SOURCE: "The Mechanical in Everything That Rises Must Converge," in The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. XVIII, No. 2, Spring, 1986, pp. 14-26.

[In the following essay, Folks discusses O'Connor's relationship to the Southern literary tradition and to the industrialization of the South as expressed in the stories in Everything That Rises Must Converge.]

To many critics, the views of Flannery O'Connor on science and technology have seemed self-evident. The modern faith in science was the extension of a Post-Reformation reliance on Nominalism, a philosophical position that O'Connor never ceased to question. More damaging than pure science, the popular belief in technology as a panacea had led the twentieth century away from religious faith and toward belief in a future paradise to be brought about by technology.

As Jane C. Keller insisted, O'Connor's empiricists had erected barriers between themselves and the recognition of the universe as the work of God. In the figure of Sheppard, Thomas Carlson saw "the supreme exponent of Pelegianism," a character who "tries to render the material thing spiritual through technology, a kind of latter-day alchemy."

Certainly O'Connor's writing has provided ample evidence that the concept of mechanization is to be viewed in opposition to the religious message of her works. In a letter of March 17, 1956, to Shirley Abbott, O'Connor expressed her rejection of the strictly empirical approach: "It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing." Speaking of the sweeping impact of mechanization on the South and its effect on the southern writer, O'Connor stated in "The Regional Writer": "The present state of the South is one wherein nothing can be taken for granted, one in which our identity is obscured and in doubt." As a result of this sort of comment, one might well conclude that O'Connor's orthodox Catholicism, attested by her own statements and the great majority of her critics, has set her in opposition to the modern forces of science and technology. According to this interpretation, modernization, as represented by a host of characters from Sheppard to Rayber to Mrs. McIntyre, may be read as the clear villain in each of her works. The representation of the machine carries with it an implied negative cast, and the extent to which characters such as Mr. Head or Parker are depicted as "mechanical" indicates the working out of the destructive effects of a nominalist philosophy.

In view of the frequency with which this reading is repeated, it is striking to find that O'Connor had an extensive interest in natural and social science. While she implied at one point that science has led to the decline of Biblical knowledge and Bible reading, she admired Teilhard de Chardin as a scientist and a Christian, and in a review of his work, she spoke scathingly of "a caricature of Christianity … which sees human perfection as consisting in escape from the world and from nature." As O'Connor's book reviews indicate, O'Connor nurtured an open-minded interest in psychology; she praised Cross Currents for printing "the best that can be found on religious subjects as they impinge on the modern world, or on modern discoveries as they impinge on the Judeo-Christian tradition."

One can trace the tension in O'Connor's writing between the traditionalist eager to decry the abuses of modernization, as when she describes the mass media as a "diet of fantasy," and the sophisticated modern, aware of the latest advances in psychiatry and philosophy. One suspects that this internal struggle between traditionalist and modern underlies her comment singling out a quotation from Baron von Hügel: "'how thin and abstract, or how strained and unattentive, the religion of most women becomes, owing to their elimination of religious materials and divinely intended tensions!'" Though certain of her readers have sought to disregard the battling of "divinely intended tensions" in her fiction, her fictional treatment of the changing South benefited enormously from her appreciation of the need to preserve these tensions in her stories. The outright dismissal of mechanization would have resulted, as she recognized, in a very thin and "inattentive" body of fiction; more important to O'Connor, it would have mitigated against a clear-sighted application of religious truths to the modern world. O'Connor came to recognize that the predictable revulsion of the southern traditionalist to the "evil" of science was a failure of vision, a narrow-sighted disregard for the world of sense experience. Her marginal lining of a passage in George Tavard's Transience and Permanence: The Nature of Theology According to St. Bonaventure highlighted the statement "that sense forms the first degree of the way to God and has thus a momentous religious value." The emphasis of the concrete image as the starting point of vision is indeed fundamental in O'Connor's aesthetics, but the assumption that she arrived at this aesthetic position out of a deductive process of reading medieval exegesis or theology seems entirely inconsistent with what we know about the emergence of her narrative art. Rather, her reading in Catholic and non-Catholic theology, philosophy, and social science must have confirmed ideas on aesthetic practice that had already been formed long before any serious theological study occurred. Whether her recognition of the value of concrete writing was the result of the influence of the New Criticism, a movement that deeply marked her work, or was the working out of her own psychological needs during her narrative apprenticeship is a question that will probably be impossible to answer conclusively. That she was influenced by the ideas of Allen Tate and particularly by the advice of Caroline Gordon, that she had read a number of New Critical texts, and that she was trained in a school of writing which was New Critical in emphasis can be demonstrated.

