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Foreign bodies: History and trauma in Flannery O'Connor's 'The Displaced Person'

History and the irrational are revealed to exist in intimate proximity in O’Connor’s texts: the past haunts the present by returning through the unconscious. The role of history in O’Connor’s narratives could be addressed by drawing an analogy between the persistence of the unresolved con icts of the past and the return of the repressed in the form of the uncanny. Freud de nes the uncanny as ‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’ and as that which ‘ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light’ (‘The uncanny’, p. 345). The material which is subject to this mechanism of repression and return in O’Connor’s  ction is history, and its violent disruptions reveal their imprint on the unconscious in the form of trauma. History and psychoanalysis have traditionally been perceived as being at odds with each other. However, as Maud Ellmann has written, they are two discourses which urgently require a language through which to speak to each other: ‘What history needs is a science of tropes – that is, a psychoanalysis – to understand the ways in which the con icts of the world are recon gured in the con icts of the mind.’ An encounter between a crisis in subjective and historical memory is theorized in the concept of trauma. Cathy Caruth proposes the following de nition of trauma: