Everything That Rises Must Converge: Stories (1996) - Plot & Excerpts
Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hogThere is no doubt. I am a Flannery O’ Connor junkie. I can’t think of anything she’s written I haven’t loved. Even her letters and essays ring true. She is, to some degree, a product of her environment, and her use of certain words can grate on our 21st-century ears, but a toned-down O’Connor would not be O’Connor. Everything That Rises Must Converge may be her best collection of short stories, including, among others, the title story, “Parker’s Back,” “The Lame Shall Enter First,” and, my personal favorite, “Revelation.”Typically, O’Connor takes her spiritually-flawed protagonists and blasts them to hell and back. By the time O’Connor is through with them, they’re emptied out, meek, and ready to receive grace. Some of Samuel Beckett’s characters seem post-apocalyptic, as if they had just returned from the Flannery O’Connor Finishing School. The characters most likely to be squashed flat are the smug, self-righteous, short-sighted, hypocritical, complacent, and intellectually or spiritually proud. To effect redemption, O’Connor often has her fairly grotesque characters confront circumstances and people that are also grotesque. Given O’Connor’s rather mild aspect, she was asked frequently why she used such shockingly violent means and had such a penchant for the grotesque. It’s doubtful O’Connor ever gave a verbal response; she did not suffer fools lightly, and apparently saw critics comfortably occupying that category. In an essay, though, she does provide an answer: “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” O’Connor works to get the religiously distorted back into spiritual alignment or at least into a state of self-awareness, and she’s willing to do whatever it takes to accomplish her aims. Despite her serious intent, all of her fiction—even the darkest—has moments of humor, and few authors have achieved O’Connor’s level of hilarity.“Revelation” provides a nice illustration of O’Connor at work; here her target is the memorable Ruby Turpin. I don’t view this summary as a spoiler; while her plots are wildly imaginative, it’s O’Connor’s writing, with its perfect pitch and dead on descriptions, that must be experienced.Ruby Turpin believes she is a good person. She thinks she believes in God. What’s going on in Ruby’s thoughts and conversation are less than godly, and we’re given a full view of her philosophy as Ruby sits in a doctor’s waiting room, observing the array of people. After scanning the room, Ruby chooses to talk to a woman she knows must be lady, given her tasteful clothing and good shoes. For the most part, though, Ruby is preoccupied with ranking the others in the waiting room.And Ruby finds most of these people sorely wanting, the dregs of her envisioned hierarchy: On the bottom of the heap were most colored people, not the kind she would have been if she had been one, but most of them; then next to them—not above, just away from—were the white-trash; then above them were the home-owners, and above them were the home-and-land owners, to which she and Claud belonged.Ruby also occupies herself with another favorite pastime: contemplating what she would choose if Jesus said she would have to be either white trash or a “nigger.” Ruby prides herself on her correct, self-sacrificing, moral choice, and tells Jesus to “make her a nigger then—but that don’t mean a trashy one.”Throughout Ruby’s conversation with the respectable lady, largely dealing with the virtues of a good disposition and strategies for getting the most work out of “colored” people, Ruby notices that the lady’s daughter is showering her with “ugly looks.” The more Ruby talks, the more intensely the daughter stares: “[H:]er eyes were fixed [on her:] like two drills." As Ruby ecstatically thanks Jesus for making her the type of person she is, the young college girl takes her book, aptly entitled Human Development, and beans Ruby just above the eye. Just before the girl is taken away, presumably to an asylum, Ruby, in shock, asks her, “What you got to say to me?” In a voice “that brooked no repudiation,” the girl whispers, “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.”Ruby leaves, stunned and outraged. Later that day, she goes out to their state-of-the-art pig parlor to confront the hogs they own, who are “a-gruntin and a-rootin and a-groanin,” and demands loudly, “How am I a hog?...Exactly how I am like them?” Still gazing at them as though she “were absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge,” Ruby begins to have a vision of a “vast horde of souls…rumbling toward heaven.”Surprisingly, Ruby sees the “white-trash,” “niggers,” “freaks,” and “lunatics” ahead of her and Claud, who were at the end of the line along with people just like them, those who always believed in “good order and common sense and respectable behavior.” Further, Ruby could see by “their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.” We are not told Ruby’s outcome. We don’t know if O’Connor’s reality check takes hold, but it is clear—if only for a moment—that Ruby sees her goodness as a shell that would crumble in the face of eternity.
