The Style vs Substance Problem in Literature

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Originally Posted by stlukesguild

cacian- style is luxury

style is secondary

Cacian, you seem to assume a false dichotomy...a separation of "style" and "substance" (or "meaning"/"content").

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But is it not the same dichotomy as between cause and effect? There is no cause without effect, no effect without cause. Style is the vehicle by which the artist communicates his vision (substance) to the reader. The author uses style to create the effect, tell the story, communicate the emotions, which all add up to form the substance of the work. No style without substance, no substance without style, and yet they are not the same thing, or so it seems to me. That is why I'm finding this discussion confusing. I feel that the OP's question about the relative importance of style and substance is a legitimate one, which cannot be dismissed by saying they are just two ways of looking at the same aspect of the work.

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Originally Posted by mona amon

But is it not the same dichotomy as between cause and effect? There is no cause without effect, no effect without cause. Style is the vehicle by which the artist communicates his vision (substance) to the reader. The author uses style to create the effect, tell the story, communicate the emotions, which all add up to form the substance of the work. No style without substance, no substance without style, and yet they are not the same thing, or so it seems to me. That is why I'm finding this discussion confusing. I feel that the OP's question about the relative importance of style and substance is a legitimate one, which cannot be dismissed by saying they are just two ways of looking at the same aspect of the work.

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No, it is not the same dichotomy. Cause and effect are inherently separated because their relation is diachronous, as one inevitably follows the other. Style and substance are inherently tied together synchronically, as they always exist together simultaneously. And style isn't just the "vehicle by which the artist communicates his vision (substance) to the reader." It is part of his or her vision itself. If you don't think part of the reader's artistic vision lies in his or her style, you've been reading the wrong literature. Also, the style doesn't just "create the effect, tell the story, and communicate the emotions" It is part of the effect itself; it is part of the story; and it is part of the emotions communicated. Again, you are artificially separating style from substance and mistakenly arguing the former follows and serves the latter. It doesn't.

And I certainly never denied there are relative importances to substance and style; they just are never fully separated. I also never said they are "are just two ways of looking at the same aspect of the work. I have no idea where you got that from.

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Originally Posted by Bartlebooth

I'm definitely in agreement with the idea that poems are more than just images. When I tried to explain how I reacted to the poem, I wasn't really trying to suggest that those impressions were the only important aspects of the poem. But I'm a bit confused by why you emphasize the aural aspect of language. It's true that a major part of language is speaking and the sounds it produces, but I think that some aspects of language on the page might be important as well. While visual appearance isn't always integral, some writers are concerned with the visual patterns that words on a page create. For example, if you were listening to a free verse poem, it might not always be clear how the lines of the poem are divided. And concrete poems absolutely rely on how words are aligned. The same way we can't reduce language only to visual images or music, we shouldn't reduce it only to the spoken word.

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The reason I am emphasizing the aural part of communication is because words are generally what we use to communicate meaning and words are composed of sounds. We have other ways to communicate such as sign languages or body languages or art and music, but using words gives us a precise way to communicate when we are trying to get a point across such as how we are communicating in this thread.

I would consider poems that depend on visual patterns on a page to be art that contains words, just as music could have lyrics. The words contained in the art or music, however, represent sounds and that is what provides the meaning for the words.

I am not trying to argue with this that poetry should be metrical. What I am saying applies to free verse poetry as well as fiction. Words are based on sounds.

It is true that you might picture a house in your mind when you say the word "house", but that would be a personal way to understand the meaning of the word. I would picture a different house and right now when I say the word I don't imagine anything in particular. What is common to both of us when we read or hear "house" is not an image, but the original sound. Besides, the meaning that we need to understand is often far more complicated than just "house". It might be something like, "The Smiths lived happily in their house on Cedar Street." What is the image in that string of sounds? What image in your mind helps your mind construct that meaning? I can't think of any image that would work and yet we both understand what that sentence means.

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Originally Posted by mona amon

But is it not the same dichotomy as between cause and effect? There is no cause without effect, no effect without cause. Style is the vehicle by which the artist communicates his vision (substance) to the reader. The author uses style to create the effect, tell the story, communicate the emotions, which all add up to form the substance of the work. No style without substance, no substance without style, and yet they are not the same thing, or so it seems to me. That is why I'm finding this discussion confusing. I feel that the OP's question about the relative importance of style and substance is a legitimate one, which cannot be dismissed by saying they are just two ways of looking at the same aspect of the work.

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I don't have a good answer yet to this, but I am trying to figure it out as well. What you wrote made me ask the following question: What if the author is a computer using an algorithm to generate the words?

