Shelley: Style and Substance

Abstract

In this day of political handlers and image consultants, it has become fashionable to say that we value style at the expense of substance. The pervasiveness of electronic media constantly reminds us that we live in a world of appearances, a tele-world far off from a reality we can no longer conceive of as immediate. Instead, the ‘reality’ in which we function is one of mediation, a realm of images and signs that come to have a substance of their own. The voice on the phone, the picture on the screen, the words on the page all mimic presence, deceiving us into thinking that they are the ‘thing itself’; but this essence always seems to escape, if only by the time it takes to blink an eye or draw a breath, our desire to pin it down.¹ Nevertheless, that desire persists and urges us to the pursuit of the sense beyond sound, of the content beyond form, of the substance beyond style that we call reading. What we are coming to appreciate, though, are the ways in which style can arouse that desire and in the process complicate the possibilities of substance.