SPECIAL EDITION: Teaching the Well-Placed Cliché: "Connective Pathos" and Effective Hermeneutics of Everydayness
I just wanted to share this presentation I made to my fellow English teachers in 2006 at Penn State while earning my Master's Degree in English.
Teaching the Well-Placed Cliché: “Connective Pathos” and Effective Hermeneutics of Everydayness
Last summer, I read two crime fiction novels that got me thinking about clichés: Mickey Spillane’s 1948 I, the Jury and Jim Thompson’s 1952 The Killer Inside Me. I found Spillane’s writing to be heavy-handed, and devoid of nuance. It was also riddled with clichés. A random opening of the book presents the scene in which two cops “didn’t see eye to eye in their methods” but one was “man enough” to give the other “credit where credit was due.” Further down the same page, we learn that Mike Hammer, our Private Eye hero, has “to play his cards close to his vest.” For one hundred and forty-seven pages, Spillane deadens his prose with what Florence Freedman called “mal-clichés,” meaning ones that are “imperfectly understood,” inaptly used, or overused.
Jim Thompson, on the other hand, deploys clichés with a rhetorical purpose. His violently psychopathic character, Sheriff Lou Ford, uses clichés strategically as verbal weapons. Early in the novel, Sheriff Ford says that “Striking at people that way (with words) is almost as good as the other, the real way.” (5) The word cliché comes from the French name for a stereotype block – a cast used to print letters. It was repetitive, and it was effective. In a sense, the miserable rural Texas town in which the novel is set mirrors the stereotype block: common people doing the same things over and over while talking the same way every day.
Interestingly, Thompson artfully maximizes clichés within the very cliché and formulaic genre of crime fiction. The sheriff Ford-ifies his language in The Killer Inside Me by stamping familiar rhetorical imprints on his fellow citizens in order to manipulate them by establishing trust, rapport, and kinship through social bonds and connections. He uses clichés to create what Ryan Stark calls “connective pathos.” Sheriff Ford understands that well-placed clichés in the right rhetorical situation can bring comfort. They can sometimes even anesthetize as people recite maxims in church and elsewhere in the face of an often cruel and unfair world. Thompson shows that clichés can serve as hermeneutics of everydayness, and they can be very effective. Additionally, Sheriff Ford employs clichés differently in his dialogue with other characters than he does in his narrative. He seeks to connect emotionally and to manipulate other characters by using proverbial-type clichés, such as “There’s no use crying over spilled milk,” or “You can’t keep a good man down.” But when talking to the reader, he economizes his language and facilitates understanding by using familiar metaphors like when he congratulates himself on his affability: “I often did that, you know, spread a little sunshine, and they ate it up.” (92) Generally speaking, Sheriff Ford tailors his speech to his audience, mastering the rhetorical situation so that stock phrases and commonplace language become uncommonly effective.
Why, then, do writing manuals and composition teachers admonish against using clichés? What’s so wrong with them? Perhaps the problem is not so much with the cliché itself but rather with students using them as replacements for critical thinking. Phrases such as “War is not the answer” or “Freedom is not free” in argumentative composition lack the rhetorical purpose deployed by Thompson and deaden the prose the way Spillane did.
Lou La Brant takes issue with the lack of context that clichés can invite (276):
The cliché is frequently, in essence, a generalization, its threat to thought lying, as has been indicated, in careless acceptance of its implications. ‘The tried and true,’ ‘slow but sure,’ ‘poor but honest,’ and similar expressions easily mislead the user into thinking the long accepted to be true, the slow worker to be accurate, and the poor man more honest than the rich. Scores of illustrations are to be found in our everyday speech. The cliché is, in such cases, an example of our tendency to overgeneralize or to use abstractions carelessly.
Dawn Skorczewski offered a more nuanced discussion of students’ usage of clichés as stand-ins for legitimate arguments in her College Composition and Communication article (2000), “’Everybody has their own ideas’: Responding to Cliché in Student Writing.” While lamenting how often students would compose fresh arguments throughout most of their essays, only to resort to clichés in their conclusions. She considers William James’ assertion that “Our capacity to see depends largely on our position.” (231) Skorczewski recognizes that students often lean on clichés as rhetorical crutches but asks if there is some validity to it. “If our students testify to their solidarity with others even as they struggle to position themselves against what seems unfamiliar or frightening, then our comments must address these contradictions without foreclosing the possibility of transformation.” (ibid.) Within her discussion of the human social interactions between students and teachers as simultaneously conflict-ridden and safe and nurturing, she explains that the use of clichés often emerges as a rhetorical blanket to which students cling for comfort. Even after taking that into account, it seems to me that the most agreed-upon noxiousness of clichés is that they too often substitute for critical thought. So what information do clichés leave out? The incomplete answer is that they virtually always omit valuable elements of an idea or discussion that provide context; therefore clichés are often one-size-fits-all over-generalizations that relieve the user from sustained thinking. In other words, they are a form of verbal compression that invite thought compression at the same time.