O'Connor's visual descriptions make me think of paint, of the keen eye of the artist and the bold translation of light into silver and black, fierce depths of shadow into purple, arterial red, pine green. They are also very dynamic, full of verbs, motions, relations. Even a still image glares back at the looker provocatively, demanding some response. The writing also has fine clarity and precision, great intensity and force. She drives her subtle points home with hammers, a full and devastating follow through behind each blow.Compassion is a major theme and I appreciated the critique-by-plot of the heartless charity-giver, Sheppard, in The Lame Shall Enter First, who helps a homeless boy but neglects his own child, focussing on 'intelligence' and providing no emotional sustenance. I was reminded of The Brothers Karamazov, and maybe that's all I need to say to compliment O'Connor, here endorsing the view that kindness and care begin with those closest to us, as well as arguing that a person's IQ score doesn't determine their worth or potential.In his introduction Robert Fitzgerald rebuts the assertion that O'Connor stories express no feeling for the natural world. I'm unsure about how strongly O'Connor challenges the instrumental view of nature integral to the settler colonial/extractivist worldview, but in 'A View of the Woods' Fitzgerald's rebuttal might be vindicated. She describes the woods as brooding, silent, dismissed as 'nothing' by the would-be extractor since it has no spectacular features (such as 'waterfalls', which could theoretically be exploited as energy resources). Nature thus seems to be alien and eternal or beyond human temporality, yet the family still want to maintain a relationship with it, even if only a 'view'. Here could be an argument for nature as end in itself, since beauty is not a requirement for its appreciation. The pale vestige of a life within nature represented by the 'view' may not be linked to a longing to return to or rediscover a deeper relationship, but it is linked to 'playing' on the wild 'lawn' and grazing calves. These three uses/defences of nature are given in that order - first the 'view', reverence of the creation, second 'play', which for the child could be seen as direct, loving, learning experience, and third 'grazing', a relationship involving the taking of sustenance from nature that could be either extractive or symbiotic.Many of the stories are about race, and describe a situation of shifting tensions in the South. The pith of these stories is white sentiment; O'Connor is like a psychiatrist diagnosing the varied plague of racism; the gradations and qualities it takes on in the whole gamut of white folks; the allowances for age, class, even gender. Some of this diagnosis and exposure (some of which even takes place in a doctor's waiting room) seems embarrassingly relevant, particularly the performative allyship of the younger generation, represented by Julian in the title story. The relationship he wants to strike up with his black fellow passenger is clearly just a recently invented form of emotional exploitation, instrumentalising black bodies to score points against his mother. O'Connor could be accused of the same form of racialised violence in her use of black characters, who are embodied and who react, but whose thoughts we never hear as we do those of whites. Refusing to speak for the Other could be a sign of respect here (I have argued that Doris Lessing deliberately adopts this strategy in The Grass is Singing) but O'Connor's liberal use of racial slurs and essentialising gaze were jarring and troubling for me. Some of the few whites who come off sympathetically retain comfortable in their racist attitudes or don't survive confrontation with them, suggesting that the illness is incurable.O'Connor's religion evidently influenced her writing. It's perhaps unfortunate for me as a reader that I happen to find the Catholic worldview so unappealing. Death, torment, domination and the devil haunt these pages, shutting around a world that feels blighted, rotted by the laying-waste of colonisation and 'progress'. There is a sense, even a theme, of surveillance which dampens even the faintest hope of, or impulse toward freedom and renewal anywhere. I even felt that O'Connor sees freedom as degrading; wholesomeness lies in control. The world of the South grinds on bitterly, chewing up its children.It's interesting to compare O'Connor with Louise Erdrich, another writer with Catholic roots. In Erdrich's book Love Medicine, as in O'Connor's stories, the devil is a vivid presence constantly busy in the world. Yet for Erdrich 'he' is one of many spirits and non-human influences at work behind events, and rather than being an absolute enemy, he can be an (albeit terrifying) ally. Religious motives blend into the magical undercurrents she charts, part of a universe vast and varied opening behind love and pain, behind cruelty and kindness, a glittering ground to the tapestry of acts. While O'Connor's world feels trapped and trammeled, full of fools corralled into wrong paths by some malicious deceiver.
What do You think about Everything That Rises Must Converge: Stories (1996)?
