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KATALIN G. KÁLLAY
feet that guide him, not thoughts or conviction. Flannery O’Connor herself
found the role of gestures decisively important in her works. In Mystery and
Manners,’ she says the following:
I often ask myself what makes a story work, what makes it hold up as a story, and
I have decided that it is probably some action, some gesture of a character that is
unlike any other in the story, one which indicates where the real heart of the story
lies. This would have to be an action or a gesture which was both totally right
and totally unexpected; it would have to be one that was both in character and
beyond character; it would have to suggest both the world and eternity. The action
or gesture I’m talking about would have to be on the anagogical level, that is, the
level which has to do with the Divine life and our participation in it. It would be
a gesture that transcended any neat allegory that might have been intended or any
pat moral categories a reader could make. It would be a gesture which somehow
made contact with mystery.’
It is remarkable that in the first paragraph of “The River,” the father pushes
the boy “toward a pale spotted hand that stuck through the half-open door,”
Mrs. Connin is only later shown as a full (skeleton-like) figure. And when
the child finally plunges under the water, “the waiting current caught him
like a long gentle hand and pulled him swiftly forward and down.”'® These two
gestures seem reliable in getting the child somewhere, making contact with
both the world and eternity. In the text, hands are mentioned several times,
and when the boy doesn’t speak, he communicates through the pressure
of hands. His feet are equally important: the idea of returning to the river
comes through feeling his still wet shoes, and it is his feet that will remember
the way. Faces, however, seem to be obstacles on the journey: the face of
the pig pushed towards his own, the eyes of an owl or a squirrel frightening
him in the forest, the distorted face of Mr. Paradise. Before the river accepts
him, it, too, “pushes him back in the face” several times. Does this mean that
the story upholds something that is impossible to face? That the mystery into
which the boy is initiated will never be shown face to face?
In the conclusion of my paper, I would like to return to Ralph C. Wood’s
implied imperative of either-or, referring to the hard edge of Flannery
O’Connor’s stories and Jesus Christ’s parables. In this context, I examine the
meaning of the word bevel. From the point that the child names himself this
Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners. Occasional Prose. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux,
New York, 1970.
16 Ibid., 111.
17 "The River, 157.
18 Ibid., 174.
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