The word cliché has musical origins.
The French infinitive from which the word derives, clicher, came about in the 19th century to describe the process of printing using a stereotype plate. It is an imitation of the clicking sound of the printing press as it churned out copy after copy, mindlessly repeating itself: click-eh, click-eh, clicher, clicher, cliché, cliché…
It’s easy to feel the contempt baked into in that word. We use it, like those old French printmakers must have used it, to express our annoyance with something we’ve heard too often. We use the word cliché to imply that a statement we’ve heard before cannot be entirely true — or at least that we’ve already understood the entire truth it expresses. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we say impatiently, I’ve got it. We equate the familiar with the shallow. We assume that any stimulus repeated can be safely ignored.
The corollary — that we are really only interested in new things — is painfully obvious. Still, I recently ran across a fascinating take on a study of dopamine production that demonstrated exactly this: only new input lights up the brain. Scientists compared predictable stimuli with “oddball” stimuli (their excellent word), and compared the results. Dopamine production, it turns out, literally demands novelty. (1)
The author citing this study was making a point about the pernicious circularity of the diet industry. (2) If, for instance, you offer a completely effective yet cliché process for losing weight, like: cut back a little, you won’t sell many diet programs. But if you tell people something wildly novel, like: eat half a tablespoon of pink Himalayan salt while standing on your head and multiplying height in centimeters by .452% of half the number of carbs in grams consumed per 26-hour cycle… you will get a lot of people trying out your new method.
Something in us craves new complexities. Whatever the endeavor, we assume that there must be an undiscovered hack. We are tragically unmotivated by proven methods, for the exact reason that they have been proven. The truth is, by definition, boring — because we have seen it before.
Perhaps this is why, when we have a really big breakthrough, it always feels like a circle. The end of all our exploring is, as T.S. Eliot says, to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time. The really enormous realizations always carry with them a sense of: dammit, I knew this all along. Truth always arrives in an ironic container.
Something, deep down, clicks.
II.
So: our habit of scanning for quicksilver novelty (helpful for staying alive in a hunter-gatherer society) makes us ignore stable truths (unhelpful for staying sane in an information-driven society).
Truth escapes us because of its simplicity. The root of the word simplicity means singleness. Yet once the ear has encountered a phrase twice, we are in the realm of duplicity — from the Indo-European du meaning two, as in duet, double, and (deliciously) doubt. Having heard the same phrase twice, a kind of paranoia arises. We begin to generate unnecessary depths. We critique the phrase as not-possibly-complete in its simple (single) form. We use the word cliché to go on the attack.
But the most powerful insights, as David Foster Wallace points out, are to be found in the clichés: “Many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually express a great and terrible truth.” (3) Or elsewhere: “Clichés earned their status as clichés because they're so obviously true.” (4) Our inherent mistrust of repeated language keeps us from seeing the things we need to see most: the things so universal they hardly need a name, the realities so real that words will barely stick to them.
Let’s not gloss over the profound tragedy of this fact: we are programmed to ignore how the world works.
III.
Literature has always had to take this neurological demand for novelty into account.
To convey old truth, language must pretend to be something new. It must contort itself into a kind of Trojan horse. Otherwise, the mind will hear the annoying click of cliché, and discard the needed insight with the depleted language. Old wine must be delivered in new wineskins.
One of the clearest articulations of this process comes from Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky. In a 1917 essay entitled “Art as Technique,” he gives us the following ambitious nugget: “The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.” (5)
What, we should stop to ask, is the difference between perceiving and knowing? For Shklovsky, language downgrades the superior perceiving into the lesser knowing through a process he calls “algebrization.” Meaning: language stands in for real sensory experience, serving as a kind of shorthand for experience so we can know it and move on, without being overwhelmed by perceiving.
