Everything That Rises Must Converge Read Online Free PDF Page A

that the heroes of both O’Connor novels are so perceived within the first few pages, and her published work begins and ends with coffin dreams. Her memento mori is no less authentic for being often hilarious, devastating to a secular world and all it cherishes. The O’Connor equivalent for Eliot’s drowned Phoenician sailor (“Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you”) is a museum piece, the shrunken corpse that the idiot Enoch Emery in Wise Blood proposes as the new humanist jesus.
    â€œSee theter notice,” Enoch said in a church whisper, pointing to a typewritten card at the man’s foot, “it says he was once as tall as you or me. Some A-rabs did it to him in six months…”
    And there is a classic exchange in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”:
    â€œWhy listen, lady,” said Mr. Shiftlet with a grin of delight, “the monks of old slept in their coffins.”
    â€œThey wasn’t as advanced as we are,” the old woman said.
    The state of being as advanced as we are had been, of course, blasted to glory in The Waste Land before Flannery made her version, a translation, as it were, into American (“The Vacant Lot”). To take what used to be called low life and picture it as farcically empty, raging with energy, and at the same time, sub specie aeternitatis, full of meaning: this was the point of Sweeney Agonistes and the point of many pages of O’Connor. As for our monuments, those of a decent godless people, surely the asphalt road and the thousand lost golf balls are not a patch on images like that of the hillside covered with used car bodies, in The Violent Bear It Away:
    In the indistinct darkness, they seemed to be drowning into the ground, to be about half-submerged already. The city hung in front of them on the side of the mountain as if it were a larger part of the same pile, not yet buried so deep. The fire had gone out of it and it appeared settled into its unbreakable parts.
    Death is not the only one of the Last Things present in the O’Connor stories; Judgment is there, too. On the pride of contemporary man, in particular on flying as his greatest achievement, Tarwater in The Violent has a prophet’s opinion:
    â€œI wouldn’t give you nothing for no airplane. A buzzard can fly.”
    Christ the tiger, a phrase in Eliot, is a force felt in O’Connor. So is the impulse to renounce the blessed face, and to renounce the voice. In her work we are shown that vices are fathered by our heroism, virtues forced upon us by our impudent crimes, and that neither fear nor courage saves us (we are saved by grace, if at all, though courage may dispose us toward grace). Her best stories do the work that Eliot wished his plays to do, raising anagogical meaning over literal action. He may have felt this himself, for though he rarely read fiction I am told that a few years before he died he read her stories and exclaimed in admiration at them.
    VI
    The title of the present book comes from Teilhard de Chardin, whose works Flannery O’Connor had been reading at least since early 1961 when she recommended them to me. It is a title taken in full respect and with profound and necessary irony. For Teilhard’s vision of the “omega point” virtually at the end of time, or at any rate of a time-span rightly conceivable by paleontologist or geologist alone, has appealed to people to whom it may seem to offer one more path past the Crucifixion. That could be corrected by no sense of life better than by O’Connor’s. Quite as austere in its way as his, her vision will hold us down to earth where the clashes of blind wills and the low dodges of the heart permit any rising or convergence only at the cost of agony. At that cost, yes, a little.
    The better a poem or piece of fiction, the more corrective or indeed destructive it is likely to be of any fatuous happiness in abstractions. “Rising” and