EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE
by Flannery O'Connor, 1965

The short story as a literary form, Flannery O'Connor once noted, has an extra dimension, one that comes about "when the writer puts us in the middle of some human action and shows it as it is illuminated and outlined by mystery." O'Connor's own capacity to charge her prose with mystery is demonstrated by the enigmatic title "Everything That Rises Must Converge." The title is usually taken to refer to the philosophies of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in whose work O'Connor found, if not answers, at least a different set of questions. It is a title charged with mystery, but in the story that follows the incidents related are so mundane (a weight-reducing class and a ride on the bus) and the points of convergence so funny (unlikely mothers and the wearing of the same hat) that an opposite and entirely comic view continuously threatens to overwhelm the tragic and the mysterious. Such are the tensions of O'Connor's work.

As in many of O'Connor's stories, "Everything That Rises Must Converge" has as its fulcrum a mother-figure. Julian's mother has sacrificed to send her handsome and intelligent son to college. She has managed to maintain appearances in the midst of squalor and southern decline and can now look back with a smile on the hard times that she has won. Julian is not grateful. He realizes that he is too intelligent to be a success and is already as disenchanted as a man of 50 years: "he could not forgive her that she had enjoyed the struggle and that she thought she had won." The action, seen through the eyes of Julian, shows him as a preeminently rational and reasonable man embarrassed by his moth-er's refusal to adjust to the modern world. Within this conflict O'Connor seeds the possibility of revelation.

Typically O'Connor's characters move toward a personal epiphany in which the rational and reasoning world of everyday occur-rence is stripped away, leading to the recognition of a universe of spirit in which sin and moral choices are still an issue. Julian is a rational man, but reason, says O'Connor, "should always go where the imagination goes." Julian's rationalism and imagination are at odds. Although he does not like to consider all that his mother has done for him, he nevertheless agrees to take her to her weight-reducing class. As his mother dons her new hat—in which, she has been assured by the shop assistant, she won't meet herself "coming and going"—Julian appears pinned to the door frame, waiting "like Saint Sebastian for the arrows to begin piercing him." Julian's mother not only affronts his sense of reality with her "imaginary dignity" but also challenges his self-righteous liberalism by openly advocating difference in the newly integrated South: "They should rise, yes, but on their own side of the fence." The narrative voice of O'Connor's work, however, is rarely impartial.

O'Connor is, in essence, a satirist, and her narrative voice is often that of a fundamentalist preacher who, like the satirist, inhabits a world of clear-cut good and evil with a sort of monumental certainty about which is which. Julian's hypocrisy is unveiled with stunning clarity. He fusses childishly about wearing the tie his mother insists upon; he ostentatiously seats himself next to an African American passenger and wishes to engage his neighbor in conversations about art, or politics, or any subject that would be "above the comprehension of those around him"; and he succumbs to an "evil urge" to break his mother's spirit. "True culture," Julian insists, "is in the mind," but his actions are so far dislocated from his professed ideas that his mother acquires dignity in direct relation to Julian's loss. At least she knows who she is, and to know oneself is also, as O'Connor has remarked, "to know the world." It is the way to overcome regionalism, and, paradoxically, it is a form of exile from the world: "to know oneself is above all to know what one lacks…." In these terms O'Connor herself transcends the regional and material settings of her stories to consider the nature of human spirituality.

Julian, blissfully unaware of what he lacks, moves from ignorance to knowledge. When an enormous African American woman seats herself beside him while he sits beside his mother, Julian maliciously allows his amusement to show. They have symbolically swapped sons, and although his mother could not comprehend the symbolism, "she would feel it." There is a look of dull recognition in her eyes, but what his mother has recognized is both more mundane and more womanly. The large African American woman is wearing the very same hat his mother is wearing. This vision breaks upon Julian with the "radiance of a brilliant sunrise."

O'Connor views the symbol as an integral part of her art and allows a given symbol to accrue meaning until "it is turning or working the story." The language of her fiction invites imaginative response that is rewarded with meaning. The son's rise at this point in the story is short-lived, for his mother is able to withstand even this blow to her dignity: "With a sinking heart, he saw incipient signs of recovery on her face and realized that this was going to strike her suddenly as funny and was going to be no lesson at all."

The point of convergence is entirely comic, and the reader, like Julian, can be beguiled into what Melville would have called "horrible allegory." It is, however, part of O'Connor's craft that her shift from southern comedy to southern grotesque is as swift as it is terrible. As the party alights from the bus, the large African American woman, whose anger is stoked by centuries of indignities, finds the offer of a penny to her son unbearable. She hits Julian's mother and sends her reeling for home. Self-satisfaction gives way to uncertainty and ambiguity. Julian's pleasure at seeing his mother finally receive a lesson gives way first to indignation, then fear, and at last to blind panic as he realizes that she is, in fact, about to die. He feels the tide of darkness sweeping him back to her, "postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow."

Symbolic meaning is complex, and in O'Connor's work rational meaning must be brought into correlation with possible meaning. In a letter of 16 December 1955, O'Connor explains that she has no foolproof aesthetic theory, that the moral basis of her work could be found in the Jamesian sense of a "felt life." The writer, she thought, should have a moral sense that coincides with the dramatic sense. Her own moral sense, that of the confirmed Christian writing for an audience who, she said, thought God was dead, informs all of her work. In her own words her writing tends to be "more terrible than it is funny … or only terrible because it is funny."

—Jan Pilditch