{"id":13078,"date":"2014-01-07T11:58:47","date_gmt":"2014-01-07T16:58:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=13078"},"modified":"2014-01-07T12:14:59","modified_gmt":"2014-01-07T17:14:59","slug":"on-the-moral-dangers-of-cliche","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=13078","title":{"rendered":"on the moral dangers of clich\u00e9"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here are five brief studies of people who made heavy use of clich\u00e9s: Francesca da Rimini, Madame Bovary, Adolf Eichmann, W.H. Auden, and Don Gately from David Foster Wallace\u2019s novel Infinite Jest<\/em>. I offer these portraits to explore the moral pitfalls of clich\u00e9 and to investigate how our postmodern situation differs from the medieval, Romantic, and high-modern contexts of the first four examples. I end with the suggestion that in our time, the desire to shun clich\u00e9 can also be a moral hazard.<\/p>\n

In the days of moveable type, printers cast common phrases as single units of type to save laying them out one letter at a time. In France, typesetters called those units clich\u00e9s. When we assign a phrase to a word processor\u2019s keyboard command because we use it frequently, that is a modern version of the original printer\u2019s clich\u00e9.<\/p>\n

There is nothing wrong with repeating functional phrases: \u201cTo whom it may concern\u201d; \u201cOn the other hand.\u201d We skim over these formulas without cost. But the word \u201cclich\u00e9\u201d now has a pejorative sense, implying a fault in writing. A clich\u00e9 is an expression that has been used so often that it has lost its impact. Using a recycled phrase can undermine the aesthetic value of a work. It can also be a moral failure, if the writer or speaker uses it to avoid a serious issue or problem.<\/p>\n

Francesca da Rimini<\/em><\/p>\n

Francesca is a favorite character from Dante\u2019s Inferno<\/em>, represented countless times in Romantic and modern literature and art. A particularly famous example is Rodin\u2019s sculpture of \u201cThe Kiss,\u201d which shows Francesca embracing her lover Paolo. In Romantic versions, she is depicted as a heroine who suffers because her authentic and natural impulse to love outside of her marriage is forbidden by artificial and conventional rules. As a character in his own book, Dante is so moved by her plight that he faints.<\/p>\n

But Dante (the author) put her in hell. A careful reading of her two short speeches reveals, first, that she talks entirely in quotations or summaries of previous writing about love, and, second, that all of her references contain errors. Indeed, Barbara Vinken has claimed that every quote by a damned soul in the whole Inferno<\/em> is in error.<\/p>\n

For example, Francesca says (in my translation)<\/p>\n

When we read that \u2018the desired
\nSmile then was kissed by the ardent lover,\u2019
\nhe who \u2018can never be torn away\u2019 kissed
\nme, all atremble. A Gallehaut was the author
\nof that book, and seductive was his fancy.
\nOn that day, we read no farther.
\n(Inf., v, 130-136)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Francesca is quoting here from the French prose romance Lancelot<\/em>. But in the known versions of the roman<\/em>, Lancelot never initiates the kiss. He is bashful and passive to the point of foolishness, and Queen Guinevere makes all the advances. Yet the ardent lover in Francesca\u2019s quotation is male. She has confused this text with other episodes from the courtly love tradition, such as the one in which Tristan kisses Iseult while they play chess together. The details of the Lancelot story fade in her mind, to be replaced with a generic formula: damsel taken by ardent knight. Perhaps this is because she wants to shift the blame from Guinivere (the woman) to Lancelot (the man). Or perhaps it is because she reads literature as a set of clich\u00e9s.<\/p>\n

A clich\u00e9 is that it is portable and recyclable\u2014a ready-made scenario or sentiment that shows up in many contexts. When we employ clich\u00e9s, we often commit what Alfred North Whitehead called the \u201cfallacy of misplaced concreteness.\u201d This is the fallacy of taking something specific that belongs in one context and applying it elsewhere. Francesca treats the love scene between Lancelot and Guinivere that way, and to do so, she must ignore its peculiarities.<\/p>\n

The works that Francesca cites in virtually every line were so popular in the high Middle Ages that she is like a modern person who speaks entirely in phrases from top-forty songs. Even the air in the Circle of the Lustful (where she is condemned for eternity) is filled with quotations:<\/p>\n

