2At first sight "Artie’s Print Shop" has all the outward signs of a man’s world. Machinery is run and operated by men; however, male authority is called into question since men seem to be at the mercy of the very machines they are intended to control. This is confirmed by the assemblage of atrophied, disjointed, deformed and dismembered bodies which constitutes the labor force. The office manager, Mr. Sardo, a midget, oversees a maimed crew of male operators: Raymond "the foreman of the mail room" who limps, Bewick Coulter, missing two fingertips that a "paper folder ate", the deaf and dumb Linotypes, and most significantly Billy, an "apprentice" blade operator in the print shop missing a hand jammed in the paper rollers.

3The insistence on mutilated parts of the male anatomy seems to suggest that limbs and appendages in "Body Parts" are a metonymical displacement to castration. A case in point is the signifier "limp" used to describe the incapacitated assembly line director Raymond. We may infer, for example, that one of the signifieds of the signifier "limp" corresponds to the notion of impotence. In the same way stumped or maimed limbs - "meat hooks" for hands - and the recurrence of signifiers specific to the work of printers such as "scissors" and "blades" are representative of castration since these cutting instruments are associated with "nubs" and "hongs". We may extrapolate from the above that fear of emasculation constitutes the impricir discourse of the short story.

4Although Hoar provides only scant physical description of character in the story, we can reconstruct a mental image of the protagonist Billy through his first name. First of all Billy is referred to as "Billy boy" by his mother when she sings lullabies at his bedside. This recalls a popular American dialogue song about "Billy Boy", an adolescent lover and chaste soldier who is in quest of the virgo intacta. Like the adolescent Billy in "Body Parts", the soldier is seeking the "idol of his life" provided that she "can bake a cherry pie as quick as a cat can wink its eye", the baking of the pie being a metaphor for pregnancy.

5It is commonly acknowledged that the cherry is an allusion to forbidden fruit - that is to say the taking of the woman’s virginity. So the fruit hidden in the female which is contained within the signifier "cherry" substantiates Billy’s frustrated desire to possess the unattainable feminine ideal, Susie.

I. Primal instinct under attack

6Hoar translates the protagonist’s move toward manhood as a violent satire of the sexual initation rite staged in "Artie’s Print Shop". A veritable ritual is enacted each morning at 8:00 when the male workers gather round the press machine as the Judge "rubs glycerine into the fingertip of his left hand", stretches "a black rubber guard over his right thumb, checks the paste reservoir of his clipper, and bumps the blade to clear it" (BP, 120).

7Here machinery is sexualized so as to produce a mimetic variant on foreplay. The Judge assumes the role of a demiurgic figure reenacting sexual rites with all the modern preparatives necessary for fail-safe fornication: vaseline (glycerine), condom (rubber guard) and the right thumb (a displacement for the virile member). The fact that he holds a position of authority as Manager of the print shop while Billy’s father is at war suggests that the Judge may be inscribed within the Lacanian structure of "the Name of the Father", a symbolic authority upholding the Law.

8The titular Judge, Billy’s boss, otherwise known as Raymond, assumes the role of Billy’s surrogate father who is at war with Japan. Billy refers to him as the "Judge" thus corroborating the boy’s need to identify with a patriarchal figure in the absence of a paternal ideal. Billy’s preliminary initiation experience requires his participation in fantasy rituals with the older male operators. In accompanying them regularly to the Mail Room, he is authorized to gaze at Female pin-ups which the Judge has selected for display. It is of interest to note that Billy has just recently been initiated into the Mail Room, a secret male locus where the operators furtively "look up to" 253 clippings of women pasted on the walls. Despite his attempt to integrate into the operator’s voyeuristic clique, Billy admits: "There is a conspiracy to keep me in ignorance" (BP, 123).

9An attentive reader cannot afford to overlook the allusion made to "conspiracy" since it is an implicit statement about Billy’s ignorance concerning sexual matters. This is further suggested through the metonymical transfer of sexual expertise to machinery; indeed the adolescent is perplexed as to "which buttons to hit on women" (BP, 116). Despite his reading of Dr Lucian Oate’s sex manual and the fact that he can snatch newspapers as fast as the Judge without losing digits (BP, 129), Billy has not proven to be a successful seducer: "Women get bored and smoke a cigarette on you, or go frigid if you do not do everything right and in correct order", he muses, concluding "Screwing is a terrible responsibility" (BP, 116).