More pertinent to the issue of this study is the result of O'Connor's remarkable shaping of an aesthetic theory that demanded complete fidelity to the naturalistic facts of the objective world while it sought to express supranaturalistic insights. O'Connor had been trained from the inception of her writing career in an aesthetic theory that excluded the rhetoric of transcendence, an aesthetic that Faulkner only partially practiced and that Tate worked toward throughout his career only to abandon at the end; but in O'Connor's case the realistic bias in her aesthetic conflicted sharply with her intention to write a form of moral fable. From one perspective, we can see that Wise Blood is the perfect example of the Jamesian novel, written with strict control of the point of view and a density of specification that fell clearly within the New Critical understanding of Jamesian theory as interpreted by Percy Lubbock, and later by Brooks and Warren, Booth, Schorer, and others. Nonetheless, in other respects O'Connor's first novel reveals intentions that fall outside the tradition of James, for while the technique of O'Connor's writing, the careful limitation to the point of view of individualized characters and the accretion of specific details, are convincingly Jamesian, the larger shaping of her fictions is wildly subversive of the middle-class assumptions about motivation and behavior that are equally a part of the aesthetic of New Criticism and its understanding of literature. Without intending to downplay O'Connor's ultimate compassion for the Mrs. Mays of her fiction, one can see that the "secure" untroubled matrons and bachelors whose "faith" is grounded more than anything on illusive commonplaces of bourgeois language are the targets of her often virulent satire. Her character by and large is not the fully rounded "intelligence" whose consciousness is gradually revealed but the representative figure closer to caricature. The Jamesian technique, predicated on the aesthetic assumption of complexity, only serves to exacerbate the sense of a debased idiom.

Furthermore, in an amazing strategy of aesthetic indirection, O'Connor has created fiction which ultimately confirms the sexless and often friendless middle-aged heroines and heroes by insisting that their limitation is the basis of a spiritual search, a pattern that neatly parallels the dialectic of O'Connor's aesthetic: with the legacy of a Jamesian aesthetic of self-effacement and limitation, O'Connor opens her fiction to the corrosive effects of satire and ambiguity, only to end with a seemingly more secure confirmation of her aesthetic origins. I would say "seemingly," because to many of her readers and to O'Connor herself, the interpretation of her fiction is clouded by psychological forces that pull in the opposite direction of her orthodox intention.

The issue of mechanization is crucial to this process of aesthetic reevaluation and formulation. Growing up in the postwar South at the point of its greatest industrial transformation and social change, O'Connor observed a radically different land from that of earlier southern writers. When Faulkner wrote of the machine, he still had the agrarian ways very much in mind if not as a viable future, at least as an experienced past. Almost all of his characters could remember with some nostalgia the pre-industrial South in which the automobile was a rarity. Even Allen Tate, who outlived O'Connor by fifteen years, grew up in a southern cultural milieu which was centered mythically if not actually in the agrarian past. For O'Connor, perhaps because she was a woman and because of her illness, the modernization of her region was a more compelling, inescapable reality. The transformation of the physical landscape of the South and the concurrent transfiguration of human manners and values became O'Connor's primary subject, and the enormous pressures of dealing with this material led to shifts in the aesthetic which O'Connor inherited from her predecessors. With O'Connor the southern aesthetic for the first time fully accepted mechanization as the permanent and inescapable destiny of the region. Whatever theological fable O'Connor felt compelled to satisfy on the symbolic level of her stories, the concrete reality out of which she writes is the fact of sweeping social change with all the dislocation, destruction, and excitement it brings about. O'Connor is writing a fiction of "outrage," as Ihab Hassan recognizes, in which there is "a radical threat to man's nature." In this Post-Modernist fiction, the sense of outrage arises not out of time, as it does in the writing of Modernists, but from space, so that the southern landscape becomes a metaphor for violence.

