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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780687497409 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Abingdon Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2008 |
| Series: | Horizons in Theology |
| Pages: | 110 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Literature and Theology
By Ralph C. Wood
Abingdon Press
Copyright © 2008 The United Methodist Publishing HouseAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-687-49740-9
Chapter One
The Scandalous Baptism of Harry Ashfield in Flannery O'Connor's "The River"
Several years ago when I taught Flannery O'Connor's "The River" to an undergraduate class, a student brought me up short by asserting that the parents of Harry Ashfield should have filed charges against Bevel Summers and Mrs. Connin for child abuse. Summers is the river preacher who baptizes young Harry Ashfield, and Mrs. Connin is the Christian woman who brings the boy both to hear and to heed the evangelist's invitation for him to be baptized. Since little Harry drowns himself, in a mistaken attempt to gain yet more of the same significance that he had first found in baptism, the story's real miscreants and malefactors are Summers and Connin—so the student argued, with considerable cogency. Rather than leading the child to new and greater life, the fundamentalist preacher and his fellow believer have practiced the ultimate deceit upon little Harry: they have made him believe that his life's significance lies beyond life. Thus have they engendered the child's needless, indeed his meaningless, death.
In this reading of the story, O'Connor's river preacher and lay evangelist are not well-meant but benighted creatures: they are examples of the Christian treason against the fundamental premise upon which modern existence is built—the notion that physical life itself is the ultimate good, since nothing either precedes or follows it. Such mortalism insists, as Bertrand Russell famously declared, that when we die we rot. With a great cosmic void surrounding us—with literally nothing coming before or following after us—human life has its only justification within its own terms. And since human existence has value in relation to nothing transcending itself, its only worth is found either in the pleasures we can manage to enjoy (in the case of hedonists) or in the good deeds we can manage to accomplish (in the case of moralists). Hence the stark conclusion: Death is the ultimate enemy and remaining alive at all costs is the ultimate good, whether to enjoy more pleasures or else to do more good deeds. To die in devotion to a non-existent kingdom of a non-existent God is thus the ultimate lie.
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" (Mark 10:25); 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 O'Connor despised. She likened sentimentality in both morality and religion to pornography in art: it is a cheap and easy way of achieving a bogus effect. Yet neither does O'Connor encourage any quick and conveniently Christian verdict.
As we have seen, there are good reasons for concluding that Harry Ashfield's baptism is an instance of what Nietzsche called Christian nihilism: a flight from the one and only world into unreality and delusion, into nothingness. "The River" focuses, in fact, on the single act requiring the sharpest moral and religious assessment: the rite of initiation into Christian existence as either the ultimate reality or the ultimate delusion. As the public event that incorporates believers into the visible church, baptism is the sacrament of transferred citizenship from the civitas terrena to the civitas dei: from the earthly city that is perishing to the City of God that is eternal. If it is not all of these things, then baptism is a snare and a cheat that leads to spiritual and—in this case, quite literally—to physical death.
Flannery O'Connor makes Harry Ashfield's altered allegiance as scandalous and objectionable as possible, so the readers will be compelled to make a dire decision about the boy's baptism and death— whether they are fraudulent and enslaving or truthful and freeing. In fact, the narrator conducts little Harry through all of the essential steps of Christian initiation, but not in the sweet and pretty fashion that turns the baptism of most children into an empty rite of entrance to bourgeois existence. Rather does O'Connor make the boy's entry to eternal life in Christ both violent and uncouth: from a succinct schooling under the unschooled Mrs. Connin, to the proclamation of the divine Word via the boy evangelist Bevel Summers, to an exorcism of a real and present devil, to the monosyllabic confession of faith made by young Harry himself, to his own triune baptism by the river preacher, to a verbal anointing that seals the significance of his immersion, to the confirmation of his baptism in the decision he makes to put himself under the water permanently. Indeed, the boy is offered what might be regarded as his first eucharist, although in horribly negative form: in the seductive candy stick proffered by Mr. Paradise. Thus is Harry Ashfield scandalously or else mistakenly incorporated into the only universal community, the church catholic, the single community comprised of all the baptized. Thus are all readers—whether Catholic or Protestant or Orthodox, whether hedonist or humanist or atheist—faced with their own crisis of decision: whether to regard Harry's thoroughly Christian baptism as a huge mistake or a wondrous gift.