And as cranes will move, chanting lays in the air,
\nordering themselves into one long file,
\nso I saw coming with a woeful clamor
\nshades that were borne by the stress of the squall.
\n(Inf. v, 46-49)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The word lai<\/em> means any complaint, and also a particular form of Proven\u00e7al poetry about lost love. The “lays” that are endlessly chanted in Hell must be repetitive to the point of meaninglessness, which makes them perfect symbols of clich\u00e9.<\/p>\n

One topic that Francesca does not talk about is Paolo. She says nothing specific about him, not even his name. She only says that he has a gentle heart (a commonplace from the poetry of the dolce stil nuovo<\/em>) and that he is attracted to her \u201cbella figura<\/em>.\u201d When Francesca notices that Paolo is attracted to her, she immediately recalls scenes from old Romances. In her mind, Paolo becomes Sir Lancelot in the arbor with Guinivere\u2014or Tristan at his chessboard with Iseult, or Floire looking at a book with Blancheflor, or Floris reading romances with Lyriop\u00e9. She thinks she\u2019s in love with a real human being, but she really loves the idea of a courtly suitor, which has been put into her head by books.<\/p>\n

Francesca speaks in clich\u00e9s; she overlooks the specific details of stories in order to turn them into stereotypes; and she repeatedly uses euphemisms (\u201cAmor<\/em>,\u201d instead of sex) and circumlocutions (\u201cThat day, we read no further \u2026\u201d). As a result, she never has to say that she cheated on her husband or that he killed her.<\/p>\n

In one of the Old French texts that Francesca has read, Iseult says of Tristan:<\/p>\n

He loves me not, nor I him,
\nexcept because of a potion I drank,
\nand he too; that was our sin.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In his classic book Love in the Western World<\/em>, Denis de Rougemont comments: \u201cTristan and Iseult do not love one another. They say they don\u2019t, and everything goes to prove it. What they love is love and being in love.\u201d<\/p>\n

Madame Bovary<\/em><\/p>\n

The first clich\u00e9s that Emma Bovary learns as a child are religious: \u201cThe similes of fianc\u00e9, spouse, heavenly lover and eternal marriage that recur in sermons aroused unforeseen sweetness in the depths of her soul.\u201d But Emma loses interest in religion once an old maid smuggles novels into the convent where she lives. \u201cThey were about love, lovers, the beloved, persecuted ladies swooning away in solitary pavilions, postilions killed at every inn, horses ridden to death on every page, somber forests, troubles of the heart, oaths, sobs, tears and kisses, little boats by moonlight, nightingales in the copse, gentlemen<\/em> brave as lions, sweet like lambs, as virtuous as no one is, always well appointed, and weeping like urns.\u201d She has been reading the nineteenth-century equivalents of the Roman de Lancelot<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The narrator tells us that before Emma was married, \u201cshe thought that she had love; but since the happiness that should have resulted from this love didn\u2019t come, she must have been deceived, she reflected. And Emma sought to know exactly what was meant in life by the words felicity, passion<\/em>, and ecstasy<\/em>, which has seemed so beautiful to her in books.\u201d<\/p>\n

Once she marries, she learns little about her husband\u2019s interior life, doesn\u2019t appreciate his tenderness, but realizes that he has nothing in common with the romantic heroes of fiction.<\/p>\n

What is striking about Madame Bovary<\/em> is Flaubert\u2019s fresh, perceptive, sometimes sympathetic, and always precise way of depicting his characters\u2019 hackneyed, vague, and self-serving thoughts (many of which he italicizes, to show that they are id\u00e9es re\u00e7ues<\/em>). Likewise, Dante depicts Francesca as a person who thinks in clich\u00e9s, but she is hardly a conventional character herself. On the contrary, she is a highly original creation.<\/p>\n

Adolf Eichmann<\/em><\/p>\n

Clich\u00e9s are a mark of poor writing\u2014an aesthetic failing\u2014but Flaubert indicates that they are also morally dangerous. Emma Bovary is cruel to Charles because she sees the world in clich\u00e9 terms. Pushing the argument much further, Hannah Arendt has described the power of clich\u00e9s to excuse (or even to generate) true evil.<\/p>\n

