Not Gothic, Just Dark: Flannery O'Connor & Everything that Rises Must Converge

Flannery O'Connor is known as a "southern gothic" writer in the line of William Faulkner. One almost gets the sense that as time goes by she will become so enmeshed in the "gothic" side of her reputation that the "southern" element will be forgotten. Soon she will be compared to Edgar Allen Poe instead of William Faulkner.

In reality, O'Connor shares much more with Faulkner that she does with anyone of true "gothic" bent. She is a writer of region who keeps mortality and the fragility of the human body at the forefront of her writing. Death, in O'Connor's work, is common.

As a writer of short stories, Flannery O'Connor is unsurpassed. With a wit and a skill for both precision and brevity, she manages to address large themes in small spaces.

Her masterpiece of short fiction, if we have to choose one, can be found in her short story collection Everything That Rises Must Converge.

These stories concern the generational conflict and the profoundly important mistakes and lapses in communication that can result in tragedy.

The title story of the collection "Everything That Rises Must Converge" takes as its subject a mother and her son taking the bus across town. The mother is a woman of means once who has fallen into destitution with the death of her husband and father. Her son is her sole salvation. He spends his days and nights resenting her for her sympathy, her attitudes, and her fallen position. This last bit of resentment is most poignant for the young man because he feels implicated in her poverty.

She put him through college and now she has to take the bus across town instead of driving because she is broke. He resists his feelings of guilt, as we discover through a series of subtle psychological clues, by telling himself that his mother does not understand him. He feels harassed by her, though it is his own guilt that ultimately bothers him.

The story finds a way to tell the reader all about the differences in opinion that divide these two unmatched people along generational (and socio-political) lines. We find also that the son cannot believe in his mother's religion. We find that he wants to punish her for being so different than him. And he vows to find a way, as he carries on an internal discussion with himself on the bus.

When the mother attempts to give a penny to a cute little colored child, her antiquated values are confronted by the new age of which her son is a member. She is assaulted by the boys' mother.

This act of violence was not inevitable in the world of the story. What was inevitable was that the mother character would be forced to confront reality as it is and not as it once was. Her brave façade is shattered. Though her bravery took the form of a purposeful self-delusion about her family name, it was bravery none-the-less.

The weakness she was hiding behind the veil of her fantasy is put on full display as she gurgles and mumbles on the sidewalk and her despairing son is forced to look on helplessly and shout down the street for a doctor.

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Though O'Connor deals in morbid subjects at times, her emphasis is on the high stakes of misunderstanding - almost in a religious sense - her writing does not become truly gothic. There are no monsters, goblins, ghouls, or specters. There are only people, wrapped up in a history they cannot escape and fixed in a world that, as much as they desire to, they cannot control.