For instance, consider the word tree as a coarse abstraction. Everyone knows what a tree is. There are over 3 trillion trees on earth. To mean a thing that sticks up out of the ground and forks off into branches with leaves, the word tree does just fine. But if you stand in a forest and remove the pattern called tree from your mind, you can see how you are actually surrounded by discrete, unique, and wildly contrasting organisms. The smooth skin of the beech and the faceted armor of the oak have absolutely nothing in common. The magnolia blossom and the pine needle could come from different planets. And even within a species, no two trees are shaped even remotely alike by the time you get out to the branches. Knowledge of the word tree conveys 1/3,000,000,000,000th of the perception.
Knowing is in the mind, and relies on the past. Perceiving is in the body, and relies on the present. You can guess which one makes people feel more alive. The purpose of art, for Shklovsky, is to break the thrall of knowing and expand the pleasure of perceiving. It is to short-circuit our reflex toward algebrization through what he calls roughened language — language that slows us down, and keeps us from numbing our sensory intake through pattern recognition. It is possible, through great writing, to be overwhelmed again (as children are overwhelmed) by the weirdness of the way things are. “The purpose of art…” says Shkolvsky, “…is to make the stone stony.”
It is here that we can turn to genre. If literature wants to return the original novelty to things, then the mechanism of how the language achieves its novelty is one way to distinguish between genres of literature.
Poetry, for instance, is writing which carries its novelty in the language-material itself: in the sounds of the words, in the rhythm of their arrangement, in their grouping on the page. This sensory density slows us down, and in hearing language anew we see the world anew. (As Anthony Hecht once told a group of young composers who asked if they could set his poems to music: “Please don’t. I’ve already set them to music.”)
With prose, it’s the opposite approach — the best prose becomes transparent to thought, creating a hallucination where the reader thinks they are thinking new thoughts along with the writer, or thinks they are witnessing the events in a story — rather than what they are actually doing, which is reading. Prose clarifies language until the language itself pulls off a kind of vanishing act.
This is a massive over-generalization, of course — poetry includes clear thought and prose includes interesting sounds — but it suggests a spectrum of genre with language pointing entirely into itself on one end, and entirely beyond itself on the other. My point is that both extremities heighten perception. Both extremities pull us out of the dull middle, where language is used merely to convey knowledge.
To push this model a step further: dramatic genres inhabit a kind of expanded middle on this spectrum. A play or film script has enough of poetry’s roughened quality to make the lines memorable, but enough of prose’s clearness to disappear into the story, to create the illusion that you are seeing a real person think out loud. Dramatic language achieves its novelty not by pointing entirely into itself (poetry) or by pointing entirely beyond itself (prose), but by serving as a scaffold for a deeply collaborative happening — so that the novelty is not in the language at all, but in the happening.
IV.
Opera libretto is, of course, a kind of dramatic genre. But it is equally a kind of poetry. Meaning: it is language forced into an inextricable relationship with music.
Unlike other dramatic genres — which create a simulation of passing, horizontal time — an opera libretto is just as much about pulling the listener out of horizontal time and into vertical time. Opera creates the illusion of forward-moving events (like drama) only so it can trash this illusion (like poetry). Opera is okay at linear, left-to-right storytelling; but it is better than anything else in the world at stopping the storytelling, at coring down inside a turn of phrase, at creating a sense of heightened moment. And in such heightened moments, the space between the language and the music can kick open new meanings in familiar words — meanings beyond grammar, meanings that no audience member can quite articulate apart from a private sense of linguistic saturation.
This synesthesia around text is, I think, why we continue to bother with the otherwise cumbersome medium of opera. It is the thing opera offers that no other genre can.
These uncanny moments are possible because libretto does not execute Shklovsky’s linguistic “roughening” process all on its own. Rather, it allows another medium entirely — music — to participate. Libretto’s semantic interest comes from discrepancies in the space between words and music. In fact, I would define opera as whatever occurs in this abyss. Opera is what arcs across it, like electricity between two distant poles.