The author has been called "a genius" for her woebegone tales of southern white trash, hence many readers humbly accept this hyperbole and are in agreement. It's an understandable aberration. Her stories or parables are too similar for my taste buds and, for best effect, should be read months apart. I read in a compressed "sit" and wanted to gore certain critics, like Alfred Kazin, just as Mrs May is off'd in "Greenleaf." (Foreshadowed early in the story; same with the gun in "The Comforts of Home"). The most effective is the titular about white-black condescension. (B. on the west coast, I've lived my adult life on east coast, with interim years in Europe. Howev, I went to college in the south. I daresay I know more about the southern "spirit," as Kazin calls it, than know-it-all Kazin, who never left NYC).There's a deadly religio-meller sameness in these stories that I resist. This sameness includes opening sentences: (a) Mrs May's bedroom window (b) Thomas withdrew to the... (c) Parker's wife was sitting on.. (d) Sheppard sat on a stool. ~~ Very Creative Writing 101. Flannery is interesting. Of 2 serious and crazy ladies I much prefer Jane Bowles.
—Sketchbook
O, the pleasure I get from reading about horrible people doing horrible things to one another. No one does it better than O'Connor. Note the succinct, positively perfect way lines like "'I wouldn't milk a cow to save your soul from hell'" and "'Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog'" relay the cruelest and most absurdly amusing ways we approach others. These lines may shine particularly bright (or dark), but the sentiments are hardly unique among the inhabitants of O'Connor's insular and bleak landscape.Know this up front: O'Connor's characters are almost universally despicable, ignorant, proud, and, finally, hilarious. Nearly every story in this collection concludes with a violent death; racial slurs abound, as do the prejudicial worldviews that accompany the use of such slurs. Race relations seem to be at the forefront of this collection in a way that I don't recall A Good Man is Hard to Find or Wise Blood underscoring. I couldn't tell you too much about O'Connor's views on Southern racism; I haven't read enough of her personal writings to make a sound call there. I can tell you that the characters who display their investment in social hierarchies, the benefits of slave or underpaid labor, or in their own glory in a general sense are invariably punished. If race is one looming issue in the book, sickly intellectualism is the other. The intellectual, as a 'type', is figured in these stories as someone to be pitied; someone who has brought a hollow achievement back to his family; someone who may have a vivid life of the mind, but who cannot survive the gritty realities of the world. These men are often paired with their shrill, witless mothers - and the limitations of each are held in contrast and in opposition until they no longer seem distinguishable from one another; or perhaps they're just two sides of the same imbecilic coin.I may prefer the reading experience of A Good Man, but make no doubt of it: these stories are absolute masterpieces of the genre; terrifying and laugh-out-loud funny at once. If ever you need to find the humor in a mortifying or despairing situation, turn to ol' Flannery.Highlights: "The Lame Shall Enter First," "Everything That Rises Must Converge," "Revelation," Greenleaf," and "A View of the Woods." One thing I know: to survive an O'Connor story, you must have humility, humility, humility, Rose.
—Jamie
Flannery O'Connor's link to my home state of Iowa: she attended the Writer's Workshop. When she went to the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, she said, she “didn’t know a short story from an ad in the newspaper.” Yet she quickly became a star there and “scared the boys to death with her irony,” as a teacher put it. O'Connor frightens many readers. On Goodreads, reviewers describe her work as dark, sarcastic, depressing.Oddly, O'Connor was a devotee of racial jokes. She also enjoyed making costumes for her chickens. She died young (39) was Catholic, and took care of her mother in Georgia.In her short story, "Revelation," Mrs. Turpin meets Mary Grace, a student at Wellesley College. Mary Grace, enraged by Mrs. Turpin's platitudes, literally throws the book at her."The girl raised her head. Her gaze locked with Mrs. Turpin's 'Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog,' she whispered. Her voice was low but clear. Her eyes burned for a moment as if she saw with pleasure that her message had struck its target."Though O'Connor was Catholic, most of her characters are fundamentalist Protestants. One of these is Parker's wife in the story, "Parker's Back."O'Connor writes in the first page of "Parker's Back,": "The house they rented sat alone save for a single tall pecan tree on a high embankment overlooking a highway. At intervals a car would shoot past below and his wife's eyes would swerve suspiciously after the sound of it and then come back to rest on the newspaper full of beans in her lap. One of the things she did not approve of was automobiles. In addition to her other bad qualities, she was forever sniffling up sin. She did not smoke or dip, drink whiskey, use bad language or paint her face, and God know some paint would have improved it, Parker thought."At times, O'Connor is dark. But her biting wit is so delicious.
—Cynthia
