SOURCE: Bolton, Betsy. “Placing Violence, Embodying Grace: Flannery O'Connor's ‘Displaced Person.’” Studies in Short Fiction 34, no. 1 (winter 1997): 87-104.

In the following essay, Bolton examines the relationship between vision and the violence experienced by the characters in “The Displaced Person.”

Several years ago, Slavoj Zizek, considering the notion that “we live in a post-ideological society,” proposed instead a redefinition of ideology. The most elementary definition, he suggests, is a phrase from Marx's Capital: “Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es” (“they do not know it, but they are doing it”). In place of this definition, he invokes Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason and the following formulation of cynical ideology: “they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it” (Zizek 28-29). News coverage of massacres in Bosnia and other places makes the cynicism of contemporary ideology especially vivid. With images of violence and...