In this scenario, I can see there being style without substance. There would be sound without meaning since the computer cannot understand the words. (See John Searle's Chinese room argument for why the computer cannot understand the language: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room). However, the human listener or reader could construct some substance from the words unless the words were in a language the reader did not understand.

YesNo,

Words do not just contain sounds, and words are not just based on sounds. As I said before, your continually and mistakenly saying so doesn't make it true. As I've shown in my previous posts, words also contain and refer to ideas, images, and concepts; and interact with other words of their texts to form more of the same. And it doesn't matter if the image evoked by words and/or literary words are personal; they still evoke images. The word 'house' does evoke the image of a house for anybody who has ever seen a house; it does not just evoke the sound. So, the word "house" is an image. That is both the reality of words and literature and the reality of cognitive science and neurology.

Finally, the fact an image doesn't convey all a reader needs to know about that image doesn't change the fact it is still an image. So, your anecdote about "The Smiths' doesn't support your point at all. It only rightly acknowledges "house" is an image but is not sufficient to convey all the needed information on its own. So, even you correctly, if inadvertently, acknowledge "house" is an image, and images do exist in literary language.


P.s. "The Smiths," the Smiths lived happily," and "house on Cedar Street" are all images. So, well done. They all evoke physical imagery in every reader who could visually conceive what the Smiths, the Smiths living happilY, and a house on Cedar Street might look like. So, thanks again for showing imagery is a part of literary---and most other--language.

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Originally Posted by YesNo

I don't have a good answer yet to this, but I am trying to figure it out as well. What you wrote made me ask the following question: What if the author is a computer using an algorithm to generate the words?

In this scenario, I can see there being style without substance. There would be sound without meaning since the computer cannot understand the words. (See John Searle's Chinese room argument for why the computer cannot understand the language: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room). However, the human listener or reader could construct some substance from the words unless the words were in a language the reader did not understand.

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Whether the computer could understand the words would have no bearing on the words it wrote. The words, if legible, would still contain style and substance, neither the style nor substance would precede each other, and the substance and style would remain inseparable. The fact a computer wrote those words wouldn't change that. However, if you would like to show how it would, I'd be intrigued to see you try to do so.

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Originally Posted by YesNo

I don't have a good answer yet to this, but I am trying to figure it out as well. What you wrote made me ask the following question: What if the author is a computer using an algorithm to generate the words?


In this scenario, I can see there being style without substance.

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Or the artist a monkey playing with a paintbrush and paper, creating abstract 'art'. I would say they have both style and substance, but it is purely accidental and not intentional as with a human painter - well most human painters, though I sometimes wonder about the role of happy accidents in the production of a work of art. There must be some amount of the unintentional in every work of art, unless you are Gustave Flaubert constantly revising and rewriting with a perfectionist's obsessiveness.

Here are some examples of style without substance:

1) My viewing an opera in Italian. I don't understand Italian. All I get is the style, which is the sound of the words.

2) My reciting a Sanskrit mantra such as the Gayatri mantra. I have memorized it, but I don't know what it means. It is all style for me.

3) A computer generated response in a Turing test would be another example of style without substance from the perspective of the computer since the computer cannot go beyond style and understand the words.

4) Gibberish spoken by an infant, at least to the parent.

5) Gibberish spoken by someone with mental challenges, perhaps to both the speaker and listener.

6) Gibberish spoken by those being verbally abusive, intending not to communicate.

An example of substance without style would be an idea for a poem prior to its being written.

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Originally Posted by mona amon

Or the artist a monkey playing with a paintbrush and paper, creating abstract 'art'. I would say they have both style and substance, but it is purely accidental and not intentional as with a human painter - well most human painters, though I sometimes wonder about the role of happy accidents in the producing of a work of art. There must be some amount of the unintentional in every work of art, unless you are Gustave Flaubert constantly revising and rewriting with a perfectionist's obsessiveness.

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That might be another example. With the computer, because we know it is based on an algorithm, there can be no substance at least from the computer's point of view. Perhaps the monkey is intending to communicate something.

I hadn't considered the unintentional substance in art, but that opens up the idea that there is more to us than our individual conscious existences since we can be receptive to influence without being aware that we are.

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Originally Posted by Scheherazade

I think the main problem with Cacian's argument here is that she does not exactly know what literary style is, which might be due to her EFL background, and she is assuming it is similar to another meaning of the word; ie, having style or having taste... Hence she is making references to fashion and so on.

Of course, this is a common problem with Cacian engaging in any discussion; she does not do her research before jumping and relies on her own assumptions to waffle on and and on... Unfortunately, communicating in solely in verse is a more recent hobby of hers, which further aids to blur the lines of her already blurry arguments, wasting not only her own time as you Pike points out but also others who have an interest in the debate.