Another major objection to clichés is their lack of originality. A cliché is by definition trite and hackneyed – or as Diana Hacker in Rules for Writers explains: “It’s lost its dazzle from overuse. No longer can it surprise.” (145) Our anti-cliché pedagogy echoes the Modernist slogan “Make it new,” or Orwell’s advice: Never to use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech that we are “used to seeing in print.” (350) Orwell’s universal objection to clichés along with the similar teachings found in writing manuals re-inscribe the accepted superiority of Romantic writing theory and pedagogy. Ryan Stark points to “the anxiety of authorship” that accompanies this preference.
Charles Suhor, in his 1975 College Composition and Communication article, Clichés: A Re-assessment, writes, “Clichés are, to use a cliché, the bane of many a teacher’s existence. They have traditionally been regarded as a linguistic gaucherie, used mainly by the subarticulate and the devious – teenagers, Rotarians, call-ins on radio talk shows, politicians, admen, hack writers, and other patrons of or participants in middle and low-brow culture” (159). Talk-radio hosts themselves thrive in political conversation that is replete with slogans and stock phrases. We hear Rush Limbaugh, the father of contemporary political talk-radio, tell listeners that “liberals don’t have a clue how to defend this country against Islamo-fascists.” And Sean Hannity, another talk-show host whose audience is almost as vast as Limbaugh’s (several sources indicate between 12 and 20 million listeners each week), echoes the Bush Administration’s old shibboleth to “Stay the course in Iraq.” Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck do their part not to be outdone. But cliché mongering is not limited to conservatives. Air America’s talk-show crew, led by Al Franken, told voters during the last mid-term election that “America needed a new direction.” I don’t say this simply to point to the facileness of a large portion of radio talk-show rhetoric – that’s obvious. What’s interesting is why this kind of rhetoric is so popular. What makes it so effective? I submit it’s because of the connective pathos it engenders, and the effective hermeneutics of everydayness. Common people can digest soundbites and slogans; in other words, it resonates. Incidentally, when I speak of hermeneutics, I’m merely speaking of the way in which we interpret, or understand things.
Suhor explains the hermeneutical value of clichés: “At root, [they are] ways of organizing ideas into compact, cogent units. They ring, they sing, they imprint themselves on the memory as ordinary language does not, and the fact that people in everyday life respond to their melodies and rhythms is an indication, prima facie, that some sort of imaginative language is afoot (159).” It’s ironic that Suhor points to the imaginative value of language that clichés can bring, considering one of the main objections to their usage is unoriginality. His main point, though, is that people “respond to their melodies and rhythms.” There is a dance, of sorts, going on. There is a social back-and-forth, an exchange of ideas that is often pre-packaged in familiar and comfortable rhetorical ways. This familiarity is cozy; moreover, it’s often confirming and validating. As Thompson’s Sheriff Ford tells us in his subjective voice-over narrative about a certain character in The Killer Inside Me, “Like always, he wasn’t hearing anything he didn’t want to hear.” (77) Ford is using the connective energy of clichés to build rapport because he understands the power of shared language. Sheriff Ford tells another character that “It’s a screwed up, bitched up world, and I’m afraid it’s going to stay that way.” (118) Ford is echoing Thomas Hobbes’ description of life as “nasty brutish and short.” Throughout The Killer, Thompson shows how maxims can serve to mitigate the harshness of life. He tells people, “We’re all in the same boat, and we’ve got to put our shoulders to the wheel and pull together.” (99) In the right rhetorical situation, maxims and axioms resonate with people and build a sense of community. I’ll return to the importance of the rhetorical situation in a moment.
So when one of my students recently wrote the following sentence in a definition essay, I resisted my temptation to circle the cliché and encourage her to replace it with her own words, or to “make it new.” She wrote, “Wearing their hearts on their sleeves, Emo Kids seek attention by expressing their darker emotions through their language, music, and clothes.” Instead of pouncing on her transgression, I thought of how quickly I understood what she was saying – her choice of words was borrowed and familiar, to be sure, but the cliché provided speed and clarity. I wasn’t sure whether I should point out the cliché and praise her thus encouraging more attempts at the well-placed cliché, or simply omit any comments at all in full confidence that she would reach for more clichés just out of habit. Suhor, says, “Without clichés our language would have a cold, alien, antiseptic quality … They are language inventions that people share (161)” My student’s cliché worked because I shared her understanding. This criterion raises obvious questions about shared understanding, but then so do most elements of language.