10Problematic relations with women are often evoked within a tissue of complex signifiers concerning the anatomized male body, the thumb being the most informative member. Textual evidence suggests that the thumb is an extended metaphor for the prenatal or natal appendage. If we assume that the structure of a metaphor is equivalent to a symptom, another signified of the signifierthumb may be "regression".

11In fact, women are held responsible for blocking Billy’s path to manhood. He complains bitterly about persecuting figures who share his home, notably the "harpies" - two old maid aunts who "do not know anything about becoming a man" (BP, 117). Although Billy no longer expresses a greed for "peach cobbler and banana pudding", the harpies continue to treat his palate as if it lusted after the taste of childhood. Desperate to become a man, he hopes his father will soon return to "drive the harpies from the castle" (BP, 118).

12Throughout the short story we are confronted with enigmatic representations of the thumb which feed into the lexical field of orality. For instance, the office manager is nicknamed "Tom Thumb", and Susie, Billy’s platonic love, often motions to him pointing not with her index, but with her thumb. Gladys, Susie’s foil, who is as black and hot-blooded as Susie is white and chaste is the central erotic figure of oral fixation - Billy lusts, not only after her body, but after "her eyes, chocolate as Goo-Goo Clusters" (BP, 115), a fast-food dessert equivalent to un gâteau fourré.

14Billy’s mother is rarely mentioned in the text, but we know that by singing bits of the dialogue song "Billy boy" at his bedside she has the power of captivating her son, and lulling him to sleep. In fact, the mother’s pure voice of divine femininity recalls the seductive voice of the alientating female incarnated by the antique Sirens whose enticing melodies Ulysses will escape only through self-imposed captivity. Thus, the dialogue song functions as a compressed image of the heroic male in quest of an unattainable ideal. Billy boy - the young soldier in search of a virgin wife - forms a mirrored relation with Billy, the press operator in pursuit of Susie, the impregnable woman with whom he jokingly takes "Holy Communion" (BP, 111).

15In both instances the adolescent displaces his desire onto an unattainable female model making it impossible to sever with the maternal object. In "Body Parts" Hoar mocks the grotesque image of the omnivorous mother who maintains an emasculating hold on the son by garbing him in the mixed gender trappings of a Ganymede: "My mother bought me knickers until I was the last boy in America wearing them... When the war came the manufacturers of America said ‘No. We will not manufacture knickers for one boy in Alabama’" (BP, 123). Such contemptuous gibing about effeminacy allows Hoar to highlight the devastating effect that the absence of men had on the wartime South. In the context of "Body Parts", those who stay at home in Montgomery end up invalid or risk emasculation, contrasting sharply with the heroic male at war with Japan.

II. The predatory work of women’s authority

16The second episode of Billy’s initiation rite is conceived as a mock representation of sexual intercourse where the male has become a victim of the machine over which he no longer has any authority. In this scene, Billy plunges into a fantasy world; deaf to the warnings of his co-workers, he disregards the clanging of the printing press whose voracious jaws prepare themselves for their next victim.

17Hoar stages this symbolic scene of castration in "Artie’s Print Shop" where particular attention is given to digits and limbs. The obsessive focalization on these body parts is proleptic of the inherent fear of castration which looms symbolically over the operators who are forced to work at a breakneck pace in order to prove they can snatch newspapers from running folders without losing digits.

19In "Body Parts" hypermetonymical images of buttons, switches and blades accentuate the antagonistic forces - reproductive and destructive - inherent in the creative agent of the printing press and consequently in man himself. Nowhere is this more evident than in "Artie’s Print Shop" where a man’s virility is assessed - not in terms of money or muscle power - but in terms of digital power: "I have fast hands that can snatch newspapers from a running folder without losing digits", brags the narrator (BP, 129).

20However, as we shall see, the phallocentric position that Billy lays claim to is ultimately disclaimed in the bloody dismantling of his arm, a displacement for his male organ. The fantasmagorical scene of Billy’s sexual initiation occurs as a mock-epic exploit whereby the adolescent comes to the rescue of his boss Harold who has lost control over the printing press. In fact this event echoes the first topos where machinery was animated so as to simulate the erotic act of foreplay, only here the context of dehumanized sexuality is taken one step further since it is now a question of penetrating the virgo intacta.

21In this fantasy Billy’s symbolic deflowering of Susie translates an anguished spirit of competition with his elder rival, Harold who "jams his thumb onto the press switch" which is "the eye of the Fate that denies him Susie" (BP, 130-31). The press switch obviously forms a contiguous link with female anatomy recalling Billy’s fear of measuring up to female orgiastic potential which functions much like a machine, so that female body parts like the parts of a machine depend upon the efficiency of its operator who must know which "buttons to hit on women" (BP, 116).