Flannery O'Connor sets the rural and uncultured world of the Connins in stark contrast to the urban and sophisticated life of the Ashfields, the better to lure readers into believing the latter superior to the former. The two-room Connin house is a flimsy structure whose pseudo-brick covering is belied by the family dogs that bed beneath it. The floorboards are so widely spaced that the dogs' tails protrude through the cracks. The walls of the Connin home contain forbidding pictures of elderly relatives, calendars no doubt acquired without cost, and an amateurish depiction of Christ as a carpenter. Though there may be others, we learn of only a single book in the Connin library, a nineteenth-century work entitled "The Life of Jesus Christ for Readers Under Twelve." Mrs. Connin herself is a woman with sparse and lengthy teeth, a skeletal body, a helmet-like hat, and a fundamentalist faith. She is an unattractive reflection of her unattractive environs.
Her family is even less winsome. Mr. Connin has been hospitalized with a cancerous colon after failing to be healed by the ministrations of the Reverend Bevel Summers. He has become an embittered unbeliever. Rather than heeding his wife's injunction to praise God for the life he still has, Mr. Connin refuses all gratitude: "he ain't thanking nobody". The four Connin children are equally loathsome in both their demeanor and their deportment. Sarah Mildred has "her hair up in so many curlers that it glared like the [tin] roof" on the house. Taking advantage of the city kid who has never seen a hog other than Porky Pig in a comic book, the Connin children connive to make sure that naïve little Harry is trampled by the stinking family swine. Thus is the Connin world revealed to be so mean and narrow, so backward and ugly, that it seems to justify Karl Marx's celebrated denunciation of "the idiocy of rural life."
The urbane life of the Ashfields, on the other hand, is characterized by its up-to-date beliefs and habits. Abstract art adorns the Ashfield apartment. When Harry steals the book about Jesus from Mrs. Connin, the Ashfields' sophisticated friends instantly recognize its value as a collector's item. The Ashfields themselves are both party-goers and party-givers. They stay out late and sleep in late, often hungover. Their refrigerator is filled with leftover cocktail snacks, and their tables are littered with over-full ashtrays. They are also philosophical materialists, having taught their son that he is the product of mere natural causes. Harry thus believes that he was made "by a doctor named Sladewall". As a mere accident of nature, the child is a bother and a burden to his parents. They attempt to purchase his love by buying him new toys as soon as he breaks the old ones. When Mrs. Connin comes to collect Harry in the morning, his father gruffly stuffs the boy's arms into his coat. And when Mrs. Ashfield puts him to bed at night, she exhibits little motherly care. Her erotic gait is as revealing as her uncaring kiss: "She hung over him for an instant and brushed her lips against his forehead. Then she got up and moved away, swaying her hips lightly through the shaft of light". The world of the Ashfields is marked by mockery above all else. In a house where everything is a joke, Harry himself has learned to treat everything jokingly. Hence his assumption that Bevel Summers is yet another jester, and his mimicry of the evangelist by declaring that he shares the preacher's name.
O'Connor presents her readers with two antithetical worlds, both of them noxious. Yet they are far from equal in value, as the story's action makes clear. The cultured Ashfield world is one-dimensional; it is sealed off in a self-satisfaction that virtually nothing can penetrate. It is not life-giving; it is indeed a burned-out realm, a wasteland, a field of ashes. The Connin world, by contrast, is richly complicated and full of surprising promise. Mrs. Connin, for instance, is imbued with a religiosity that fills her with charity, even if her children remain wantonly mean-spirited and her husband bitterly atheistic. Hers is a faith that does not depend on easy and obvious rewards. While the Ashfields live for trivial satisfactions, Mrs. Connin makes heroic sacrifices for her family. She takes care of other folks' children in her own home during the day, after doing cleaning work elsewhere at night. Yet we never hear Mrs. Connin complaining about her hard lot. We learn, on the contrary, that she cares deeply for others, especially young Harry. And when she embraces the boy with the love that he has never known at home, he responds in kind. He clings tightly to the things that he associates with her and her love, even if it means stealing her handkerchief and her book.
Though her regard for young Ashfield is manifestly authentic, Mrs. Connin knows that human love alone will not finally suffice for a boy so bereft as Harry Ashfield. She discerns—perhaps because she does not depend on the world's material benefits—that the child hungers for spiritual satisfaction, that he yearns in some inchoate way for the love of God, that he needs, not generic love or vague philanthropy, therefore, but the quite particular and incarnate love of God. Mrs. Connin thus teaches Harry the most rudimentary of lessons—that he is not the accidental product of an unsponsored and undirected natural process, but that the figure whose portrait Harry hadn't recognized is in fact his creator. "He had been made by a carpenter," she tells him, "named Jesus Christ". She also teaches him that this carpenter is his redeemer, for the picture book shows Jesus salvaging the Gadarene demoniac, driving "a crowd of pigs out of a man". Having learned what horrible creatures pigs can be, Harry is at once fixated on this good news about his ultimate origin, finding that it renders him strangely tranquil: "His mind was dreamy and serene as they walked ... looking from side to side as if he were entering a strange country".