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i put the argument forward because i understood. it
ii would not have said it otherwise.

i don't agree with everything you said here.
Pike has invited in this thread to join in the discussion and so I did.
i wont argue with it either.

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Originally Posted by stlukesguild

cacian- style is luxury

style is secondary

Cacian, you seem to assume a false dichotomy... a separation of "style" and "substance" (or "meaning"/"content"). Quite often this is how literature is taught at the grade-school level: you have the "meaning" and the form or style is thought of as simply an artful way of communicating this "meaning"... a bit of aesthetic perfume. I find this to be nonsense. The form taken by the poet... the language of poetry... is just as essential as the "meaning" or "substance". Form and meaning/substance are interwoven in constructing what we think of as content.

It has been pointed out before that reduced to their simplest "meaning" many of Shakespeare's sonnets convey nothing more profound than "When I think of you, I feel blue." If that was all the content of the sonnets, why bother? If all that form or style achieves is but an aesthetic perfume, why bother?

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false dichotomy?
that is what a dichotomy does separate two things and so i did just that i applied it in this case because it is allowed.
it is just another way of looking at content.
i imagine the word dichotomy comes from dictionary or diction.

an aesthetic perfume?
a perfume is sill a perfume and as you pointed out it has achieved something is it not that better then nothing?

take a dictionary for example

it takes words apart and give a meaning.
language is segregated under a form a dictionary with a list of words with full meanings.
and if every meaning of each words is put together under a form of a book sentence by sentence would it make sense?

or even consider
Jekyll and Hyde
one character one dichotomy
substance versus style

and so in all of this
do you agree that in order to find things you have to write them down?

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Originally Posted by Pike Bishop

That, again, was some more interesting wordplay. Again, none of it showed how literary substance can exist without style or how literary substance can exist independent of language. As I said before, if you want to do so, you need to actually show some texts that do. You should also really use some syllogistic logic expressed through clear prosaic language.

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let say this:
what is the format of a thought?
has it content/substance or style?
to think of something is content
a concept is without style

i have been reading up
Baltasar Gracian
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltasar_Graci%C3%A1n
and stumbled on this

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The Art of Worldly Wisdom
Gracián's style, generically called conceptism, is characterized by ellipsis and the concentration of a maximum of significance in a minimum of form, an approach referred to in Spanish as agudeza (wit), and which is brought to its extreme in the Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia (literally Manual Oracle and Art of Discretion, commonly translated as The Art of Worldly Wisdom), which is almost entirely composed of three hundred maxims with commentary. He constantly plays with words: each phrase becomes a puzzle, using the most diverse rhetorical devices.

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there is more to content then style
there is assumption
assuming something when reading one thing

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Originally Posted by cacian

let say this:
what is the format of a thought?
has it content/substance or style?
to think of something is content
a concept is without style

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No, all thought is molded by language and style. You don't use language just to communicate your thoughts, you use language to form these thoughts. As I am writing this, I am thinking in English, but when I'm in contact with the other natives, I think in Finnish, and when I'm alone in the woods, or in my apartment, I usually think in Finnish, but if there is a thought that somehow fits my English better, I might borrow words/concepts, and think of how I would translate it. There is no thought that is independent of style, language, and vocabulary.

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Originally Posted by YesNo

Here are some examples of style without substance:

1) My viewing an opera in Italian. I don't understand Italian. All I get is the style, which is the sound of the words.

2) My reciting a Sanskrit mantra such as the Gayatri mantra. I have memorized it, but I don't know what it means. It is all style for me.

3) A computer generated response in a Turing test would be another example of style without substance from the perspective of the computer since the computer cannot go beyond style and understand the words.

4) Gibberish spoken by an infant, at least to the parent.

5) Gibberish spoken by someone with mental challenges, perhaps to both the speaker and listener.

6) Gibberish spoken by those being verbally abusive, intending not to communicate.

An example of substance without style would be an idea for a poem prior to its being written.

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You are seriously confunding substance with data, information. It's more than this. Just go to a heavy metal show in a country where english is not the idiom and you will see. The fans may not understand the lyrics but most of them will understand the violence, agression, etc of heavy metal based on the style. Plus, the examples are not good, you may not understand Opera, but that is your incapacity to access the content of the work, not that this content does not exist.

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Originally Posted by North Star

No, all thought is molded by language and style. You don't use language just to communicate your thoughts, you use language to form these thoughts. As I am writing this, I am thinking in English, but when I'm in contact with the other natives, I think in Finnish, and when I'm alone in the woods, or in my apartment, I usually think in Finnish, but if there is a thought that somehow fits my English better, I might borrow words/concepts, and think of how I would translate it. There is no thought that is independent of style, language, and vocabulary.

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do you consider a type of language to be a style?
for example french spanish.
i dont consider them style