24In this game of sexual initiation Billy’s assertion of virility seems dubious if we are to consider his relationship with the machine which has been animated and sexualized to illustrate the dehumanizing force of the castrating female. Thus Susie assumes the symbolic status of the machine which places Billy in the position of a vanquished male. This in turn substantiates the dominance of the female subject implied in the signifier "rollers" - the omnivourous female parts of the printing machine - and the "button" - the orgiastic potential of the female member - over the male subject. In sexualizing the machine, Hoar reduces the female to a button/clitoris with powerful orgiastic potential which is equivalent to her destructive, castrating capacities. The experience of male anatomization in "Body Parts" calls up one of the principal preoccupations of Postmodernism: decentered sexuality.

27Although it claims to have left behind the metaphysical ground of romantic thought, Romanticism continues to exist at the heart of Postmodernism as an alternative mode of idealism. Indeed, it appears to be an extension of the dualistic Wordsworthian creation. Hoar seems to replace the notion of nature with the notion of body seated in a new instinctual foundation. As the brutally parodic rape scene in "Body Parts" will demonstrate, this primordial authentic being continues to function insiduously within the context of duality.

28Hoar mounts the rape of Susie as a mock-heroic fantasy structure where a lithe, one-armed Billy fights off proxy figures of powerful males, first with a serrated knife, then a Stacy Adamses, finally clamping the last attacker with a Japanese Strangle Hold. The vanquished crawl away and Susie clings to the protagonist for protection, but Hoar’s cartooning of the demiurgic venture of Susie’s rescue culminates in a radical turnabout whereby Billy substitutes Gladys for Susie thus affirming his incapacity to reconcile black and white oppositions. Finding the first version of his fantasy inadequate, Billy discards Susie who is rubbing her naked body against him, taking instead, her dark double, Gladys, who gazes at him submissively before sinking to the ground in the shadows where the boy leaps onto his carnal reward "dominating her totally" (BP, 135).

29This salacious episode echoes the castration scene giving it the signification of rape, thus corroborating the infirmity of the male principle. Once again, Billy finds himself in a mirror relation of impotence with the female since his vision is dependent upon maintaining the woman (Gladys) in a subservient position. Furthermore, the violent rejection of the white woman is symptomatic of the ideal ego’s need to smash the lost imaginary object of desire (Susie), the unattainable double of the "other", i.e. the mother. However, by defiling the other attainable object of desire (Gladys), in the name of the mother, the protagonist confirms his atavisitic attachment to the maternal ideal.

30The male principle is called into question once again in "the Maxwell Army Air Force Base Hospital" where Billy lies inert amongst Anglo-Saxon veterans who have been disabled at war. Mutilated by the printing press, Billy, the youngest of the maimed press operators, finds himself in a mirror relation with the wounded war victims in the Army Hospital. In either case - be it the weak men who stay at home, or the strong ones who go to war - the male in "Body Parts" is an impotent victim, not a potent war hero. This validates the signification of male infirmity as a domestic and geo-political issue in Hoar’s work.

31Postmodernism has largely adopted the habit of subverting gender roles and a forerunner of this trend can be traced back to Southern literature. The Confederate heritage of conservative rebellion against authority produced a reactionary spirit in Southern literature which would challenge traditional gender models by ascribing male authority to non-traditional female models.

34The infirmity of the circus freak, a metonymy for the disenfranchised modern male, is further suggested in the title "Petrified Man". Bearing no definite article of specification, the title of the short story obviously aims at "men" in the generic sense of the term. Like Hoar’s victims, Welty’s male metonymic models are prey to female castrating types. "Petrified Man"’s analogical setting: the hair salon, and its Medusa clients act as extended metaphors for the disempowering influence that women exercise over men. This is substantiated by a striking onomastic link between "Body Parts" and "Petrified Man" since they both feature an infantile type whose name is "Billy Boy". In "Petrified Man" Billy Boy, a three year-old toddler, crawls about at the feet of female clients attempting to ward off the blows of their feet all the while sporting the client’s hats, thus reminding us of Billy’s effeminate get-up in "Body Parts".

36Here we can see how myth informs the metaphorical play on notions of gender in postmodern textual strategy. Indeed, the obsessional recurrence of isotopies concerning petrification and mutilation of the male suggest that the phallic object has been reduced to a mere prehensile appendage. Thus the stumped, disjointed and immobilized male members in the war hospital recall the postmodern preoccupation with social and political dislocation since the male principle seems to have been marginalized, in short relegated to the fringes of society. What is foreclosed here is virility on the grand scale of anglo-saxon culture.

