[Ed. Afterthought - I find myself somewhat dreading this may come across as bitter invective, that you might think I hate a person who hates clichés. I hope not. I’ll yet review and re-write this if that seems the effect.]

IGN.com reviews a fantasy book, entitled Eragon, that has become a “publishing sensation”.

Their review mixes overt adulation with cynicism that the book employs clichés:

One can’t help but notice the clichés in place.


Myself I tend not to note clichés as something objectionable. I believe that clichés exist because there are universal truths that undergird and empower the human race, and these truths often express themselves through set cultural motifs (or in varying cultural motifs that say essentially the same thing, as Joseph Campbell observes in his works). I don’t know if I am describing the same things as C.J. Jung’s Archetypes, but I may be.

I think the objection to clichés may have root in relativism, which I also think has undue sway in American culture. I remember many years ago going to a talk organized by my church for the youth, we call these “firesides”. The speaker was Chris Heimerdinger, a noted LDS author. He described how he was being lauded by Hollywood as a gifted film-maker just before he left for service for his church, and he never got back into it (I saw indications a year or so ago that he was trying to). He characterized from his experience in Hollywood the popular approach to artists and filmmakers as being that the thrill of their work is in creating new realities, new truths, as they suppose. He objected to this and said that no artist creates new truth, he spreads ageless and eternal truth in new ways.

I add that we approach art so often as creating new truth because relativism has suckered so many of us into thinking there aren’t absolutes, and where there aren’t absolutes, the artist is of course going to set about making new truths - or different truths, however impossibly. There’s this set of truths and this other set, and nothing to join them? Are we split right down the middle? Or a thousand ways?

My favorite proof that objective truths exist is the contradiction (nay, not paradox) of the relativist which I often point out. The relativist says “No one is in possession of the ultimate truth”, or “There is no right and wrong” - or worse, Obi-Wan Kenobi’s awful line: “Only the Sith think in absolutes!”. All of these statements are themselves absolutes; then if there are no absolutes, you can’t make an absolute statement to the effect. As I’ve noted before, that as we in the very act of attempting to refute absolutes only conjure pretended absolutes in the process, it becomes us to halt and observe that we cannot defy the nature of our existence; that we are beings of absolutes: no matter how hard we try to be otherwise.

Then let’s not harp on clichés! They reflect deeper truths. They are of enormous cultural value. The End.

Except it isn’t. It can be difficult to separate clichés from unique expression, environment, plot twists, character obsessions etc. Clichés or archetypes can lie behind an infinite variety of uniquely or originally constructed.. imaginings. If someone wants to harp on clichés where really the problem is a stock character or world, I’d ask them to separate the two. Take for example the archetype or cliché of the Sage, the Wizard, or the Wise Old Man. Stuart Voytilla puts this forward in Campbell’s concept of the Mentor. In The Lord of the Rings, we see this in Gandalf, who is aged yet ageless, powerful with magic, has a robe and staff, and who likes smoking. Every hero who is going to accomplish much anything of worth needs a mentor, and surely a picture of Gandalf is similarly put forward in a lot of stories; so we tire of the same “flavor”, so to speak (though myself, I don’t really). But here is a very original character who is the same archetype; the mentor: A talking bee, traveled from a far distant future, to tell the boy of destiny about his destiny, and how and where to set about his course, and why (because ancient evil has set about disrupting the root of time to destroy earth - another common and I think usually interesting cliché). This is in one of my all-time favorite video games, Earthbound (which in my opinion is the most incredible collection ever of original and brilliant music in any one game).

The real basis of my objection to the book review that started all this is in one of its closing statements:

Eragon, seemingly simple and predictable story or not, for kids or for adults, was entertaining through and through.

I venture by their objection to something being the same as other things that they highly value things being different from other things - then if the book was entertaining to them, it must have been for it’s differences from other books, the surprises it had. What irks me is that they don’t express (or seem to know) much of why it entertained them.

There is without question a place for uniqueness or originality: but no matter how we say what we do, what we say will always be the same as something someone else has said, or it will in some way always be traceable back to some objective, eternal origin. Mark Hammil said something that strikes me: that we had seen everything in Star Wars a thousand times before, “..but not like this.”

These reviewers don’t separate unique environment and expression from the underpinning archetypes and clichés:

Paolini demonstrates that he understands how to hold the reader’s eyes and this is what ultimately separates Eragon from countless other me-too fantasy novels.

Everything they describe therafter details unique elements of the world, it’s characters, and items. But look, folks, the underpinning elements of the story are the same because it’s one of the universal types that we need: a young one coming of age and conquering evil.

About the phrase “countless other me-too” - there is not any story that is not a “me too”. Master Tolkien borrowed extremely heavily from ancient languages and myths in our world! I came accross, in Herodotus, an ancient myth of a man possesing a ring that turned him invisible, by which he robbed the throne. I doubt that Tolkien, being a renowend historian and lexicographer, didn’t know about this when he invented Bilbo and his obtained ring that has, among other effects, the power of invisibility. This “cliché”, this totem, wasn’t Tolkien’s idea: it was the world’s.

I think the problem with so many stories isn’t that they are too similar to one another - they aren’t similar enough to each other, where underpinning truths are concerned. Relativism balks at yet another story of heroism, because after all, if there isn’t any truth to live for, is there really any heroism at all? So we underplay heroism by sophisticated means.

But let’s play heroism for just what it is - going against all the odds of evil and having a reason to.