Although the outrage of which Hassan writes is present in all O'Connor's books, the stories that comprise Everything That Rises Must Converge, written toward the end of her life, contain the greatest sense of a mechanical world. As several critics have noted, these stories center on the conflict between parents and children, and this conflict, as Claire Katz states, resembles the larger global struggle of technological society "to assert the magnitude of the individual against the engulfing enormity of a technological society which fragments social roles, shatters community, and splits off those qualities of warmth, intimacy and mutual dependence which nourish a sense of identity." According to Katz, "the environment becomes a projection of sadistic impulses and fears," yet there is no sense of any attempt or even wish to flee from the technological landscape. Instead, its sadistic power to corrode human feeling and to unveil illusions about the meaningfulness of human life is willingly embraced by the characters and by the author. The extent to which O'Connor relished the technological landscape is implied in her description of the New South as "a society that is rich in contradiction, rich in contrast, and particularly rich in its speech."

One might argue, as Katz has, that the nourishment that O'Connor received from the barren landscape of the New South is the result of a Freudian necessity to repress and violate the Ego: "Her peculiar insistence on absolute powerlessness as a condition of salvation so that any assertion of autonomy elicits violence with a vengeance … suggest[s] that at the center of her work is a psychological demand which overshadows her religious intent." Despite the accuracy of much of what Katz has to say, one can recognize the need for "absolute powerlessness," I think, without attributing it to a Freudian conflict of unspecified origin. A more convincing argument may be made for the aesthetic necessity of experiencing barrenness and powerlessness. The timing of O'Connor's arrival as a fiction writer required her participation in a southern literary tradition which had become dominated by New Criticism with its bias toward a Jamesian theory of narrative. At the same time, her coming to adulthood coincided with the period of greatest technological change in the South, so that the only authentic subject for her art was modernization. It was not necessarily a projection of O'Connor's psychological need to experience violation.

The New South, in which O'Connor was among the first generation to grow up, was much changed from the South of the young William Faulkner. The southern phenomenon of industrialization was also different from that of the North, in which the industrial and urban experience was long familiar. Certainly one would have to return to the writing of Emerson or Melville to find recorded the fresh sense of outrage with which the southerners of O'Connor's generation write of the machine, an outrage that helps to explain why the machine is so often associated with the startling epiphanies at the end of her stories. Indeed, the "sadistic" landscape is the source of the "richest" humor, a paradoxical comedy that arises from our relief at admitting what we already know: that human beings are often little more "human" than machines. In her treatment of the New South, the Faulknerian portrayal of the destruction of the wilderness or the ghastly rise of the Snopeses in the social order is inconceivable because the distortions of landscape and social order brought about by mechanization are intrinsic to O'Connor's world: the mechanical is so closely connected with the human condition as to make consciousness for any length of time unbearable without the recognition that we have been reduced to insensibility and repetition.

More fully than in either of her previous books, O'Connor presents an unremittingly mechanical world in Everything That Rises Must Converge. The shift toward the use of males as central intelligences may be connected with the intention to present the milieu of machinery and technological knowledge, although the farming operations of Mrs. May and Mrs. Turpin reflect a fully developed appreciation of the "benefits" of technology. If a maturing of O'Connor's aesthetic has taken place in this collection, as I believe it has, it is toward an appreciation of the richness of the "barrenness" of technology. O'Connor's satire of mechanization is no longer as overtly funny as it had been in A Good Man Is Hard to Find because O'Connor has meditated the distinction, raised by philosophers such as Jacques Maritain, between "Making" or productive action unrelated to the use of its product, and the modern sense of "making" as industrial production. While Mrs. Turpin's pride in the cleanliness of her swine is certainly grotesque, her understanding of the farming operation is not entirely overwhelmed by the technological emphasis on ends. Her appreciation of a certain aesthetic of hog-farming, however comic it is made to seem by O'Connor's narrator, lies somewhere between the Scholasticist notion of use-less and the Modern use-ful forms of Action. The best stories in this collection—"Greenleaf," "Parker's Back," and "A View of the Woods" among them—are equally unresolved: they lead us neither to embrace nor reject industrialization but to marvel at the ambiguities of the human condition in its fundamental mechanicalness. Carlson's reading of "Parker's Back"—that "Parker intuitively grasps and rationally rejects … the union of spirit and matter, for the natural has no lasting meaning except to the degree that it is informed by the supernatural"—does not recognize that Parker's "search" is carried out through the mechanical world of the tattoo parlor and the pool hall. Certainly, the tattoo parlor has functioned aesthetically as more than "the false temple": it is the landscape that is as necessary to Parker's understanding of himself as was Dante's mountain called Purgatory. Similarly, Mr. Fortune is more than "the modern fortune hunter, unable to accept nature for what she is rather than for what he can get out of her." By accepting the Post-Modernist landscape as her necessary canvas, O'Connor has recognized that to some extent the attitude of mechanized culture toward nature will always be "what he can get out of her" and this recognition has indelibly marked her aesthetic.

