The Curse of Cliché

Sam Goldwyn getting dangerously close to smiling

This is the first post that I have offered for some time. The reasons for absence are multifarious but I guess, beyond sheer laziness, the one reason that has always dogged me in life, whether working in this format or any other, is the nagging suspicion that I don't actually have anything worth saying. But on top of what can easily appear to be a false humility is the genuine anxiety about cliché. The formidable movie producer, Sam Goldwyn is reputed to have demanded, 'Let's have some new clichés.' His well-documented cynicism belies an awareness of the ever-present danger of banality. In the film industry, where the profit motive is often more important than any artistic one, this much is obvious. But I think it is true in life more generally. The risk of simply surface living, or producing a life (to maintain the movie theme) which is about playing safe and offering what the world expects to hear or see is, paradoxically, a very real one.

Looking more broadly, I wonder whether this in itself has led many in religious communities to shun things like cinema or the theatre or, dare I say it, even books. The idea of being exposed to a fictional world, it is assumed, befuddles the imagination which ought to find its focus in the 'real' stories of life, namely the Gospel. The point that is missed in all of this is that it is precisely in such creative endeavour (and this includes our reading the Gospel) that we find ourselves both challenged and transformed.

Great critics like Samuel Johnson were, in the early days of the novel, particularly conscious of the negative effects of literature on 'unformed' minds.  Two hundred years later, T. S. Eliot was only half right when he said that, [i]t is our business as Christians, as well as readers of literature, to know what we ought to like.' While there is always a risk of stultifying or belittling one's life by what one chooses to read or watch, or indeed do, the counter argument is that it is that very risk which brings life purpose and meaning in the first place.

And I guess that brings me back to the point, which is that writing, like life, entails risk and if that risky dimension is absent, then we will find ourselves living shadow existences, experiencing life at second or third hand... or is that another cliché?