Rehabilitating the Cliché

I saw Les Miserables for the first time in December, in a theatrical production at the National Theatre in DC. I have been well acquainted with the songs for years, as my friends and I had grabbed ahold of the cast recording in high school as a window into the larger world of culture closed off to us in our small South Dakotan city. It wasn’t until I saw the actual production that several plot questions were answered for me, and only then did I realize how much of the show really couldn’t be understood by singing along to the sum of its parts. Speaking of ‘the sum of its parts,’ this post is about clichés. But I’ll get to that. Only when I sat in the theater and saw, for the first time, familiar songs acted out within their context did I realize the broader and powerful message stitching together the characters and their stories. What seemed by sound to be only a tragedy was also a tremendous story of hope and an admonition against false dreams of earthly happiness. I found truth in the well-known, concealed from me by its familiarity.

This brings me to clichés. There are clichés, and clichés about clichés all about how things are said because they’re true and they will keep on being said because they’re true, and really the only way to deal with them, especially if you’re a writer, is to avoid them altogether or else burn your pages over a ritualistic altar to Hemingway. There is certainly some truth to clichés not belonging in great writing (if nothing else but for the very fact that repeating a cliché isn’t really writing at all). But I would like to take a moment and give clichés their due, for I feel they’ve been shortchanged in pursuit of the idea that truth can only be revealed in the new. Clichés are particularly tough because most of the time, they seep into our cultural consciousness long before we face the complex circumstances that gave rise to their existence.

Wikipedia considers a cliché to be “an expression, idea, or element of an artistic work which has been overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, especially when at some earlier time it was considered meaningful or novel” (much like my use of a definition to illustrate a point of contention).  So writers are advised to avoid using clichés, because they are a way of expressing something that has been expressed many times before in precisely the way it has been expressed many times before. But it is exactly my point that through overuse, clichés lose their original meaning. By avoiding the phrase, you avoid the idea, and in doing so, the meaning itself thought to be so common is lost. It’s as if the entire wisdom of collective human experience is hidden in plain sight around us and we sit, oblivious, confined by the commonplace.

There are many true things that we learn before we’re ready. Often they are very hard things that we must face before we know how to deal with them. Sometimes, though, it is a truth just doesn’t matter yet, and we become inoculated to the words that could make the chaos of our lives assume meaning. The burden of our struggle is made all the harder by feeling alone in our misery and we isolate ourselves in the singularity of our circumstance. How comforting then it would be to know the roadmap to perseverance is laid out in speech, the proof of the outlasting preserved and reduced in the maxims and tropes written on cereal boxes and motivational posters hanging on the walls of high school gym teachers all across the country. Usually, however, this clarity only occurs after we have made it on our own, learned the truth slowly and stubbornly and at great personal cost. When we then encounter the cliché, it serves only to mockingly remind us of the simple truth behind the battle ours alone to face.

Sometimes the most difficult thing to accept is the commonness of our problems. If we feel overshadowed by the great things that make us unique, it is easy to fetishize our problems and hold on to them even as they unmake us, because it seems better to be a flawed somebody than an adjusted no-one-special. I am not suggesting that clichés can teach us anything new, but rather aid in our understanding of old and common things, the things that are the hardest perhaps because they happen to everyone. Words can take on new meaning when you realize they apply to you and give rise to an entirely new perspective. Sometimes we know the words so well it’s impossible to know their meaning.