In other words: opera libretto can safely use cliché. I would almost say there are times libretto needs to use cliché, consciously. For it is opera’s superpower to make the meanings of worn-out, obvious words fresh again. It is opera’s superpower to help us hear those great and terrible truths behind cliché.
Examples of this could go on for a long time. I will limit myself to two. In the first act of La Bohème, Mimì is telling Rodolfo how she stitches fake flowers to earn money. The seamstress work isn’t much, she says, but at least il primo bacio dell’aprile è mio — “the first kiss of April is mine.” Not only is the spring imagery hackneyed: there’s an unconvincing irony to it on the page. Speak the line, and it sounds like Mimì is either daft, and doesn’t realize her situation is dire, which would result in unintentional comedy — or it sounds like Mimì is making fun of herself in a mopey, bitterly ironic dig, fishing (unsympathetically) for sympathy.
What Puccini does here — and I really can’t help but believe Illica & Giacosa knew that they were hooking him up with the musical opportunity — is to set the line on the most expansive, earnest, lonely-beautiful orchestral swell of the entire opera. For me, the next three acts are downhill. We hear, in the gap between Mimì’s banal chatter and the tragic nostalgia of her music, a quintuple-bluff of irony: we travel all the way from the character’s cliché to 1) our dismissal of it as cliché to 2) the deeply felt experience behind the cliché suggested by the music to 3) the realization that the words alone don’t exactly merit the music, so there must be some hidden depth in Mimì we’re missing, to 4) the realization there must be some hidden depth in our own trivial daily experiences we’re missing, to 5) the realization that the real tragedy might not be onstage at all, but in our own lives if we never make contact with this urgent, wordless meaning behind it all.
Skip a century: there is a moment near the beginning of As One (libretto: Mark Campbell & Kimberly Reed; music: Laura Kaminsky) in which the character Hannah Before is reciting, in junior high English class, the famous passage “No Man is an Island” from Meditation XVII by John Donne. It is remarkable enough as an audience member to hear these familiar lines recited over new music, and stitched into a new dramatic situation. The brain is already on high alert, trying to decide if the language-input is completely known or completely unknown. But I saw a production of the show in 2015 in which the audience were given copies of the Donne text on the way into the theater — and, at this moment in the show, were invited to read it aloud. (6) This added yet another layer of meaning to the already-saturated language: now the audience was no longer simply watching, but also causing the story. In the context of the story, the pun on the word “man” was deafening. And the lived experience behind “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind…” takes on a fresh reality when you’re suddenly speaking those words with hundreds of strangers.
Sung text becomes a window into things we don’t know about things we thought we knew. This process of opening up new dimensions behind language feels good. It feels so good that it’s tempting to call it magic. At the very least, we can call such language enchanted: which, after all, means anything that is chanted, chanté — sung.
V.
I say all this because recently I have admitted something to myself about why I do what I do: art is here to make people feel different.
More and more in university spaces, we are called on to justify the arts and humanities. Too often, we end up equating the benefit of the arts with some other, completely separate benefit: the arts make you smarter, they offer social mobility, they make you better in business. It should be obvious that answers like this completely evade the question.
The value of art is self-evident, self-justifying, and self-generating. When it has had an effect on you, you know it. Art is, in that sense, therapeutic. But I don’t mean therapeutic in the sense of: art deployed for therapeutic purposes. That would just be more evasion of the question, equating the benefit of art with a physical or mental health benefit. Notice I did not say that art is here to make people feel better. I said art is here to make people feel different.
To go further is to be painfully obvious. There is a person’s inner state before encountering a work of art. Then they read/view/hear/watch a book/painting/song/film. Then they feel different. There is the state before, and the state after. No matter how subtly, art moves the needle, and makes the state different. Art exerts force on its environment. You can do with art whatever you please. But trying to justify it is like trying to justify the lever or the pulley or the wheel.