On trial in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann remarked that the Holocaust was \u201cone of the greatest crimes in the history of humanity.\u201d He also said that he wanted \u201cto make peace with his former enemies,\u201d and that he \u201cwould gladly hang [himself] in public as a warning example for all anti Semites on this earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Arendt writes that these remarks were \u201cself fabricated stock phrases\u201d popular among Germans after 1945. They were as \u201cdevoid of reality as those [official Nazi] clich\u00e9s by which the people had lived for twelve years; and you could almost see what an \u2018extraordinary sense of elation\u2019 it gave to the speaker the moment [each one] popped out of his mouth. His mind was filled to the brim with such sentences.\u201d In fact, she writes, \u201che was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a clich\u00e9.\u201d<\/p>\n

Arendt stresses Eichmann\u2019s \u201cinability to think.\u201d Although he wasn\u2019t a very good student, he was an excellent organizer and negotiator, who had set up efficient, factory like operations for processing Jews. So presumably he was capable of thinking as well or better than most people. Nevertheless, when he told a \u201chard luck story\u201d of slow advancement within the SS, he apparently expected his Israeli police interrogator to show \u201cnormal, human\u201d sympathy for him. Similarly, when he visited a Jewish acquaintance named Storfer in Auschwitz, he recalled: \u201cWe had a normal, human encounter. He told me of his grief and sorrow: I said: \u2018Well, my dear old friend, we [!] certainly got it! What rotten luck!\u2019\u201d He arranged relatively easy work for Storfer\u2014sweeping gravel paths\u2014and then asked: \u201c\u2018Will that be all right, Mr. Storfer? Will that suit you?\u2019 Whereupon he was very pleased, and we shook hands, and then he was given the broom and sat down on his bench. It was a great inner joy to me that I could at least see the man with whom I had worked for so many long years, and that we could speak with one another.\u201d Six weeks after this normal, human encounter, Storfer was dead\u2014not gassed, apparently, but shot.\u201d If Arendt is to be believed, Eichmann\u2019s total reliance on clich\u00e9s permitted him to ignore the smoke from the Auschwitz ovens and to believe that Storfer was \u201cvery pleased.\u201d Eichmann\u2019s inability to think, she writes, was an \u201cinability to look at anything from the other fellow\u2019s point of view.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eichmann couldn\u2019t see things much more clearly from his own<\/em> perspective. Facing the gallows, he rejected the hood and spoke with complete self possession: \u201cHe began by stating emphatically that he was a Gottgl\u00e4ubiger<\/em>, to express in common Nazi fashion that he was no Christian and did not believe in life after death. He then proceeded: \u2018After a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again. Such is the fate of all men. Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. I shall not forget them.\u2019 In the fact of death, he had found the clich\u00e9 used in funeral oratory. Under the gallows, … he was \u2018elated\u2019 and he forgot that this was his own funeral.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to relying heavily on clich\u00e9s, Eichmann and his Nazi colleagues used euphemisms to describe crimes from which they might have recoiled if they had called them by other names. So \u201ckilling\u201d was known as \u201cevacuation,\u201d \u201cspecial treatment,\u201d or the \u201cfinal solution.\u201d Deportation to Theresienstadt was called \u201cchange of residence,\u201d whereas Jews were \u201cresettled\u201d to the other, more brutal, concentration camps. These phrases were not called \u201ceuphemisms,\u201d of course, but rather \u201clanguage-rules\u201d\u2014and even that term was (as Arendt notes) \u201ca code name; it meant what in ordinary language would be called a lie.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is standard for a single act to have several potential names, each with a different moral implication. The dictionary will not tell us which name to use. For instance, it is not an incorrect use of language or logic to call mass murder \u201cspecial treatment.\u201d Nevertheless, some words are much more morally appropriate than others under particular circumstances. The Nazis\u2019 euphemisms were extreme and telling examples of immoral language, for the crimes of the Holocaust had obvious names that the perpetrators studiously avoided using. By using euphemisms and circumlocutions, they avoided having to admit what they were doing\u2014even privately.<\/p>\n

Among Eichmann\u2019s favorite clich\u00e9s were lines from moral philosophy. In Jerusalem, he \u201csuddenly declared with great emphasis that he had lived his whole life according to Kant\u2019s moral precepts, and especially according to a Kantian definition of duty,\u201d which he could paraphrase accurately. Clearly, Kant\u2019s demanding principle had become an empty formula in Eichmann\u2019s mind.<\/p>\n

