Everything That Rises Must Converge (Criticism)

Criticism

Sarah Madsen Hardy

Madsen Hardy has a doctorate in English literature and is a freelance writer and editor. In the following essay, she discusses how O’Connor’s religious vision shapes the seemingly secular content of “Everything That Rises Must Converge.”

In many essays and public statements, O’Connor identifies herself as a Catholic writer and asserts that her aims as an artist are inextricably tied to her religious faith. She claims that it is her specific goal to offer a glimpse of God’s mystery and, thus, to lead readers — whom she sees as, for the most part, spiritually lost in the modern, secular world — back toward the path of redemption.

This information may be somewhat bewildering for those first approaching O’Connor’s writing through her short story “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” While some of her other fiction focuses on specifically religious themes, this story, involving the generational and ideological conflict between mother and son, seems to be thoroughly secular in nature.

Set in the South in the early 1960s, “Everything That Rises Must Converge” is firmly grounded in the social history of that time and place. Julian, the arrogant and alienated son, abhors his mother’s racism and resents her attachment to outdated ideas of Southern aristocracy. Their differences come to a head during a ride they take together on a recently integrated city bus. The questions the story raises are obviously moral, but how they relate specifically to Christian theology is not immediately apparent.

The story contains a few passing mentions of heaven and sin, but these words are not used in a serious theological sense. (For example, exasperated with his mother’s indecisiveness, “Julian raised his eyes to heaven.”) There is a single reference comparing Julian to Saint Sebastian, a Christian martyr, but it is used ironically, in order to show Julian’s exaggerated self-pity.

In another remote reference to religion, Julian’s mother attends a weight reduction class at the ’ Y’ — the Young Women’s Christian Association. But at the time O’Connor wrote, the YWCA, which was founded on Christian values, had become a secular institution. It seems that the few references to Christianity are largely emptied of meaning.

However, the first bit of research into “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” reveals that the title of the story refers to the philosophy of an obscure Jesuit theologian, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard offers a Catholic version of the science of evolution, theorizing that lower life forms evolved toward greater diversity and complexity, rising to the level of man, who exists at the midpoint between animal life and God. At this point, evolution continues — yet only on a spiritual level.

Instead of diversifying biologically, humanity takes a path of convergence — that is, a path toward intersection or union — rising toward the unification of spirit in God. Referring to the Christian concept of revelation, Teilhard posits that at the end of time human spirit will have at last risen to the ultimate point of convergence, where all people are as one in Christ.

O’Connor states in her title that everything that rises must converge. This sounds optimistic and affirmative — which faith, by nature, is. What can this theory have to do with the bleak view of human nature that O’Connor presents in the story?

It is helpful to remember that Teilhard conceives of humankind as the midpoint between the ultimate unity of offered by God and the chaotic savagery of animal life. O’Connor writes from this midpoint, grounding her fiction in the contemporary secular word, a world she sees as sinful and benighted.

“If the Catholic writer hopes to reveal mysteries, he will have to do it by describing truthfully what he sees from where he is,” she writes in “The Church and the Fiction Writer.” (This and the other writings by O’Connor cited in this essay are collected in Mysteries and Manners, edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald.)

What O’Connor sees when she looks at the world from her Catholic perspective is mostly dark, chaotic, and divisive. “An affirmative vision cannot be demanded of [the Catholic writer] without limiting his freedom to observe what man has done with the things of God,” she maintains.

Staring into the weaknesses of the human heart, O’Connor finds that what man has done is not good. “[The Catholic writer] may find in the end that instead of reflecting the heart of things, he has only reflected our broken condition and, through it, the face of the devil we are possessed by,” she writes in another essay on the topic, “Novelist and Believer.”

Returning to the events of the story, it is possible to see them now in a theological light. In “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” O’Connor contends, “The Catholic novel can’t be categorized by subject matter, but only by what it assumes about human and divine reality.” She considers it her calling to write about her here and now, which is the South in the 1960s, not heaven.

O’Connor portrays the fallen nature of humankind in terms of what she sees from where she is: the arrogance and blindness that divides son from mother, as well as white from black. She portrays the pain and folly that are “our broken condition,” the recognition of which is the only means for the human soul to rise toward grace.

The textual references to rising in “Everything That Rises Must Converge” refer literally to problems of race and social class that were reaching a boiling point when O’Connor wrote the story. These issues demonstrate clearly enough the failure of humans to achieve spiritual unity.

Julian’s mother perceives the rise of African American people as related to her own family’s fall from the social and economic heights it enjoyed before the Civil War. She thinks that she knows who she is — meaning she knows where her family belongs in a rigid racial and social hierarchy.

The fact that the family is no longer rich means to her that society is out of order — but this does not cause her to doubt her inherent superiority or the validity of the categories that divide people from one another. “I tell you,” she says to Julian, meaning to comfort him about his failure to live up to his ambitions or to make any money, “the bottom rail is on the top.”