Recently a friend introduced me to the work of Alejandro Jodorowsky, a Chilean-French director. Setting aside the fact that Jodorowsky’s films are sometimes openly operatic, I was struck most of all by his philosophy on why he makes movies. “For me,” says Jodorowsky, “the goal of art is to heal.” (7) And elsewhere: “I ask of film what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs. The difference being that when one creates a psychedelic film, he need not create a film that shows the visions of a person who has taken a pill; rather, he needs to manufacture the pill.” (8)
In the same way, I am admitting to myself that opera is here to manufacture the pill. Specifically, opera’s ability to rip familiar words open — generating unfamiliar levels of meaning — is psychedelic in the literal sense of the word: it is mind-revealing. It bypasses the mind’s usual dismissal of familiar language, and summons new content for that language from within the listener. These novel meanings in sung (enchanted) text are not imposed from the outside, and do not originate with composer or librettist. They are the result of the listener’s own insight, in the literal sense: sight inward. Whatever is found there is by its very nature fleeting, un-reportable in language, and constitutes a kind of private curriculum generated from within. (9) Each individual gets a hint — custom-minted from a deeper part of their own brain — as to their next right move.
If cliché is defined as an obvious truth we’ve been overlooking because of its tired surface, then opera’s power to reanimate cliché is not merely a sentimental trick, or a private aesthetic impression. It is a message about how the world actually works. The social need for such messages is urgent. Over time, the wordless meanings that infuse people in these moments of roughened, vertical, psychedelic insight can have a real effect on their worldview, character, and behavior. In the words of Adorno: “Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.”
Of course, this subtle way in which art changes people usually spans decades. It requires patience from society’s hall monitor types. Policy is the hare, and art is the tortoise. But let’s not forget who won the race.
VI.
The next time your brain feels wired for unhappiness, the next time life feels gray and flat and repetitive, the next time you feel numbed by the incessant barrage of clickbait — go more deeply into the clichés. Be earnest. Take them seriously. Experience the state they describe.
Just breathe.
Enjoy the moment.
Go with the flow.
NOTES
Absolute Coding of Stimulus Novelty in the Human Substantia Nigra/VTA. Bunzeck, Nico and Emrah Düzel. Neuron 51, no. 3 (August 2006): 369-79.
Adam Bornstein, You Can’t Screw This Up.
This is Water.
Infinite Jest. Here I am tempted to go on for an inordinately long time about David Foster Wallace’s profound insights into the mechanics of consciousness — and his habit of demonstrating those mechanics by (to echo Ramana Maharshi) “using the mind to destroy the mind,” i.e. thinking and talking in a steriodally overdeveloped way in order to demonstrate, ironically, and in an incandescent, irrefutable-by-virtue-of-sheer-heft, often spiritually transcendent failure, the pitiful limits of thinking and talking — rendering this footnote longer than the essay itself by way of tribute to D.F.W., and then footnoting the footnote with an even longer passage***
*** Although I will refrain.
Translation here and elsewhere as reprinted in Literary Theory: an anthology by Julie Riven & Michael Ryan (Blackwell Pubilshers, 1998)
At Urban Arias in Washington DC. According to Mark Campbell, the Donne passage was a real autobiographical detail from co-librettist Kimberly Reed, and the idea to have the audience read it aloud in the 2015 production came from the director, Octavio Cardenas.
As quoted in The Guardian, “I am not normal” (Steve Rose, 21 November 2002). We may take this even more literally when considering Jodorowsky’s Psicomagia (“Psychomagic”), a therapeutic model the director developed that brings together art therapy, dream work, genealogy, shamanism, and theater to help clients release trauma through ceremonial “acts of confrontation.”
In El Topo: The Book of the Film (1971)
Ineffability being one of the hallmark features of mystical experience per the Hood Mysticism Scale — developed by Ralph Hood, a psychologist at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga, whom I once had the great and improbable delight of interviewing in his capacity as the world’s leading expert on serpent handling.
