martedì 1 giugno 2010

At the end of the day, a cliché has its uses

FROM TELEGRAPH
One writer's hackneyed horror may be a source of delight for others, says Philip Hensher.

By Philip Hensher

When it comes to clichés, writers divide in two. For some, writing is a "war against cliché", in the title of a collection of Martin Amis's essays. For others, they have their own poetic force; they can be relished even when they are totally flat.

Kazuo Ishiguro is very much one of those who likes a sordid cliché. At the Hay festival, he was challenged by the academic John Mullan about the use of such drably over-familiar phrases as "to tell the truth" and "to be fair". These, Mullan said, were the sort of phrases footballers like to use.Ishiguro enthusiastically agreed, and went still further. He found many of them, he said, "poignant and beautiful". He singled out "at the end of the day" as "full of stoic ruefulness", and suggested that the fear of committing a cliché had "a kind of snobbery" behind it.

Ever since George Orwell wrote his essays on the English language, and probably before that, the budding writer has been told that clichés are to be avoided at all cost – "like the plague", someone once said to me, quite seriously. They are lazy – in fact, they have their origins in the laziness of printers. A cliché was originally a line of type left on one side after use, because it would soon be called on again. Orwell's list of clichés has now passed into history – "jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno…" But his point that you should never use an expression you are used to seeing in print remains, for many writers, a forceful prohibition.

Zadie Smith put this very well. "In each of my novels," she confessed, "somebody 'rummages in their purse' for something, because I was too lazy and thoughtless and unawake to separate 'purse' from its old, persistent friend 'rummage'. To rummage through a purse is to sleepwalk through a sentence."

A writer like that would die rather than write "at the end of the day". And yet cliché is only one step in an unobjectionable linguistic process by which poetry is tamed and domesticated. The 16th-century translator of the Bible who first used the expression "by the skin of my teeth" was a vivid poet, and the phrase caught on. At some point, it became a dreary cliché; but subsequently it passed beyond cliché, and now is really just a neutral idiom.

A lack of familiarity with such a phrase can restore all its poetic force. "There is no happiness," Randall Jarrell once wrote, "like mistaking an idiom in a foreign language for a poetic inspiration." There is a lovely German expression, "wo sich die Füchse gute Nacht sagen", literally meaning "where the foxes say goodnight" and metaphorically "the back of beyond". Probably, to a German speaker, the English equivalent is as strange and poetic as the German is to me.

Ishiguro was speaking about footballing clichés, and he is right to think that they have their own poetry, which a little attention might restore to us – "over the moon", "a game of two halves", "early doors", "strong on paper". Other areas of professional endeavour have their own mysterious poetry of cliché, notoriously management-speak: "the elephant in the room"; "it's not rocket science" (I once heard someone say "it's not rocket salad"); "run it up the flagpole"; "shoot the puppy"; "blue-sky thinking": these all have their own innate beauty and even energy.

Many writers respond with a kind of rueful enjoyment to such exotic coinings, long after they have been deadened by over-use. Personally, I've used some quite cheap clichés in my novels, intending to outrage and amuse – once, even, "like a knife through butter".

And it isn't hard to find famous lines of poetry which relish the most exhausted idioms. When W H Auden wrote, in his sonnet about A E Housman, "Deliberately he chose the dry-as-dust/Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer", the tawdry cliché and the brilliant coining bang up against each other. If "dry-as-dust" is good enough for Auden, and "at the end of the day" for Ishiguro, perhaps the rest of us should stop worrying so much.

Philip Hensher's most recent novel 'The Northern Clemency' (Harper) is available from Telegraph Books

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