Page 288 [288]
OCR
KATALIN G. KÁLLAY to which the initiation is indeed to be taken seriously. As the author claims, most of her stories contain a “moment of grace.” The challenging question is if and where this moment is to be found in this particular text. It is significant that in the morning, when she takes the child from home, Mrs. Connin does not know his first name, and Harry, after hearing about the faith healer, says his name is also Bevel, which the babysitter takes literally, thinking of it as a special coincidence. Thus, in terms of naming, the child might unconsciously or jokingly baptize himself, at least in the sense of repeating and taking up the name of the preacher before being immersed in the river. Like in many of O’Connor’s works, names are symbolic here: the Ashfields, Harry’s quite negligent parents, live a life of partying. Their apartment is full of dirty ashtrays, and they do not seem to care much about where exactly their sleepy son is going at 6 AM on Sunday with the drowsy babysitter (who is taking the boy after a night-shift of cleaning somewhere else). In the chilly autumn morning, it is only the preacher’s last name, Summers, that might remind the boy (and the reader) of warmth. Later in the story, at the healing event, the sceptical criticism of the preacher’s words comes from a man with a scary and distorted face called Mr. Paradise. At the end of the story, it is Mr. Paradise who tries to save the child from drowning by running after him with a one-foot-long candy stick, but in vain. Through the homophone, Mr. Paradise’s name seems to parodize, i.e. make a parody of, any Christian message, thus turning the moment of grace into its travesty. I will return later in this essay to the possible interpretations of the name Bevel. Ralph C. Wood, in his careful and thorough analysis of the story,’ says the following: In “The River” as with all of her stories, O'Connor presses her readers to drastic conclusions. In this regard, they share the hard-edged quality of Jesus’ parables and sayings. For example, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God (Mark10:25); or “Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor” (Luke 18:22). So must we decide whether Preacher Summers and Mrs. Connin have done Harry a terrible and final violence, or whether they have given him the most important of all gifts—eternal life. There is no humanistic way of avoiding such a drastic either-or. The story’s dire outcome cannot be justified by insisting that the child unfortunately literalized the preacher’s message and thus mistakenly ended his own life. The story would thus become a trite exercise in the sentimentality that > Ralph C.Wood, The Scandalous Baptism of Harry Ashfield in Flannery O’Connor’s “The River,” in: Inside the Church of Flannery O’Connor Sacrament, Sacramental and the Sacred in Her Fiction. Ed. Joanne Halleran McMullen and Jon Parrish Peede. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 2007. + 286 ¢ Daréczi-Sepsi-Vassänyi_Initiation_155x240.indb 286 6 2020. 06.15. 11:04:24
