4 - creation, degeneration, and back again.

If these stories are "art," what makes them a creative activity both for the reader and the writer? Choose a story and discuss its creative aspects and what is available for interpretation.

My mom's company used to give out these Norman Rockwell calendars every year, each month with a different painting. The beginning of Flannery O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge" reminded me of one of those paintings. Rockwell is known for his realistic, detailed, almost humorous approach to art – his pieces appear to be almost photographic snapshots into the lives of everyday people. O'Connor creates a similar atmosphere with her characters and setting. We can really see Julian, the surly only son, ungratefully handsome and intelligent, shirt wrinkled to spite his mother, eyes cast downward, walking down the street with his pleasantly plump, naively blue-eyed and childish mother, dressed like a proper Southern lady but wearing a ridiculous hat. These images do not require great stretches of the imagination, much like Rockwell's paintings don't really leave much room for interpretation.
However, as O'Connor's story progresses, the detailed strokes become more hurried, the photographic clarity loses focus, the images become less quaint. O'Connor obviously likes to create realistic characters that surely stem from her own life observations, but she also likes to place them in unusual, tense situations that reveal more about them than who they are "in the tenor of their daily lives". Much in the same way that Shakespeare contracted the story of Othello onto the island of Cyprus, O'Connor intensifies the relationship between Julian and his mother by cramming them onto the bus, providing no outlet, only still air for breeding tension. O'Connor shows her true range as an artist by subtly transforming a Rockwell into a Renoir or Monet – the life, the realism, is still evident, but as the lines and strokes become less defined (as, ironically, their relationship becomes more so), so does the meaning, allowing the readers interpret more for themselves.
The end of "Everything That Rises Must Converge," however, is when O'Connor really relinquishes her brush to the readers. When Julian's mother gets clocked by the black woman, that single moment of violence catalyzes the story from impressionism to abstraction – the endearing details surrounding Julian and his mother are no longer relevant. Mother and son have been stripped to "that which they are essentially." At the end of the story, O'Connor invites readers to flesh out the primitive images of human nature that she has created into something more realistic, but the pictures we paint will not mirror those with which O'Connor began the story. However, it was still important for us to begin with her Rockwell-esque images. If we'd been handed a Jackson Pollock...well crap. We would only really be able to respond to splatters with splatters, and then we would have just gotten stuck in the difficulties we encountered trying to glean meaning from images that were so far from what we view as "real life." But by beginning in such a straightforward manner and then degenerating her own realisms into abstraction, O'Connor makes it far less difficult for us to reconstruct these raw images into something more real and personal to us – to really become the artists of our own interpretation.