives on the farm of Mrs. Crater and her mute daughter, Lucynell. After working his way into their good graces, he marries Lucynell then steals her car and leaves her at a diner. Afterward, he picks up a hitchhiker and feels "like the rottenness of the world is about to engulf him."

3. Manley Pointer
Traveling Bible salesman Manley Pointer in Good Country People is certainly one of O'Connor's most bizarre characters. He meets his match with philosopher Hulga, who has both a wooden leg and heart condition. When they escape to the barn, Pointer demands to know where her wooden leg "joins on," then takes it from her and reveals his Bible to be a hollowed-out box of whiskey, condoms and playing cards. Pointer's final reveal is that Hulga's wooden leg isn't the first thing he's taken from someone. "One time I got a woman's glass eye this way," he tells her.

4. Mrs. Shortley
This overweight, hateful woman in The Displaced Person is both prejudiced and mean-spirited. She's threatened by the Polish refugees who come to work on the farm and starts having visions about them. At one 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." She convinces her husband to pack up their things and leave the farm, only to die of a stroke in the car on the way out of town.

5. Mr. Paradise
This skeptical man from The River with "cancer over his ear" questions the Rev. Bevel Summers' ability to heal. He's only a small part of the story as the owner of the town gas station, but his name and description at the end of the story make him quite memorable. "Finally, far downstream, the old man rose like some ancient water monster and stood empty-handed, staring with his dull eyes as far down the river line as he could see."

6. Gonga the Gorilla
A gorilla suit actually gets a starring role in O'Connor's novel "Wise Blood." After meeting a Hollywood gorilla at a movie theater, Enoch Emory decides to attack the man in the costume and steal his suit. He buries his own clothes and puts it on, transformed. Man turned gorilla isn't the creepiest character in this novel. There's also a museum mummy that character Sabbath Lily holds like a baby and main character Hazel Motes who blinds himself and wraps barbed wire around his chest in his search for redemption.

7. O.E. Parker
Poor Parker in Parker's Back. He gets his first tattoo at the age of 15 after being inspired by a man at a fair covered in them from head to toe. Once Parker's front is full of serpents, eagles and hearts, only his back is left. In an effort to please his pious wife, he gets a large tattoo of God there, but when he gets home and shows his wife, she says, "It ain't anybody I know."

8. General Sash
The 104-year-old general in A Late Encounter with the Enemy considers himself to still be a very handsome man. He doesn't wear teeth because he believes his profile is more striking without them and likes to dress in his full uniform, even though it's not the one he wore in the war. The general's big moment of fame - and his uniform - came years earlier when he was invited to a movie premiere in Atlanta. "Since then, his life had not been very interesting. His feet were completely dead now, his knees worked like old hinges ..." But he has to make it to his granddaughter, Sally's, graduation for one last procession, even if he's a corpse by then.
Image of The Misfit from The Composites on Tumblr. Thanks to Dr. Mary Ann Wilson, English professor at UL Lafayette, for her help in narrowing down the characters. We know there are plenty more grotesque O'Connor characters out there. Did we miss your favorite? Comment and let us know!

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Flannery O'Connor's Top 8 Freaks - Deep South Magazine

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Nobody does Southern grotesque better than Georgia author Flannery O'Connor. Characters with missing limbs, mysterious bulges, wooden legs and faces blue with acne. Her stories are a never-ending freak show, and she's quoted as saying "Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers, particularly, have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one."

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1. The Displaced Person: A Short Story by Flannery O'Connor

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1. The Displaced Person: A Short Story by Flannery O'Connor

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Land of Opportunity

" Mr. Guizac and his family have arrived in the United States with only the most basic of possessions. Assuming he does not enjoy being homeless, Mr. Guizac probably does feel "incomplete." We don't hear his thoughts but we can assume from his actions that he sees the farm as an opportunity to do good work, and get ahead in this new world, a world that is supposed to be kindler and gentler than the one he and his family fled."

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"The peacock was following Mrs Shortley up the road to the hill where she meant to stand. Moving one behind the other, they looked like a complete procession. Her arms were folded and as she mounted the prominence, she might have been the giant wife of the countryside, come out at some sign of danger to see what the trouble was. She stood on tremendous legs, with the grand self-confidence of a mountain, and rose, up narrowing bulges of granite, to two icy blue points of light that pierced forward, surveying everything. She ignored the white afternoon sun which was creeping behind a ragged wall of cloud as if it pretended to be an intruder and cast her gae down the red clay road that turned off from the highway" (page 194, The Complete Short Stories"

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Guizac's displacement contrasts with the ominous presence of Mrs Shortley in the opening / marmoreal like / big as a mountain / statuesque

