War on Cliche

Martin Amis’s 2001 collection of criticism was entitled The War Against Cliche . Now he comes out with The Second Plane: September 11: 2001-2007 . According to Marjorie Perloff (in the TLS), it’s mostly cliche.

There are religious cliches. Though the age of ideology in the last century was bad, the age of religion that’s a-dawning is far worse: “an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality; religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.”

There are cultivated cliches: Literature is “the most persistent candidate for cultification, partly because it nonchalantly includes the Bible and all other holy texts.”

There are political cliches: Perloff says “The war against cliche has a curious way of morphing into the cliche against war.”

We might have predicted it. In the 2001 volume, Amis says that the opposite of cliche is “Freshness, energy, and reverberation of voice.” How chiched.