Ode to Cliché

The Truth Hurts

Cliché. A core literary issue, one considered a pox, a vex, the lowliest of linguistic leprosy. Every writer, of whatever genre, necessarily confronts them, and we all do the merriest of jigs about, above and around them—a dance of avoidance and tsk tsk superiority.  I once asked Johnny Cash about his songwriting M.O. and it was right up top in his boilerplate response: “I always try to avoid cliches, and later go back to make sure none of ‘em snuck in,” Cash recited. Similarly queried, the brilliant outlaw shaman Billy Joe Shaver had no such qualms, because he always “wrote songs so that the dumbest guy in the world could understand them.”

Shaver’s fraternal embrace of cliché—which he consistently employed with sublime affect—stuck in my mind, albeit as a cause of confusion and for years relegated to an as-best-could-be-maintained state of remission.

Take the stereotype, which like it or not, exists immortally in stage, film and literature simply because they are universally accurate depictions. Yet despite that fact many exert acrobatic efforts to ignore and dismiss what is undeniable truth, raw, uncut realism at its most blunt—and to deny it is rank blindeye counterintuition.

The cliché and stereotype are a distinct repertoire, a recognizable vocabulary whose streamlined directness is both purely effective and undeniable. Peerless punk rock lyricist Poly Styrene, who excelled at savagely subtle studies of the antiseptic, materialistic 20^th century Western self (“Art-I-Ficial,” “Identity”) flat out trumpeted this with the declaratory exult of her X Ray Spex classic “I Am a Cliché.”

Cliche’s inescapability is awesome—they infiltrate and insert themselves into every human interaction and writing project with irresistible, compulsive zeal, a slam-bang premier verity that’s nigh on omniscient.

Today, cliché has become an almost endangered species, overtaken and swamped by the vogue, circular semantic rituals strictly imposed on contemporary journalism. The 12 year old hacks replacing desiccated Fourth Estate veterans in the field’s newsrooms and op ed playpens have imposed  a new wooden vocabulary of cliché, offering perverse ungainly phraseology and inverted grammar violations—they make sure you’re serially “gifted” with “takeaways,” the “asks” and “feels” which enable you to “read the room,” “do better” and never, God forbid, commit the unpardonable atrocity of “othering” something or someone.

It’s a confluence of bureaucratic corporate and egghead academic jargon that’s infected the fourth estate and has seeped into general usage, a distorted, mutant English that is primarily based on the infernal employ of nouns as verbs and vice-versa, a nasty inversion which has created a linguistic mire that, most infuriatingly, people now simply accept as standard and, even worse, never question—which is a “big tell” on how woefully far we’ve fallen.

This sterilized version of nu-speak effectively renders cliché as a voice in the wilderness, one ringing with a simple, direct impact increasingly lost in the atmosphere of capsized noun-as-verb mumble-jumbo.

No matter how elevated the thought, how elegant the phraseology, cliché always lurks just beneath, like a teeming steaming jungle, the dreadful bedrock of Western communication. Cliché rings out (loud and clear! clear as a bell!), its hoary, undeniable realism pealing ever louder, and their very employ becomes an act of revolution, one which explodes tortured artifice and synthetic jargon.

The greatest wellsprings of cliche, after all, are the anchors of literary tradition: the Bible and Shakespeare, sources whose voluminous, eternally celebrated language and expression represent an oceanic, tidal body of thought and verity whose ebb and flow is an eternal Western constant.

Fuss with metaphor and simile as much as you like but (like the point of a compass! the moth to the flame!) it almost always returns to cliché—which represents both the rim of the volcano and the launching pad to the stars; plunge into the blast furnace maw of mediocrity or ascend to purifying celestial altitudes but never think for a moment that you got there without ‘em.

It was Sam Peckinpah, during an afterhours drunken ramble with actor-director Alfonso Arau during production of The Wild Bunch, who really nailed it: “I love cliches because they establish an immediate communication with the audience. Cliches reside in the collective subconscious. And what is a film? Just a collection of cliches. The work of a director is to love the cliché, adopt the cliché and then work against it. You have to remake the cliché in a way that nobody has ever made it before, because the cliché tells the truth. That is the creative work of the director.”