The Displaced Person: Reading Flannery O’Connor in the age of Islamophobia.

[HuckleB]

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/12/10/the-displaced-person/

"...

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.

...

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."

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A good read. It's well worth the time.

[HuckleB]

1. .

[Luminous Animal]

2. Thank you for this. I feel as though I read it long ago when

I was going through my southern writers craze but it seems worthwhile reading again.

[HuckleB]

4. O'Connor is always worth revisiting, IMO.

So much connection to the core of the human spirit.

[Luminous Animal]

3. You can read a pdf version here:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/dfc_attachments/public/documents/3205162/The-Complete-Stories-Flannery-OConnor.pdf

[HuckleB]

5. Awesome! Thanks for sharing!