Arendt argues that Eichmann was no monster, that his evil was banal. The circumstances, however, were extraordinary, so we shouldn\u2019t immediately conclude from his example that clich\u00e9s and euphemisms are a widespread danger. It\u2019s one thing to rely on stock phrases when you\u2019re in love, and quite another thing when you\u2019re the logistical mastermind of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, there is always a risk that clich\u00e9s will prevent us from exercising judgment and seeing the details of the world around us.<\/p>\n

W.H. Auden<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cSeptember 1, 1939\u201d is a poetic and presumably fictional representation of the narrator’s thoughts on the night that World War II began. (My detailed notes are here<\/a>.) The poem contains several very famous lines:<\/p>\n

Those to whom evil is done \/ Do evil in return.<\/p>\n

[We are] Children afraid of the night\/ Who have never been happy or good<\/p>\n

There is no such thing as the State<\/p>\n

We must love one another or die.<\/p>\n

Ironic points of light \/ Flash out wherever the Just \/ Exchange their messages<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These are not precisely clich\u00e9s, because Auden invented them for the poem. But he quickly decided that they resembled clich\u00e9s, presumably because they were sentimental, tempting to memorize and quote, and false to his experience. For instance, it simply is not true that we must love one another or die–plenty of people live without loving, and those who love nevertheless die.<\/p>\n

It might not have surprised Auden that Lyndon Johnson\u2019s campaign borrowed “we must love one another or die” for his \u201cDaisy\u201d TV commercial in 1964, that George H.W. Bush quoted \u201cpoints of light\u201d in his 1988 Republican Convention speech, or that at least six newspapers printed the whole poem right after Sept. 11, 2001.<\/p>\n

In any case, Auden repudiated\u00a0\u201cSeptember 1, 1939\u201d along with four other political poems, requiring that a note be added whenever they were anthologized: \u201cMr. W. H. Auden considers these five poems to be trash which he is ashamed to have written.\u201d<\/p>\n

I suppose my own opinion is that the quotable remarks from this poem are excellent within the overall network that the poem creates (diagrammed here<\/a>). They are problematic when extracted from the work. Whether Auden should have blamed himself for writing epigrams that could be misused in that way is a tough question.<\/p>\n

Don Gately<\/em><\/p>\n

I must admit that I have not finished Infinite Jest<\/em>–I am still reading it. (My excuse for writing about it anyway is that this is just a blog.) But it’s my understanding that Gately is the hero and moral center of the book. He uses the jargon of Alcoholics Anonymous, which a sophisticated, postmodern author like Wallace cannot believe literally. To say, for example, that we have “made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him” (step 3 of AA) is surely to repeat a clich\u00e9. And yet it takes courage and character in a postmodern world to insist on repeating just such phrases:<\/p>\n

Gately’s found it’s got to be the truth, is the thing. … The thing is it has to be the truth to really go over, here. It can\u2019t be a calculated crowd-pleaser, and it has to be the truth unslanted, unfortified. And maximally unironic. An ironist in a Boston AA<\/acronym> meeting is a witch in church. Irony-free zone. Same with sly disingenuous manipulative pseudo-sincerity. Sincerity with an ulterior motive is something these tough ravaged people know and fear, all of them trained to remember the coyly sincere, ironic self-presenting fortifications they\u2019d had to construct in order to carry on Out There, under the ceaseless neon bottle.<\/p>\n

This doesn’t mean you can’t pay empty or hypocritical lip-service, however. Paradoxically enough. The desperate, newly sober White Flaggers are always encouraged to invoke and pay lip-service to slogans they don’t yet understand or believe–e.g., “Easy Does It!” and “Turn It Over!” and “One Day at a Time!” It’s called “Fake It Until You Make It,” itself an often-invoked slogan. Everybody on a Commitment who gets up publicly to speak starts out saying he’s an alcoholic, says it whether he believes it yet or not; then everybody up there says how Grateful he is to be sober today and how great it is to be Active and out on a Commitment with his Group, even if he’s not grateful or pleased about it at all. You’re encouraged to keep saying stuff like this until you start to believe it …<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Note some echoes here: Flaubert italicizes received ideas; Wallace capitalizes them. Arendt writes that \u201clanguage-rules\u201d was \u201ca code name; it meant what in ordinary language would be called a lie.\u201d Gately says that “Fake It Until You Make It” is “itself an often-invoked slogan.” But Gately is the hero of the book just because he has the courage and compassion to resort to clich\u00e9.<\/p>\n

