Substance Over Style?

          Or is it the other way around?  Everyone always wants to believe that what they have to say counts more than the way they say it.  That what they write is more important than their spelling.  But the simple and observable truth of the matter is, that if a person writes badly, or perhaps merely blandly, his writing will be lost forever.  No one will be engaged by the ideas if he can’t get by the sentences, which is exactly what Oscar Wilde meant when he wrote:  "The truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style."

            I used to ask poetry students if the poem gives the theme its force, or if the theme gives the poem its force?  It’s the same question, after all, substance vs. style—and it has the same answer.  It is the poem, with its charged language and rhythmic backbone, that gives the theme its force.  No poem is ever remembered for its message if that message happens to be clouded in sloppy, sappy verse.  In other words, it doesn’t matter if the poem is about God, motherhood, or Superman’s crusade against evil—if the poem is so badly put together that readers uniformly hate it, the poem will not be read.  And there goes the message—the substance—right down the drain.

            And so in that sense, what you have to say is less important than how you say it.  And those who figure out how to phrase their ideas will get them into print, while those who never figure it out, are fated to wonder all through their lives why their superior ideas never can find a publisher (except of course in the world of blogs and self-publishing).  It’s really not that complicated:  it’s style over substance every time.

Divided I Stand, Part I

          I often feel I must be some variation of schizophrenic.  Outwardly—in my relationship with the world-at-large—I can’t resist being humorous, even bitterly, blackly comical.  At worst, the remarks I pass are smart-alecky, snide, and even mean, but most of the time they are on target and either wittily or sarcastically or vulgarly perfect.  At least I believe they are.  Furthermore, because I apparently need to be recklessly and ruthlessly funny, I long ago concluded that the condition is hard-wired into my DNA.  

          Mind you, I am aware that this is not the sort of personality feature anyone should be proud of, and I know that my life would have gone differently, better no doubt, if I could have controlled myself more often, but I’ve never been able to do much about it.  I’ve tried to root out the nastiness, of course, but my sense of humor, for better or worse, is what it is, and I feel powerless against it, the way a person learns to live with a debilitating physical affliction.

          However, I have spent most of my adult life being serious too—mostly as a late bloomer trying to become a better student, and eventually as a scholar who has strung together a long bibliography of serious writing.  That man never looks for the cheap joke or the pointed gibe.  He is always on message and carefully in control of his words.  It hardly seems possible that I can be both these people at the same time.  But I am, it seems, that variety of schizophrenic.