Even Sheppard, perhaps the most "hopeless" of O'Connor's protagonists, reflects the maturity of the Post-Modernist aesthetic. Though we are tempted to label him as one of O'Connor's "intellectuals," a moral ingénue who has fled the complexity of human life for a self-assured life of rationalization, Sheppard arrives at the most tragic sort of knowledge only because he has been immersed in the technological culture. His occupational specialization in testing, his belief that an IQ score measures the worth of a person, his faith that a special shoe, the product of medical technology, will bolster the image of a juvenile delinquent who sees the world as grotesquely evil are examples of technological society's most fervid expressions of compassion. Sheppard's act of making a telescope available to Rufus Johnson is an attempt to free the boy's perception from cultural limitation.

The physical world is inherently "mechanical" to O'Connor, and Sheppard is beginning at the proper point in the journey to self-understanding. Restricted in his own physical senses, inhibited by his hypersensitivity to touch and smell, Sheppard lives with a child who moves like a "mechanical toy" and has taken on a delinquent rebel whose reflexive criminal acts assume no sense of freedom, an adolescent whose insults Sheppard describes accurately as "part of the boy's defensive mechanism." Rufus Johnson is almost a parody of the modern, a grotesque double of Sheppard himself, for he cynically advances the traditionalist religious rhetoric of his father only to further his own destructive whimsy. The point is that Rufus is the distortion of modernity, while Sheppard is the true modern, sincere in his intentions if uncertain of his direction. A rural transplant to the city who is cynical of "progress" but unable to live within the limitations of a pre-modern culture which his father's Fundamentalism evokes, Rufus lives with a despair which is expressed in his comment to Norton that "'if you live long enough, you'll go to hell.'"

The major action of the story is Sheppard's gradual awakening to the mechanism of the world in which he lives, and the key symbol for this mechanism is the telescope. Unlike Rufus, who sees the telescope as a possession, an object of selfishness, and unlike Norton, who naively assumes that the instrument is the means to sight his lost mother, Sheppard feels that the telescope is a means of instruction. O'onnor's depiction of Sheppard as "instructor" is not predominately ironic, for he truly desires to teach Rufus and Norton about the future society in which they will live, including the possibility of space travel, and his purchase of the machine is intended to lead to a reformation of Rufus's character. O'Connor's hints that the telescope will lead to self-instruction do not diminish Sheppard's stature as a seeker of knowledge.

His search for knowledge intensifies during his visits to the brace shop, of which the description, like the symbolic interiors of Hawthorne's fiction, grimly symbolizes the human condition of suffering. Forced by the store clerk's complicitory wink to become an accomplice in fitting the shoe to Rufus's foot, Sheppard is struck by the accidental quality of human suffering, and the extent to which the natural failing of the human body is intensified by the mechanical lack of feeling with which it is treated. "'In this shoe,'" the clerk comments, "'he won't know he don't have a normal foot.'" Soon afterwards, Sheppard begins to see himself more accurately in the "distorting mirrors" of Rufus's eyes. Sheppard's own voice becomes increasingly mechanical and his efforts to save Rufus are now "involuntary," indications of a greater understanding of just how difficult the sort of freedom he seeks may be. What Sheppard understands at the conclusion of the story is the difficulty of maintaining his idealism, the moral sincerity that makes him a "shepherd," at the same time that he participates fully in a modern technological culture, working with its necessarily limited possibilities for human freedom and creative action. He has not abandoned his quest to "reach for the stars," even on the night when he finds his only son hanging from the telescope which symbolizes his belief in self-development. Instead, Sheppard has only arrived at the stage where his self-instruction has led to a merging of his positivist assumptions with a broader understanding of the future direction of human life. He has not worked "through" his faith in science but found that it coincides with a knowledge that transcends questions of immediate means. Sheppard's new understanding will never free him from the mechanical element in life, but it will lead to an appreciative humor in which the mechanical nature of life is the object of comic pleasure.

