Story and style are fundamental features of literature, art, and life.
What is a story? It always involves irony in that it happens when a narrative loops back to comment in a skewed way on its original conditions while narratives are just sequential observations of events, as in a chronicle, which can include causes and characters but not the closure that comes from showing a reflection of the beginning in the end. So Aristotle was correct in thinking stories had beginnings, middles and ends but the three stages can be specified as opening situations, development, and reflections of what has changed. A conventional interpretation of “Oedipus Rex”, which was the model for tragedy in Aristotle, is an exemplification of the just said theory of story. Oedipus begins as a person immensely successful because of his persona;; attributes. He solves the riddle of the Sphinx and so saves thebes through his insight and daring and persistence. He marries the reigning queen and so solidifies the throne. The body of the play, its development, shows him to be continuing his inquiries into the basis of things even if warned that he might delve into secrets left unopened, but it is in his nature to probe. The end of his story is a disaster that turns his virtues upside down, showing him to have engaged in hubris, because his queen was his mother and Oedipus had killed his own father and was blinded for his seeing too much. Whether hubris always has that result or whether circumstance did him in is left for the audience to contemplate in consideration of how upended a life can be, the outcome a departure from the elements of the original situation.
More primitive than a story is a sequence of events which have no feedback loop, but just one event after another as in “Chronicles”, occasionally interrupted by a story, such as the story of Jezebel, who is ambiguous as a dutiful wife or a temptress, which is a way to linger rather than move ahead to the next and unironic event. Similarly, there is a chronicle of Presidents, each one having his own qualities and impinging on American history as they will and so not a story even though it is possible to fashion the story of the Civil War as the original sin of slavery whose inevitable outcome in wart could be delayed from the time of the Declaration of Independence through various compromises until when Lincoln was elected the South said enough was enough.
Here is another feature of literary devices. There is a rhythm that takes place within stories. There are microstructures within a few sentences or words or pages that replicate within the story and serve as a template for the story as a whole. These internal replications are the substance of the style of the story. Alexander Pope’s poetry, its regularity of pleasing rhymes, provide the style of a larger view that life is a Liebnetzian best of all possible worlds. The exaggerations of boasting and outlandish claims by the major tragic figures of his plays, their bombast and ever more inward turning, whether by Brutus or Hamlet or Othello, exaggerations over the top, reflect the larger view that these tragic figures are all in a downward spiral. Jane Austen is always dealing with an immediate problem that has to be solved, whether, in “Persuasion”, how to deal with meeting an old suitor, not wanting to show embarrassment, or managing her father’s finances, to the larger question of whether it is possible to rekindle a lost love. “Pride and Prejudice” is about various people making good or bad matches within the larger context set by its first sentence about young men looking for wives. The main story is about Darcy and Elizabeth, both ungainly figures each burdened with pride and prejudice, can manage to navigate towards one another, the ever present and overwhelming hindrance being their very different social standing, all the while the style punctuating how plentifu;l are the marriage arrangements, these all coming to consummation: Mr. Wickham and Lydia Bennet; Charlotte and Mr. Collins; Charles Bingley and Jane Bennet.
What might be called near or contemporary classics also exemplify the relation between story and style. Kazuo Ishiguro’s “When We Were Orphans” shows how story and style can reinforce one another. The hero would seem to be a young man of promise who has reverses and winds up with a grown daughter, the two of them lamenting the shortcomings of their lives, complaining that in one fashion or another are orphans, making excuses for their condition. But the rhetoric, repeatedly executed throughout the novel, shows the father to make excuses one after the other for his actions and so is so deeply into his delusions as to be on the brink of madness, living within a cocoon of excuses, and the reader wonders how the protagonist managed to survive at all and by the end requiring the reader to wonder how any of us manage to survive the illusions created from our own excuses, and perhaps we don't really manage all too well because of them.
John Updike shows how style betrays rather than reinforces story in his late novel “Villages”, where a not particularly gifted MIT information technology graduate does manage to develop some coding that will make its way into the permanent internet structure but never is able to profitably produce other work because he is so preoccupied with being a serial adulterer. The style is the repeated sexual encounters that ared described, while his wife, a more promising computer scientist, languished. Looking back at his story, was the multiple adultery and the ups and downs of his life coincidental? Or was adultery a compensation for his professional drawbacks? It is difficult to say, as perhaps is the case with any life as private and professional concerns move along in tandem, as was the case as far back as in Dickens’ “Great Expectations” where an up and coming functionary collides with and encounters dramatic aspects of his personal life, such as his true benefactor and his first love. The internal dramatic events move on in vivid description amidst the langurs of the quotidian career in business. Which is real life: the flashes of memory or the rise to middle class respectability?
The distinction and intersection of story and style occurs in painting, though the two are known there as subject and background. In Church’s “Heart of the Andes”, the subject is the artist who is looking out at the splendor of the Andes, a small figure in a vast expanse who nevertheless is the one who has eyes to see. The background are all the details of the vegetation and the features of typography which make the place vast and majestic. The vegetation teems, and so there are a great many details of particular items as if it were a background wallpaper that is barely attended to except by this artist. The design includes a waterfall descending into a crevice and a mound of mountains in the background and an obligatory set of vertical trees in the near right. The ironic aspect of the story is that the artist himself is small in scale and so could be excused as another piece of the wallpaper, one of so many of these flora, except for knowing that he is different and so an irony about the landscape as a whole.
A very different painting also shows the contrast between subject and background. Emanuel de Witte’s "Interior of the Nieuwe Kerk” has as its subject the interior of a Protestant church showing its majestic spaces, few adornments, but usable objects, like a place from which to sermonize, and room for people to gaze, but without pews. The viewer sees what this kind of church is like in its functions. The viewer gets a sense of what it is to be Protestant, of its own very non-Catholic holiness. There is also the background which consists of duplicating slabs and columns of white, some brighter than others and differing slightly in the tones of white, so that these can be abstracted ought into a wallpaper, though it is a mistake to think that the painting was only its background, that creating the atmosphere and decoration for its subject matter, which is to be recognized as a church and not a sett of slabs. It means itself a kind of church that is created in particular by its use of whiteness, these two aspects of a singular experience.
The distinction between story and style goes beyond the arts. It can be applied to ordinary life or, if you prefer, to the phenomenology of experience. People experience in their range of attention the subject matters of their lives and their choices: their occupations, courtships, triumphs and tragedies. They also notice, as it were, the sideways glances of the streets they walk, their chatter and sidetalk, the furniture in their rooms and in their lives, except when they focus attention onto them, as when you buy a new sofa or stare at a print long framed on your wall, except to experience the ensemble of your setting as a felt experience that is with you and does not require attentiveness to provide a mood. In fact, focussing on the wallpaper of life, such as how streets zig and zag or are perpendicular or in parallel, makes you either a city architect, a student learning geometry, or an obsessive who is on the point of madness when contemplating how arbitrary and bizarre are the accoutrements of life. This distinction is very sturdy even if most philosophers do not attend to it, preferring to consider the analysis of idealizations of truth, beauty and goodness and so evading the substance of existence.