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Technological Distances: Science, Technology, and Flannery O’Connor
Doug Davis Gordon College
O’Connor’s tale of the Displaced Person becomes a science ficBonal parable of two apocalypBc futures in which the American south is destroyed in good and bad ways.
O’Connor once wrote in a leFer to a close friend, “I owe my existence and cheerful countenance to the pituitary glands of thousands of pigs butchered daily in Chicago, Illinois at the Armour packing plant. If pigs wore garments I wouldn’t be worthy to kiss the hems of them.”
Posthumanism is both a way of represenBng humans in
terms drawn from contemporary sciences and technologies that are not
tradiBonally associated with the human being and a way
of understanding society and poliBcal acBon based on
one’s personal relaBonship to not only other people but also different technologies
and systems.
“the final imposiBon of a grid of control on the planet…the final abstracBon embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defense, the final appropriaBon of…bodies in a[n] orgy of war” (154).
Mrs. Shortley recalled a newsreel she had seen once 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 sBcking out, a hand raised clutching nothing. Before you could realize that it was real and take it into your head, the picture changed and a hollow-‐sounding voice was saying, “Time marches on!” (287)
All of Mr. Guizac’s moBons were quick and accurate. He jumped on the tractor like a monkey and maneuvered the big orange cuFer into the cane; in a second the silage was spurBng in a green jet out of the pipe into the wagon. He went jolBng down the row unBl he disappeared from sight and the noise became remote.
Mrs. McIntyre sighed with pleasure. (293)
[T]he cyborg is the awful apocalypBc telos of the West’s escalaBng dominaBons of abstract individuaBon…an ulBmate self unBed at last from all dependency, a man in space. (150-‐151)
From another perspecBve a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realiBes in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently parBal idenBBes and contradictory standpoints. (154)
As far as O’Connor’s Southern characters are concerned white is white, black is black, man is man, machine is machine, cow is cow, American is American, and so on. But in the poetry of O’Connor’s ficBon—and this applies to all of her ficBon—things are never what they are, especially human beings. People are already animals. People are already machines. People are even rocks and mountains and ice and light and fossils.
Mrs. McIntyre suddenly has a name for this horrible cyborg force that will remake her farm in its own apocalypBc image of post-‐racial high-‐tech workers astride machines: “Monster!” (313)
Both Mrs. McIntyre and Mr. Shortley resolve to rid their farm of the disrupBve cyborg once his radical poliBcal potenBal is realized. They do so by trying to turn this post-‐racial, hybridizing cyborg back into the abstract individuated liFle war machine he once was.
“Gone over there and fought and bled and died and come back on over here and find out who’s got my job—just exactly who I been fighBng. It was a hand-‐grenade come that near to killing me and I seen who throwed it—liFle man with eye glasses just like his. Might have bought them at the same store. Small world…” (323)
I think it is telling that O’Connor kills her cyborg, a bearer of her region’s future, be it a future of racial integraBon, industrial farming, or nuclear holocaust. Both Mr. Shortly and Sulk, each of whom are implicated in Mr. Guizac’s death along with Mrs. McIntyre, flee the farm, never to be seen again. Mrs. McIntyre loses her farm and reBres to her bedroom to have the doctrines of the Church explained to her by the same Priest who brought her the Displaced Person.
When Mr. Shortley, Sulk and Mrs. McIntyre killed Mr. Guizac, they killed their future.
Status of Research
• I have presented this paper at a scholarly conference, where it was received well
• I have completed a rough drah of approximately 10 pages
• I know of at least one journal that is presently soliciBng papers about O’Connor
• This summer I plan to develop this into a 15-‐20 page paper with a liFle more scholarly grounding and development and send it to a journal.