The vision of progress in "A View of the Woods" again surveys the region's transition toward the industrial New South. Once again, the effort to portray the effects of this transformation mark O'Connor's aesthetic strategies more importantly than anything else in the story. By no means a "satire" of the New South or an attempt to suggest a return to the simpler ways of the agrarian life, the story succeeds aesthetically because it does not "promote" alternatives. It oes, however, require the reader to move emotionally into the mechanical heart of the technological society and to replicate the spatial "barrenness" which the modern human condition has imposed.

Repetition, the most important feature of technological life, is a motif throughout the story from its early description of the digging machine which would "gorge itself on clay, then, with the sound of a deep sustained nausea and a slow mechanical revulsion, turn and spit it up" to the exact mirroring of the grandfather's face in Mary Fortune's. The persistent but ultimately unsuccessful effort of Mr. Fortune to comprehend modernity is the central action, for like many of O'Connor's works, the story traces the arrival of the southern countryman at the entrance to modern culture. Fascinated by the machine and by the notion of "progress" which it represents—more awed of course than the sophisticated city dweller would be by these mechanical wonders—Mr. Fortune fails the other human beings around him, however, not because he has abandoned agrarianism for modernity, but because he has not understood modernity well enough. In an important sense, his failure is that he has not come far enough into the technological society. Like the protagonist of "Parker's Back" and other stories of rural immigrants to the city, Mr. Fortune clings inordinately to agrarian concepts of human free will and to sentimentalized ideas of human worth—illusions that have increasingly little application in an urban industrial South. Thinking that progress is his "ally" against a stubbornly independent son-in-law, Mr. Fortune plays into the hands of an enemy which he does not understand.

The sense of Mr. Fortune's misunderstanding of progress is paralleled by the larger community's clouding of the whole notion of urbanization. The fishing camp which is the basis for the new "town" of Fortune, Georgia, is the product of the urban misprision that the pastoral world provides a retreat from an urban workplace which is unliveable but inevitable. The comforts which city dwellers hope to find in the country are based on the mythic illusion that the country offers a simpler life than the city and that the pastoral landscape is the healing retreat for those who have suffered the woes of city life, a notion that O'Connor always dismissed with brisk irony.

Like Sarah Ruth, the fundamentalist wife whose narrow demands of morality seem irresistibly attractive to Parker, the rural southerner in O'Connor's tales is usually hypocritically attracted to the machine culture that he or she claims to despise: Sarah Ruth, who first notices Parker standing beside his broken-down vehicle on the roadside, later insists on a civil wedding ceremony in the Country Ordinary's office. Her insistence on the ugliness of the human body is an expression of her alienation from any satisfactory human identity beyond the mechanical idiom of the fundamentalist, and her final violent rejection of the "idolatrous" Byzantine Christ tattooed on Parker's back indicates a severance of religious rootedness in the past, not the comfortable religious traditionalism that it seems.

Mr. Fortune is among the most significant of O'Connor's advocates of progress. Because he is essentially a countryman without real experience of industrialization, Mr. Fortune is all too susceptible to the allure of the machine, so much so that he wishes to merge with it: sitting in his car with Mary's feet on his shoulders, he seemed "as if he were no more than a part of the automobile." Despite this merging, he understands industrialization in a very imperfect way, for he sees it through the distorting lens of the myth of progress. Much as the railroad appeared to the nineteenth-century American, the bulldozer seems to Mr. Fortune the awe-inspiring savior. Mr. Fortune is one of those "afflicted with the doctrine of the perfectibility of human nature by its own efforts" that O'Connor describes in "The Teaching of Literature." As such, he is unusually disturbed by the "natural" fallenness of his son-in-law, whose beatings are inflicted without apparent cause on his favorite granddaughter.