She attributes their reduced circumstances to the improving rights of African Americans, evidence that “the world is in a mess everywhere.” Referring to the social and economic progress of African Americans in the South, the result of the incipient Civil Rights Movement, she says, “They should rise, yes, but on their own side of the fence.”

The conflict in the story originates in part because blacks don’t rise “on their own side of the fence,” but insist on equal rights by means of integration, which can be seen as a kind of social convergence. Like the rising in the story, the convergence that O’Connor portrays reflects the social strife of her times.

Julian’s mother is uncomfortable with social convergence between blacks and whites on a most literal level. She won’t ride the bus without her son, imagining some abstract danger or indignity in simply sharing space with people of a different race.

Moreover, she reserves a special condescending pity for people of mixed race, who can be understood as the fullest realization of black-white convergence. “The ones I feel sorry for ... are the ones that are half white. They’re tragic.”

However, cultural and political changes have made this kind of convergence inevitable. O’Connor demonstrates this through the symbol of the hat, evidence that Julian’s mother has “fallen” and the black woman has “risen” to a point where they “meet themselves” as they sit across from each other on a public bus in identical hats. This convergence has embarrassment as its main effect — a far cry from the transcendent convergence Teilhard envisions of the end of time.

Yet this is O’Connor’s point: to show, at this point in human history, the unevolved state of the human soul through her characters’ weaknesses.

If Julian’s mother resists convergence by placing her faith in social separation and hierarchy, Julian takes an even more extreme position, attempting to cut himself off from identification with other people all together, leaving him arguably even further from grace than his mother.

Julian’s mother doesn’t mind living in an apartment in a declining neighborhood or going to the ’ Y’ with poor women, while Julian fantasizes about making enough money to move into a house where “the nearest neighbor would be three miles away.” This represents not only Julian’s longing for status, but also the distance at which he holds himself from fellow humans.

His feelings of superiority are not explicitly tied to race or class, but they take an even more acute form than those of his mother. While she is naive, believing that she treats people well through her misguided gentility, Julian openly wishes ill on others.

“It gave him a certain satisfaction to see injustice in daily operation,” the narrator reports as Julian observes a white woman change seats after a black man sits near her on the bus, “It confirmed his view that with a few exceptions there was no one worth knowing within a radius of three hundred miles.”

O’Connor again characterizes Julian in terms of his desire to resist any kind of human connection when she describes the “inner compartment of his mind” that is “the only place where he felt free of the general idiocy of his fellows.” Julian attributes what he believes is his judgment and insight to his ability to sever bonds — especially that with his mother. “Most miraculous of all, instead of being blinded by love for her as she was for him, he had cut himself emotionally free of her and could see her with complete objectivity.” He fiercely resists his mother’s hold on him, despite her devoted love.

These are some of the ways that O’Connor shows the terribly compromised ways that people “rise” and “converge.” Is she so different from Julian, though? For she takes such a dim view of the all-too-human characters she creates. Are they really redeemable?

O’Connor would answer with a resounding yes. “[The Catholic novelist] cannot see man as determined; it cannot see him as totally depraved. It will see him as incomplete in himself, as prone to evil, but as redeemable when his own efforts are assisted by grace,” she asserts in “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South.”

At the end of the story, both Julian and his mother are offered some opportunity for the kind of true convergence that Teilhard envisions. As she dies, Julian’s mother calls out for Caroline, her black nursemaid, showing that this early emotional bond ultimately transcends her self-justifying beliefs about racial superiority. Julian, who until the very end rails against his mother, finally breaks out of his distancing “inner compartment” and calls out for his her in child-like terms of affection, “Darling, sweetheart... Mamma, Mamma!”

These are changes not of the head but of the heart. The sky does not open to reveal God. These changes are earthbound and real.

In The True Country, his study of the place of Catholic theology in her writing, Carter W. Martin explains that O’Connor’s fiction “gives dramatic, concrete form to the humble and often banal insight that enables the individual man to move toward grace by rising only slightly. It is this movement that she means when she speaks of our slow participation in redemption.” O’Connor writes about the distance of her characters from a state of grace, but with an abiding faith in the humans ability to — someday, slowly — cross that distance.

Source: Sarah Madsen Hardy, for Short Stories for Students, Gale, 2000.

What Do I Read Next?

• A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) is O’Connor’s first collection of short stories. It shares the unique moral outlook of “Everything That Rises Must Converge.”
• O’Connor’s novel The Violent Bear It Away (1960) concerns a young boy’s resistance to his calling as a prophet.
• The Collected Stories of William Faulkner (1995), edited by Erroll McDonald, gathers Faulkner’s short fiction. These stories explore moral dramas against a Southern backdrop. O’Connor is most often compared to Faulkner.
• A Curtain of Green and Other Stories (1941), a collection of stories by Eudora Welty, shares O’Connor’s flare for local idiom, but takes a gentler approach to its eccentric characters.
• The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), the first novel by Carson McCullers, describes the moral isolation of a deaf-mute girl in a small Southern town.
• The Second Coming (1999), by Walker Percy, is a tragicomic novel chronicling a man’s search for love and religious meaning.