Ryan Stark coined the term “connective pathos” in his article, “Clichés and Composition Theory.” (1999) He told me, “The connection that occurs through the cliché is emotional first and then other things.” He points to Pascal, who said, “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” There is a place, he argues, for the cliché as a valid rhetorical tool: “The cliché creates an emotional bond that is epistemologically valid, in the same way that rational bonds are epistemologically valid.” My mother comes to mind. She overcame alcoholism and has attained more than twenty years of sobriety largely on the strength of maxims. She told me recently that “wise sayings” contributed mightily to her success in recovery. She said that it took her a long time to understand the meaning behind the oft-used maxim in AA: “What is, is.” No amount of well-reasoned logic could have effected change in my mother the way repetitive maxims – or clichés – did. They stamped clarity upon her mind, but even more, she says, they stamped clarity upon her soul. She felt connected to a community that used familiar language in a purposeful way that echoes Kenneth Burke’s discussion of identification with others. Anton Zijderveld argues in his article, “On Clichés: The Superstructure of Meaning by Function in Modernity,” that clichés “seem to carry truth – an old and obvious truth – not because of their semantic content but because of their repetitive use.” (66) The rhetorical effectivity of cliches, perhaps precisely because of their connective pathos, reveals their power if used in the right rhetorical situation.
Let us return for a moment to the talk-radio audience. Like the characters Sheriff Ford describes in Thompson’s novel, these listeners are largely people who hear to what they want to hear. Unlike Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said he read for antagonism as well as confirmation, these listeners are often drawn to confirmation because it validates their feelings, which again I emphasize, is where clichés begin their work. Metaphors are a type of cliché prevalent in talk radio in which connective pathos and hermeneutical effectivity are transferred. George Lakoff writes, “If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor.” (3) He goes on to explain how metaphors are “reflected in our everyday language by a wide variety of expressions.” (4)
ARGUMENT IS WAR
Your claims are indefensible.
He attacked every weak point in my argument.
His criticisms were right on target.
I demolished his argument.
I’ve never won an argument with him.
You disagree? Okay, shoot!
If you use that strategy, he’ll wipe you out.
He shot down all of my arguments.
Talk-radio often connects emotionally and interprets cognitively by building social bonds and language communities through rhetorics of war.
It’s worth noting, though, that clichés only ring and sing when the audience scarcely notices them. I think that’s why the more educated classes tend to find them undesirable. Clichés work within language communities in which members share similar social status, personal values, and backgrounds. Sharon Crowley says, “A rhetor should try to determine whether his audience has any preconceived opinions that are relevant to his point. If so, he should find an appropriate maxim that generalizes these preconceived opinions” (159). The stock phrases of middle and lowbrow culture, don’t have the nearly the same connective and hermeneutical effectivity when they cross educational or class boundaries. These clichés indicate a lack of “cultivation and exclusivity,” as Ryan Stark points out. For the literary classes, instead of ringing and singing, clichés rattle and clang.
Considering the hermeneutical value and connective energy of the well-placed cliché, the romantic emphasis on the creative genius in search of originality is strangely overvalued. Stark says that, “Handbooks are sermonic, and the values inscribed by viewing writing as the search for constantly new expressions, as an activity aimed at surprise and dazzle, and as an activity of a solitary mind looking for solitary meaning, solipsism, lead to an automatic devaluation of the cliché.” Skorczewski points out that when we do this, “we assert the autonomy of the individual subject that contemporary pedagogical theories work hard to resist.” (231) It seems to me that tipping the scales toward so heavily toward originality and verbal ownership works against the benefits of sharing from a community pool of familiar language resources that can serve to connect people and clarify meaning. Crowley explains, “Their very general nature makes maxims applicable to a wide variety of situations. In fact, part of their persuasive force lies in their generality – when applied to a specific case, a maxim can impart its own persuasive force to that case.” (159)
Suhor wrote, “The mark of a good contemporary prose stylist is not that he avoids clichés altogether but that he is confident enough to use them when doing so doesn’t violate the overall texture of the work.” In Jim Thompson, we see what good writers can do with clichés. Unfortunately, there are far more Mickey Spillanes than Jim Thompsons. Orwell insisted that people use clichés and stock phrases because they “save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.” (340) That’s often the case, of course, as Spillane demonstrates. But Thompson shows that clichés can be used consciously to effectively generate connective pathos, and to economize language in order to instantly crystallize understanding.
My goal has been to show that clichés have redeeming value in spite of their overwhelming undesirability. So, what is the rhetorical upshot of teaching the well-placed cliché in the classroom? I submit that we, as composition teachers, should rethink our aversion to clichés. Or at least we should rethink our knee-jerk reaction against them. Of course, we must insist on sustained argument and critical thought and reject the mal-cliché. But let’s reconsider our insistence on originality when it comes to writing. Hamlet famously swore to wipe his slate clean and rely only on his father’s ghost for wisdom and guidance. Perhaps we shouldn’t pressure students to rely so heavily on their inner muses to surprise with originality when connecting with shared phrases has its place in the writer’s toolbox. There’s value in the rhetorical effectivity and social utility of the properly used cliché.
I join Suhor and Stark in arguing that the hermeneutical value and connective pathos that clichés can establish sometimes outweigh their triteness. By teaching students to avoid them entirely, I worry that, ironically, we’re shunting their creativity by demanding unseen ways of expressing ideas from young writers who having seen enough ideas expressed yet. That’s why I favor teaching discernment. I favor teaching the well-placed cliché.