III. The return of the father

38In associating himself with the underdog and contrarily subscribing the Greek heroic archetype to his father, Billy assumes a subservient position of absolute obedience toward the paternal ideal. This recalls the subordinate position of the authoritarian, castrating female that he has been trying to escape. In "Body Parts" the disempowered male is often confronted with cutting instruments: Susie brandishes scissors before her boss, Billy’s hand is ripped off in the paper rips, and his father returns home "swinging a samurai sword around the house breaking glass" (BP, 118).

39When placed in the context of Billy’s rite of passage, lacerating tools may connote symbolic castration. This is corroborated by the fact that Billy sees his father as an omnipotent rival. Consequently the trope of the "sword" may be read as a paternal metaphor in this last fantasy structure suggesting a repressed conflict in which Billy rivals for authority with his father. Fantasy and ritual are fundamental to Hoar’s writing, and although the narrative of "Body Parts" lends itself to a psychoanalytical reading, it always has something of the mock epic mode to it. For example, in an earlier mock epic fantasy structure Hoar uses parody to evoke what is obviously an example of imaginary identification. Thus Billy’s desire to appropriate the heroic strength of his father is contingent upon his buying a package of "Trojan Condoms" (BP, 127) emblematic of the potency of Roman soldiers.

40When at last Billy is confronted with the authentic return of the father, he refuses to believe the litany of unheroic adventures his dad relates about his war experience, particularly the fact that he was a mere courrier. Faced with this harsh truth, the son prefers to maintain his illusions about the paternal ideal instead. Nevertheless, it is thanks to the return of the father that Billy’s heroic ideal and his cult of certainty will be totally discredited.

41In "Body Parts" the protagonist’s move toward reality is related as a dialectical process drawing on ready-made imperialistic myths whose surface structure when stripped away reveals crude and troubling contradictions. In this way Hoar disqualifies the golden myth of an heroic America on a global scale by subverting the geo-political convictions of the United States in 1944. At first sight the emblems on the father’s flight jacket - the splayed wings of "silver eagles printed upon leather epaulets and a shower of shooting stars on the sholder" (BP, 139) appear to be mythological tokens in praise of America. However, the father’s inner experience of war contrasts sharply with his heroic attire.

42By revealing the fact that he played only a bit part in the war as a courrier, the father destroys Billy’s illusions of paternal grandeur. In so doing the adolescent is obliged to renounce his fantasy of believing that his father was awarded the "Purple Heart". Even worse he comes to the realization that his father was no better than a "voyeur" since he witnessed heroic incidents of the Japanese, but never played an active role in battle himself. As for the Americans, his father states: "in all the fighting on Saipan we only captured seventeen hundred people. Most were civilians. The few soldiers we picked up were incapacitated" (BP, 142).

43The signifying chain in this passage reverberates with signs of impotent and maimed men all constituting unheroic figures of the American Infantry in Saipan, thus undermining the legendary stature of America in World War II. Though Billy struggles to maintain a stance of moral blindness by resisting reality, "He is telling the truth, and I hate it" (BP, 139), he is forced to see the imperialistic mask of the American demigod ripped off and replaced by the heroic alternative of the Japanese model.

44In refusing to defend his son’s authoritative convictions about the American ideal, the father liberally exalts Japanese manhood and military conduct, thus reversing the received ideas of the founding principles of American ideology. He goes so far as to attribute the Roman cult of honour, virility, and military prowess to the anti-heroic and anti-American model of the so-called "yellow-bellied Japanese", thus opening his son’s eyes to the unpleasant reality that truth exists as a highly personal experience.

45This remembering of 1944 as an alternative ideology, or a truncated myth suggests we have gone full circle in the revelation process of the protagonist who is reaching the point of epiphany: "This is not a revealing little insight. It is a truth that turns my world" (BP, 142).

46However, the closing lines of the short story suggest that Billy’s world is confined to circularity and subtly demands that we question the outcome of his rite of passage and his parting with heroic ideals. Although Billy has renounced the obligations of manual labor in "Artie’s Print Shop" and has started a new intellectual life at high-school, it seems as if he has displaced his quest for the heroic paternal ideal onto the academic model of the professor. This sign of circularity is adumbrated by his friend Jack who traces a circle in the dust as a mute response to Billy’s cry of jubilation at being back at school where "Teachers don’t have doubts" (BP, 147).