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Source

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During World War II, many Europeans were “displaced” and even in America, the land of the free, they were not treated fairly. They were often treated no better than the African-Americans, and in those time racism against them in the South was still vast. The stylistic techniques used by Flannery O’Connor in her short story, “The Displaced Person,” allows her to relay her purpose of writing to the audience. She uses symbolism, foreshadow, and irony to communicate her opinions about racism to the audience....Source

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During World War II, many Europeans were "displaced" and even in America, the land of the free, they were not treated fairly. They were often treated no better than the African-Americans, and in those time racism against them in the South was still vast. The stylistic techniques used by Flannery O'Connor in her short story, "The Displaced Person," allows her to relay her purpose of writing to the audience. She uses symbolism, foreshadow, and irony to communicate her opinions about racism to the audience. Flannery O'Connor grew up in a small town in Georgia, and received her M.F.A. degree at the University of Iowa in 1947 (Epperson 563). Most of her fiction is a mix of comedy and tragedy based around "Southern life" (Epperson 563). She put ...show more content...
The most prevalent symbol of the story is the peacock. The peacock symbolizes the Christian faith. The peacock is noticed by the good people, such as the priest and Astor, who were also not present at the murder.The priest often remarked on how the peacock resembled Christ, and the way he observed the bird revealed the way he views the Christian faith. "The priest stood transfixed, his jaw slack" (O'Connor 599) The way he looks at the peacock shows how enraptured he is with the Christian faith. Astor would often speak to the peacock (O'Connor 595). Neither of these men are racist, nor have they ever shown any animosity towards anyone else. Those who did not acknowledge the peacock or disliked it, are seen as the villains, such as Mrs. McIntyre. Mrs. McIntyre's dislike for the peacocks mirrored the way she felt about the Christian faith. She stated, "I've let them die off," symbolizing that her faith has died (O'Connor 587). Mrs. McIntyre is a racist, she is often seen saying something about the African-Americans or Mr. Guizac that exhibits how much she looks down on...show more content...
The first use of foreshadow is seen in a conversation between Mrs. McIntyre and Mrs. Shortley. "'We'll get this whole bottom cut within two days at the rate.' 'Maybe,' Mrs. Shortley muttered, 'if don't no terrible accident occur'" (O'Connor 590) This conversation foreshadows the murder of Mr. Guizac. Towards the end of the story Mr. Shortley says, "'Revenge is mine, saith the Lord," right before he uses the tractor to murder Mr. Guizac (O'Connor 602). Mr. Shortley believes that Mr. Guizac is to blame for the death of his wife, because his work ethic and her dislike for the man were part of the termination of Mr. Shortley. The second us of foreshadow is seen in Mrs. Shortley's prophecy. This prophecy foreshadows her death. She states, "'Legs where arms should be, foot to face, ear in the palm of the hand. who will remain whole'" (O'Connor 592). While she was dying in the car she begins to grab anything she can almost as if she was "trying to fit the two extra limbs onto herself," fulfilling both the prophecy and foreshadow (O'Connor 594). The way that O'Connor portrays Mrs. Shortley as hateful and prejudice, leads the reader to not feel sympathy for her. Almost as if O'Connor wants the reader to know that no good can come from

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Symbolism In The Displaced Person By Flannery O Connor

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During World War II, many Europeans were "displaced" and even in America, the land of the free, they were not treated fairly. They were often treated no better than the African-Americans, and in those time racism against them in the South was still vast.

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By referrring to "person" / there is already a displacement.  The displaced person turns out to be Mr Guizac and all his e entourage.  He is given a name but the name does not appear in the title.  The pronunciation of his surname entails difficulties for Mrs Shortley and Mrs McIntyre.  Mrs Shortley and Mrs McIntyre call him "Gobblehooks" and it is made explicit that Mrs McIntyre doesn't call him "Gobblehooks" to his face.
Interesting connotations:  "Gobble" is the sound "turkeys" make, and it also seems to make allusion to "fish" imagery, normally associated with Jesus Christ.

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6. From "The Paris Review" / Source for the title

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6. From "The Paris Review" / Source for the title

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"O’Connor takes her title from the Displaced Persons Act, which, between 1948 and 1952, permitted the immigration of some four hundred thousand European refugees into the United States. President Truman signed the bill with “very great reluctance” for what he saw as its discriminatory policy toward Jews and Catholics: the Act stipulated that, in order to be eligible, one must have entered Germany, Italy, or Austria before December 22, 1945, which, according to Truman, ruled out 90 percent of the remaining Jewish people displaced by the war. Similarly excluded were the many Catholics who’d fled their largely Communist countries after the December 22 deadline." https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/12/10/the-displaced-