These examples in historical context<\/em><\/p>\n

In a pre-modern culture like Dante’s, the main role of the artist is present known truths, thereby serving a patron, buttressing the true religion, and decorating and entertaining. No points are awarded for originality or sincerity: truths come ultimately from God, and the only question is whether a fictional work captures those truths in its allegory. Clich\u00e9 is not problematic, because there is nothing intrinsically wrong with repeating a well-known truth.<\/p>\n

However, authors of Dante’s own time were discovering that using a rote phrase or image could interfere with an audience\u2019s emotional engagement. A striking image of the Crucifixion would be more emotionally compelling than a highly conventional one, as Dante’s contemporary Giotto showed. Dante was also part of a literary milieu in which clich\u00e9s about romantic, secular love were beginning to spread. He was alert to the moral pitfalls of that love culture (in general) and to the specific perils of its clich\u00e9s. Meanwhile, he was such an astoundingly forceful and original author that, despite his commitment to the traditional truths of his faith, he created indelible characters like Francesca–sinners who have been admired most of all by atheists and freethinkers. The tension between Dante’s poetic originality and his theological doctrines account for some of the power of his work.<\/p>\n

By Flaubert’s time, authors were much less confident that there were truths to be conveyed or that repeating them would have value. Flaubert, for example, decided after his sojourn in Egypt that all the conventional mores of Catholic and bourgeois France were arbitrary conventions. But he couldn’t simply tell people to become Egyptians, because that was also a conventional culture and not objectively better than the French one. To copy it would have been false. He sought authenticity and autonomy from all norms. Originality became a mark of excellence and freedom; and clich\u00e9, a fundamental fault. In\u00a0Madame Bovary, <\/em>the narrator does not express his own values, because those would have to be conventional, but <\/em>he achieves autonomy by ridiculing his bourgeois characters for their clich\u00e9s. The author vanishes, leaving a work that is meant to be perfectly original and free.<\/p>\n

Auden and Arendt (who were friends in New York) were modernists and post-Romantics. They no longer believed that a work of genius could break free of conventions. Any description of reality–such as a 19th century novel–would have to be a product of some kind of conventional culture. Moreover, they no longer sought autonomy and authenticity alone. They were both serious moralists, looking for answers to the evils of totalitarianism and capitalist imperialism. Yet, like Flaubert, they still sought critical distance from mass culture, wanting to break “the strength of Collective Man.” Auden’s “points of light” are exchanged by “the Just”–individuals who say and do the right things. These people “show an affirming flame,” quite unlike Flaubert’s caustic fire that merely burns the society he describes. Yet the points of light are “ironic,” because the wise cannot just state moral truths. Those would be, or quickly become, clich\u00e9s.<\/p>\n

Postmodernists then arrive to say that clich\u00e9 is unavoidable. No one can invent language from scratch; it is intrinsically conventional. Postmodernists no longer pretend to avoid clich\u00e9, but they try to battle it indirectly by means of irony and parody. David Foster Wallace came from that background but spoke powerfully to his generation (which is also mine) because he recognized that the escape from clich\u00e9 is pretentious and arrogant. In a culture saturated with advertising slogans (Wallace’s “ceaseless neon bottle”), we need the courage to say–and mean–things that are good but not original and not wholly true.<\/p>\n

(This post draws from my book Reforming the Humanities: Literature and Ethics from Dante through Modern Times.)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here are five brief studies of people who made heavy use of clich\u00e9s: Francesca da Rimini, Madame Bovary, Adolf Eichmann, W.H. Auden, and Don Gately from David Foster Wallace\u2019s novel Infinite Jest. I offer these portraits to explore the moral pitfalls of clich\u00e9 and to investigate how our postmodern situation differs from the medieval, Romantic, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fine-arts","category-philosophy"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13078"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13078\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13117,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13078\/revisions\/13117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}