Everything That Rises Must Converge Read Online Free PDF

“convergence” in these stories, as the title story at once makes clear, are shown in classes, generations, and colors. What each story has to say is what it shows. If we are aware that the meaning of the stories is to be sought in the stories and well apprehended in the stories alone, we may try a few rough and cautious statements about them. Thus the title story shows, amid much else in a particular action of particular persons, young and old and black and white to be practically sealed off against one another, struggling but hardly upward or together in a welter of petty feelings and cross purposes, resolved only slightly even by the tragic blow. “Slightly,” however, may mean a great deal in the economy of this writer. The story is one of those, like “The Artificial Nigger” in her first collection and “Revelation” in this, in which the low-keyed and calibrated style is allowed a moment of elevation.
    What is wrong in this story we feel to be diffused throughout the persons and in the predicament itself, but in at least two of the stories, and those among the latest and most elaborate, the malign is more concentrated in one personage. I do not mean il maligno, as the Italians call the devil. There are few better representations of the devil in fiction than Tarwater’s friend, as overheard and finally embodied in The Violent; but in these two stories, “The Comforts of Home” and “The Lame Shall Enter First,” the personage in question is not quite that. He need not be, since the souls to be attacked are comparatively feeble. Brainless and brainy depravity are enough, respectively, to bring down in ruin an irritable academic and a self-regarding do-gooder. The latter story is clearly a second effort with the three figures of the novel, Tarwater, Rayber and Bishop, who are here reworked, more neatly in some respects, as Johnson, Shepard and Norton.
    Other similarities link various stories to one another and to earlier stories. There is a family resemblance between Julian in the title story, Wesley in “Greenleaf,” Ashbury in “The Enduring Chill” and Thomas in “The Comforts of Home.” The Wellesley girl in “Revelation” is related to all these and to the girl in “Good Country People.” In the various mothers of the stories there are facets of Mrs. McIntyre in “The Displaced Person.” Parker in “Parker’s Back” has some of the traits of a latter-day Hazel Motes. The critic will note these recurrent types and situations. He will note too that the setting remains the same, Southern and rural as he will say, and that large classes of contemporary experience, as of industry and war and office work and foreign travel, are barely touched if touched at all. But in saying how the stories are limited and how they are not, the sensitive critic will have a care. For one thing, it is evident that the writer deliberately and indeed indifferently, almost defiantly, restricted her horizontal range; a pasture scene and a fortress wall of pine woods reappear like a signature in story after story. The same is true of her social range and range of idiom. But these restrictions, like the very humility of her style, are all deceptive. The true range of the stories is vertical and Dantesque in what is taken in, in scale of implication. As to the style, there is also more to say.
    She would be sardonic over the word ascesis , but it seems to me a good one for the peculiar discipline of the O’Connor style. How much has been refrained from, and how much else has been cut out and thrown away, in order that the bald narrative sentences should present just what they present and in just this order! What counts is the passion by which the stories were formed, the depth, as Virginia Woolf said of Milton, at which the options were taken. Beyond incidental phrasing and images, beauty lies in the strong invention and execution of