The Difference between Flannery O'Connor and Gertrude Stein

To me, Flannery O'Connor and Gertrude Stein both have a lot in common. I don't care about their characters. Their plots are for the most part mundane-- even when exciting things happen, they're coated with a veneer of mundanity. And I read both of them in a way completely devoid of empathy for any characters involved.

But I will seek out a Flannery O'Connor story, and I will not seek out a Gertrude Stein story. In fact, I will go to great lengths to NOT have to read Gertrude Stein. And this is why:

Flannery O'Connor filters her stories through a narrative structure. Gertrude Stein does not.

Take, for example, Gertrude Stein's Three Lives. I feel like Three Lives was concocted in a laboratory by someone who's never been human. Just for a sample:

‘“I certainly never did see no man like you, Jeff. You always wanting to have it all clear out in words always, what everybody is always feeling. I certainly don’t see a reason, why I should always be explaining to you what I mean by what I am just saying. And you ain’t got no feeling ever for me, to ask me what I meant, by what I was saying when I was so tired, that night. I never know anything right I was saying.” “But you don’t ever tell me now, Melanctha, so I really hear you say it, you don’t mean it the same way, the way you said it to me.” “Oh Jeff, you so stupid always to me and always just bothering with your always asking to me. And I don’t never any way remember ever anything I been saying to you, and I am always my head, so it hurts me it half kills me, and my heart jumps so, sometimes I think I die so when it hurts me, and I am so blue always, I think sometimes I take something just to kill me, and I got so much to bother thinking always and doing, and I got so much to worry, and all that, and then you come and ask me by what I mean by what I was just saying to you. I certainly don’t know, Jeff, when you ask me. Seems to me, Jeff, sometimes you might have some kind of a right feeling to be careful to me.”

This is less than third of the paragraph, by the way.

I just can't read it without getting a massive headache. And the stories are put together in the same way-- with absolutely no regard for convention. Details describing characters seem chosen at random. Descriptions are clinical, exact, and uninteresting. The pace of the story seems at once painfully slow and entirely arbitrary-- it isn't filtered by interest to the reader or by anything else. Time itself seems arbitrary-- Gertrude Stein leaps back and forth without blinking an eye. And of course she abuses punctuation horribly.

But Flannery O'Connor is something easy to swallow, something... storylike. In the film industry, where convention is generally considered a lot more important, the rule is introduce your villain in the first twenty pages. In "A Good Man is Hard to Find", we are introduced to our villain on the first page without knowing he is, in fact, our villain. Also, the story occurs in three locations: the family's home, the roadside restaurant, and the eventual car accident (the road is a device to get us from one plotpoint to the other). In all of these locations our villain is (re)introduced to us in various forms, whether it be through hearsay or in person. When the villain finally shows up, there's a sort of inevitability to it, a comfortable inevitability. "Oh, of course," you think. "This must be our villain."

Also, the story begins where it begins and ends where it ends. There's an element of closure.

I don't know whether this is good or bad. I don't know if I've been brainwashed into being uncomfortable with the avant-garde. But I know what I like, and for the most part I can't help that. I don't like Gertrude Stein. I like Flannery O'Connor. I think in narratives and she writes in narratives. It's almost like a more direct form of communication.