The crucial scene in the story is the beating which Mr. Fortune himself attempts to inflict on Mary. His granddaughter's violent resistance implies that the beating which he inflicts is of a different order than that administered by her father. In fact, Mr. Fortune beats the girl to extract an admission that she is a replication of his attitudes and behavior—that she is the exact product of his training. Most significantly, he wishes Mary to subscribe to his faith in the myth of progress by denying that her father has the right to beat her.

Mary does not recognize her father's violence as "beating" because she understands that the human condition is inherently flawed, or in O'Connor's words that "a sense of loss is natural to us." Coming of a later generation which is quite at home with mechanization and has seen its mark on the landscape with open eyes, Mary Fortune is willing to humor her grandfather's belief in progress up to the point when he decides to spoil the view of the woods by selling her father's cow pasture to erect a filling station. Although she can hardly have any sentimentalized notions of the nature of rural life, Mary insists on preserving the "view," the vision of a transcendent value beyond the reach of a strictly mechanistic philosophy. Even after the tragedy of accidentally killing his granddaughter, Mr. Fortune is still unable to grasp Mary's understanding of mechanism. The conclusion of the story, with the rows of trees marching away across the lake, implies that the need for a transcendent view evades Mr. Fortune even at the end of his life.

Mr. Fortune is consequently in a much worse condition than many of O'Connor's protagonists because there is no recognition on his part of the myth of progress as a myth. Though it is in fact no "monster," the bulldozer appears as such to Mr. Fortune at the end because he failed to humanize the machine by accepting it for what it is. He is still responding to the myth of the machine as savior, so the mechanical beating that he receives from his granddaughter ("five claws in the flesh of his upper arm where she was hanging from while her feet mechanically battered his knees and her free fist pounded him again and again in the chest," is the appropriate mirroring of his own distorting vision. To this limited extent he has managed to inscribe his self on another, the granddaughter who is his favorite only because she appears to acquiesce to his ideas.

Mr. Fortune becomes a truly grotesque figure not because he is the proponent of progress, but because he knows so little about the modern industrial culture. Understanding none of the larger psychic and emotional implications of technological society, he has adopted the machine as a kind of toy, and his taking Mary to watch the bulldozer dig up the earth reminds one of a childish sort of play. The extraordinary sadness of the story derives from the fact that Mr. Fortune is so much the product of an outdated generation that once exuberantly hailed the machine as the sign of a utopian age. In the modern South, Mr. Fortune is bound to be a lonely exponent of this enthusiasm.

In "A View of the Woods," O'Connor's purpose is not to satirize the industrialization of the South but to explore the necessity of the mechanical element in human society. O'Connor understands that flight from mechanism is more damaging than the machine itself, which has no power to harm those who understand it. More important, the mechanical plays a key role in O'Connor's comic aesthetic. The machine is not just a neutral force to be controlled by humane purposes—it is the best representative symbol for the repetitive, mechanical element in which human beings live most of the time. Typically, human beings resemble machines in O'Connor's fiction, because as she views everyday life, the "normal" condition is one of insensitivity and automatism. However, if "mechanical" describes the normal condition of human society, it is also the basic trope in O'Connor's fictional aesthetic. To be "mechanical" is to be in a condition which is capable of warmth, humor, and compassion; it is also to be in a perpetual condition of need, just as Parker ("heavy and earnest, as ordinary as a loaf of bread") standing before the tattooed man at the fair feels a "peculiar unease" about "the fact that he existed." Unlike the Modernist generation of writers who viewed the machine by and large as a monstrous intrusion into the normal human society in which meaningful action was possible, O'Connor has depicted the mechanical level of reality as the primary and normative subject for her art. The artistic challenge that O'Connor set for herself was to portray the response of southerners to modernization without allowing herself to regress to thinking in terms of the agrarian myth. O'Connor was in no sense a traditionalist whose work calls for a return to a simpler, agrarian community. Her art is more severely realistic in its treatment of the psychological reactions of southerners to change than that of her predecessors, for her recognition of mechanization as the inevitable, permanent condition of human society permits no recourse to escape through a mythic history of pastoral. Instead, O'Connor's realism is the aesthetic foundation for a comic art in which the concrete details of mechanization are the source of her greatest humor.