{"id":5579,"date":"2016-04-22T07:51:24","date_gmt":"2016-04-22T11:51:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5579"},"modified":"2016-04-22T07:51:24","modified_gmt":"2016-04-22T11:51:24","slug":"flannery-oconnors-the-displaced-person","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5579","title":{"rendered":"Flannery O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"bookshare,

Bookshare box outside Flannery O’Connor’s girlhood home with an adored peacock (photo: Vicki Weisfeld)<\/p><\/div>\n

Late last year author David Griffith<\/a> wrote a timely essay in The Paris Review<\/em> about Flannery O\u2019Connor\u2019s infrequently anthologized short story, \u201cThe Displaced Person.\u201d* He was inspired to do so by the ongoing political debates over immigration. First published as a short story in 1955, the story was made into a tv movie<\/a> with John Housman, Samuel L. Jackson, and Irene Worth in 1977.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Connor generally avoided stories that tried to make a particular point about social issues. Topical writing can sink unpleasantly into polemics or become outdated. Think about the reservations people now have about The Crucible<\/em>, Arthur Miller\u2019s play about the McCarthy era witch hunts. Griffith says O\u2019Connor\u2019s story \u201cEverything that Rises Must Converge\u201d is another exception. (It\u2019s the unforgettable tale of the mother who gets on the bus wearing her distinctive hat.) It manages both to avoid lecturing the reader as well as remaining relevant, as the bigotry it lampoons has not disappeared and constantly shifts to new targets. As have suspicion and resentment of \u201cthe displaced.\u201d<\/p>\n

More important, says Griffith, \u201cTo be topical, (O\u2019Connor) thought, was to risk arguing for social changes that couldn\u2019t be brought about by mere idealism, but by the hard, messy, and sometimes violent work of transforming hearts.\u201d We hear that in the current campaign as well. Idealistic, pie-in-the-sky proposals from politicians that have not a wisp of a chance to become anyone\u2019s reality. When we think about the desperate parents of Guatemala<\/a>, who were willing to part with their beloved children and send them impossibly far away to the United States to keep them safe (only to find they weren\u2019t welcome here), the difficulty of transforming greedy hearts is abundantly clear.<\/p>\n

Griffith, like other students of O\u2019Connor\u2019s works, would argue that in fact many of her characters are displaced persons\u2014if not literally, he says, then figuratively: \u201cmorally rudderless, existentially lost, or both.\u201d And their displacement comes from their inability to love their neighbor. One way Griffith describes displacement is being \u201cwithout a community to care for you\u201d and, I\u2019d add, \u201cto care about.\u201d The loss of caring community certainly describes the situation facing migrants all over the world today. They did not ask for their home countries\u2014their caring communities\u2014to become disastrous, murderous places.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Displaced Person,\u201d Griffith concludes,\u201ccarries a dark moral force without recourse to didacticism or sentimentality.\u201d The character in this post-World War II story has been displaced through the intolerance and hatred spawned by the Third Reich. Yet O\u2019Connor does not refer to the war itself, but instead focuses \u201con the long shadow cast by this kind of evil,\u201d a shadow that at the time of her writing extended all the way to Milledgeville, Georgia, and that in 2016 is deepening across our beloved country.<\/p>\n

*If you search for \u201cThe Displaced Person full text,\u201d the Gordon State College link has it as a rather funky pdf.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Late last year author David Griffith wrote a timely essay in The Paris Review about Flannery O\u2019Connor\u2019s infrequently anthologized short story, \u201cThe Displaced Person.\u201d* He was inspired to do so by the ongoing political debates over immigration. First published as … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Flannery O'Connor's \"The Displaced Person\" - a dark moral force","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[174,120],"tags":[496],"class_list":["post-5579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-draft-blog","category-short-story","tag-flannery-oconnor"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1rZ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5579"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5584,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5579\/revisions\/5584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}