Style is a Good Thing After All

If I started writing with any literary theory at all, it was that content is more important than style. This was borne out, I felt, by just about everything I read and enjoyed. In order to discuss this theory, I will have to examine four different genres of literature: essays, poetry, drama, and fiction.

First of all-the essays. It’s never easy to list your favorite authors-although people are expected to do so all the time. But in terms of essays, I know exactly who they would be: George Bernard Shaw, George Orwell, and William Hazlitt. But these writers were important to me not because of the beauty of their prose, but because of the things they had to say. It didn’t occur to me that their style was partly what allowed them to say what they did in a convincing way. I simply looked at the occasional prepositions dangling at the ends of their sentences and decided that style didn’t matter half as much as everyone thought. And in drama, it struck me that a work like A Doll’s House wouldn’t be half as good if it weren’t for the final scene.

It didn’t seem to me that Ibsen was a master of dialogue or dramatic style-he was simply able to convey a message, and that message made his work interesting. But surely poetry is reliant upon style. A poet can’t get away on content alone. But then again, it struck me that the best English poets were the Romantics-all of whom are interesting because they were willing to deal with poverty, rural life, local legends, and revolutionary creeds. This content alone was, I felt, what set them apart from the norm of previous English poetry: the Robert Herrick school which dealt with very self-centered religious guilt and repressed sexuality. Herrick, after all, addressed many of his poems to an imaginary woman with whom he was supposedly having an affair.

Thank God the “content” of the Romantics was so different! And in the novels I read, it was never the beauty of the language that I remembered years later, but passages or snatches of dialogue which spoke to my understanding of the world. In all cases, I felt that it was what was said, not how it was said, that was important.

Never did it occur to me that style was what made interesting content believable. Maybe I had to read a work without style before I could understand its importance. Style is probably most desirable in an essay, so it was in that genre that I made this discovery. This occurred when I was reading Percy Bysshe Shelley’s undergraduate attempt at a philosophic treatise-the notorious The Necessity of Atheism, which got him expelled from college.

I was a fan of Shelley’s poetry and an even greater fan of atheism, so I opened the tract with high hopes. Here we have promising content. Not only was Shelley one of the first proponents of atheism in England (Godwin, I suppose, came first) he was also facing expulsion for the publication of his essay. And yet, because of its style, it’s almost impossible to get through it. Shelley’s unsmiling bombast, which works so well in his poetry, makes his essay lie on the page like a dead rodent. Even if I didn’t discover the necessity of atheism from the pamphlet, I did come to believe in the necessity of style.

Now, what is the root of this bad writing? Well, the problem begins in school. Teachers tend to believe that they are instructing kids in good writing. But in reality, schools ought to teach young people how to read and write at the most basic level and then call it quits. It’s all downhill from there. What an eye-opening experience it was for me to read genuine essays. The first time I opened Orwell or Hazlitt, I was shocked by how real the writing felt, by how much of the writer’s personality had seeped into the words. Schools teach young people to write as though they were in a fourth-grade pageant about the Boston Tea Party. Any trace of an individual flavor in school-writing, any hint of the writer’s personality, is stamped out immediately.

Kids are forced to play dress-up when they write for school. Therefore, if young people want to escape their upbringing, they must spend years as devoted readers, unlearning everything they learned before. Because schools stamp out individual style, kids also become afraid of expressing original thoughts or opinions. They learn not to trust themselves-to fill their work with bland statements of the obvious. They learn that in order to write, they must not write as themselves, but as starchy old men and women. In effect, they are alienated from their own words, which seem to be the words of someone else. Shelley was in school when he wrote his essay. That’s problem one.

When I discovered the inadequacies of school writing, I took this as a sign from above that content always trumps style. I hadn’t yet realized that the problem with school writing is that it lacks style. On the other hand, Hazlitt, Orwell, and Shaw are overflowing with style. They were able to bring the writer into the essay-directly or indirectly. Their styles are infused with their own personality. School writing replaces style with “filler.” I take this to mean all those little phrases which I used to sprinkle throughout my essays in high school. “The fact is that,” is a good one. “It cannot be denied that,” is another. “Therefore, however, we are left with the impression that, undeniably.” All of these are ways of writing words without actually saying anything. When teachers set length requirements, “it cannot be denied that,” students will always fall back on these devices. Jeez! Four pages due Friday! I’d better write: “Well, the fact is that, it cannot be overemphasized that…”

It was this empty writing which I associated with style. That is why I had such a dislike for the concept. But eventually, I came to realize that such writing is the opposite of style. I had such a revelation when it came to drama. Whenever I read or see a play, I usually look for two things. First of all, the play should either make me laugh or cry. (Well, I don’t cry very often, but you catch my drift.) Just as important, the reader or playgoer should be able to see exactly why each line was added to the script. Every word which is said on stage should add something to the meaning or atmosphere of the play. Otherwise, you are simply sitting in a darkened room watching people have an irrelevant discussion. I think that David Mamet is a hero of witty, sparkling dialogue. As is Shaw.

Ibsen is more of the gloomy variety, but the reader or viewer still understands why each word finds its way into the play. Brecht, particularly in Mother Courage, is able to be both heart-rending and funny at the same time. One playwright who doesn’t measure up to either of my requirements is Samuel Beckett, particularly in Waiting for Godot. I don’t remember thinking any line of dialogue between Vladimir and Estragon needed to be there. Or even thinking that the play itself needed to be written. Nothing sparkled, nothing came alive.

Not that I’m saying all works need to be straight-forward. For instance, absurdism works incredibly well in some of Harold Pinter’s plays-particularly in the short political pieces such as Mountain Language and One for the Road. But the absurdity on stage bears out the meaning of each play. Each word is being said for a reason.

At one point, I thought all of this proved that content-having something interesting to say-was more important that style. Beckett is a “style” writer, after all, but because his characters do not say anything important, his dialogue lies dead on the page. But of course, if content is having something interesting to say, then style is the ability to say it in a convincing way. The two are both necessary.

It’s harder to tell, in novels, which is more important. I’ve definitely spent the vast majority of my time as a reader with novels. And I couldn’t help but notice that it wasn’t the passages of beautiful description or the moments of poetic grandeur that I remembered years after I had put the book down. What I lived for were those few moments when I felt I was reading something about myself. When a character expressed thoughts that I might have thought. When the experience of someone in the novel echoed my own experience. Not that I’m so narcissistic, it’s just that such passages break down the loneliness in which we all live. That, to me, is the greatest thrill of being a reader.

Is that thrill due to content or style? Oddly enough, it has to do with style. For instance, let’s say we want to see expressed in a novel the experience of being humiliated. A writer could simply offer us this: “I felt so humiliated that day.” Direct, simple. All the necessary content is there. Or we could look at this passage from Great Expectations: “I set off on the four-mile walk to our forge; pondering, as I went, on all that I had seen, and revolving that I was a common laboring-boy; that my hands were coarse; that my boots were thick; that I was much more ignorant than I had considered myself last night, and generally that I was in a low-lived bad way.”

It’s the same content. But it is the style which makes the second example believable while the first is not. So style is a good thing after all.