Mrs. Connin is walking Harry through the woods to a strange country indeed—to the river where Bevel Summers preaches. She knows that Harry needs not merely to be taught the rudiments of the Christian gospel but also to receive the proclaimed Word and to be baptized. Mrs. Connin knows, in sum, that Harry Ashfield needs to be marked with the outward and visible sign of the Faith. He needs to be incorporated into Christ's body called the church. This rustic Protestant's obsession with baptism reveals that Mrs. Connin would likely belong to the Churches of Christ, the American denomination founded in the nineteenth century by Alexander Campbell. One of their central tenets is that baptism is not an empty ritual meant for the socializing of teenagers: it is an act that is utterly essential for salvation, a doctrine that the boy-preacher named Bevel Summers clearly espouses.
O'Connor does not make the eighteen-year-old river preacher a figure easily to be credited, even as she does not make Harry's baptism an event easily to be affirmed. Summers evokes an almost instantly negative response from most of my students. This is yet another shyster evangelist, they say, akin to those whom they have seen on television, always asking for money, if only via the crawl across the bottom of the screen. Bevel Summers has in fact won fame as a preacher who both sings and heals—and who thus would likely have received generous gifts from the beneficiaries of his curative and charismatic gifts. He draws large crowds, as desperate souls gather at the river in the hope that he will perform miracles on the sick and the malformed. Yet on this occasion Summers frustrates their desire. He has come to teach them that there is not one kind of pain but two, even as there are rivers of two different kinds.
There is the terrible physical pain that requires natural and perhaps even supernatural healing. Yet human pain is amenable to human cure. The second kind of pain does not submit to such therapy. This other disease has origins and agonies that are not merely human, and it requires a second kind of river for its healing. Martin Luther referred to this latter pain as the bruised human conscience. It is the essential human illness. It is the pain of sin and guilt and alienation from God and thus also from man. It is the source of all the evils that plague the world—whether the self-abandoning pleasures sought by hedonists or the self-centered injustices fought by humanists. Its cure, therefore, lies in another stream than the clay-draining river that the preacher stands in. When Bevel Summers announces this second cure, he does not speak for himself, therefore, but for the God of the gospel. Though apparently untutored in formal theology, much less in Roman Catholic thought, Summers performs the first act of Christian initiation by purifying the baptismal waters through a proclamation of the true Word.
"Listen to what I got to say, you people! There ain't but one river and that's the River of Life, made out of Jesus' blood. That's the river you have to lay your pain in, in the River of Faith, in the River of Life, in the River of Love, in the rich red river of Jesus' blood, you people! ... All the rivers come from that one River and go back to it like it was the ocean sea and if you believe, you can lay your pain in that River and get rid of it because that's the River that was made to carry sin. It's a River full of pain itself, pain itself, moving toward the Kingdom of Christ, to be washed away, slow, you people, slow as this here old red water river around my feet."
Bevel Summers has a rich analogical imagination because he discerns the essential link between the human and the holy that has been joined in the incarnate Lord whom he proclaims. He likens Jesus' atoning blood to the muddy river that is his liquid pulpit. Nothing would seem to be healed or cleansed by a washing in waters either so muddy or so bloody. Yet Summers perhaps knows William Cowper's eighteenth-century hymn, much beloved by Southern Protestants for its emphasis on the sanguinary character of the atonement: "There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood." The river whose healing powers Summers proclaims flows not from any natural source. It is drawn, as Cowper says, "from Emmanuel's veins; /And sinners plunged beneath that flood, / Lose all their guilty stains."
That Bevel Summers' preaching is universally Christian and not provincially fundamentalist is readily evident. Martin Luther and John Calvin both sought to recover what they held to be authentic Catholic teaching—namely, the twin doctrines of sola gratia and sola fide. Salvation comes solely by grace and solely through faith—each of them enabling the other and neither of them being separable from the other. Thus does the once-accomplished justification by grace alone through Christ's cross issue in a lifelong sanctification of believers through faith alone, as guilty souls are gradually cleansed and redeemed by living in and through the Spirit's abiding presence. Yet the saving result is neither instant nor painless. It often proceeds at the pace of the languid river meandering muddily past Bevel Summers' feet, and it often entails radical self-denials—even death. O'Connor is both catholic and Catholic, therefore, in her insistence that salvation is no instantaneous emotional cure but rather a painful yet joyful conformity—always by means of grace through faith—of sinful human wills to the sinless sacred will. The dread illness of sin, her story reveals, can be healed only as Christians are immersed in the baptismal waters of holy dying and as they are fed, when possible, on the hearing of the Word as well as the eucharistic life of holy living.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Literature and Theology by Ralph C. Wood Copyright © 2008 by The United Methodist Publishing House. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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