"All writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just cliches of the pen, but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart."
- Martin Amis
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Ironically, Amis's hatred of cliché was such a constant feature of his style and public persona that it became a bit of a cliché of its own.
ReplyDeleteTrue. And then there's that counterview which certain lyricists put across (e.g Nick Cave) about the power of cliche - "the reason it's a cliche is because it's true"
Deletealso trying to invent new language constantly is exhausting for both the writer and reader. I once saw a list of 'forbidden words / idioms / expressions / phrases' that Vogue magazine gave to all its editors and writers - most of them seemed perfectly reasonable and useful language-bits, hard to do without.
Amis Snr had some kind of clever response to Amis Jnr, after reading one of his latest novels, he said to young Mart, "you know, not every sentence needs to be an explosion". Indeed if you have workadays sentences, the pyrotechnic ones stand out more.
Yes! Sometimes the would-be explosions are misfires. The effortful striving for originality can lead to some real duds. Someone (Chris Morris?) did a brilliant parody of Amis writing about 9/11, describing the planes as "sleeking in like harsh metal ducklings", which perfectly captures that tendency in his prose.
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