What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

When I found a used copy of the latest book that I’m sending you, I was pleased that it was a hard cover—a first after eight paperbacks—but I was disappointed with the cover artwork. Surely, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the short novel by the great Gabriel García Márquez, deserves better than this awkward job. Who chose the purple? It’s all so hideous. But you can’t judge a book by its cover, isn’t that right?

Which is a nice way of broaching the topic of clichés.

A cliché, to remind you, is a worn, hackneyed phrase or opinion. At one time, perhaps in the Middle Ages among monks slowly copying books by hand in a monastery, the notion that nothing of substance can be judged by its surface, expressed in terms of a bound stack of paper and its protective shell, must have seemed like a dazzling revelation that had the monks looking at each other in amazement and rushing out to sing in full-throated worship to urbi et orbi: “Praise be to God! A book can’t be judged by its cover! Hallelujah, hallelujah!”

But now, even among people who don’t read a book a year, it’s a cliché, it’s a lazy, thoughtless way of expressing oneself.

Sometimes clichés are unavoidable. “I love you”—a sentence that is foundational to the well being of every human being, the “you” being another person, a group of people, a grand notion or cause, a god, or simply a reflection in the mirror—is a cliché. Every actor who has to say the line struggles to deliver it in a way that makes it sound fresh, like Adam saying it for the first time to Eve. But there’s no good way of saying it otherwise—and no one really tries to. We live very well with “I love you” because the syntactical simplicity of it—one each of subject, verb, object, nothing else—nicely matches its intended truthfulness. So we happily blurt out the cliché, some of us repeating it several times, for emphasis, or some of us saying it all the time, for example at the end of every phone call with a family member. Lovers at a balcony, sons and daughters at war, dervishes whirling—they’re all living “I love you” in a way that is not clichéd but essential.

But otherwise clichés should be avoided like the West Nile virus. Why? Because they are stale and flat, and because they are contagious. Convenient writerly shortcuts, hurried means of signifying “you know what I mean”, clichés at first are just a froth of tiny white eggs in the ink of your pen, incubated slowly by the warmth of your lazy fingers. The harm to your prose is slight, and people are forgiving. But convenience, shortcuts and hurry are no way to write true words, and if you are not careful—and it is hard work to be careful—the eggs multiply, bloom and enter your blood.

The damage can be serious. The infection can spread to your eyes, to your nose, to your tongue, to your ears, to your skin, and worse: to your brain and to your heart. It’s no longer just your words, written and spoken, that are conventional, conformist, unoriginal, dull. Now it’s your very thoughts and feelings that have lost their heartbeat. In the most serious cases, the person can no longer even see or feel the world directly, but can only perceive it through the reductive, muffling filter of cliché.

At this stage, the cliché attains its political dimension: dogmatism. Dogmatism in politics has exactly the same effect as the cliché in writing: it prevents the soul from interacting openly and honestly with the world, with that pragmatism that lets in fresh all the beautiful, bountiful messiness of life.

The cliché and dogmatism—two related banes that all writers and politicians should avoid if we are to serve well our respective constituencies.

As for the Márquez book, I got it for you because of your recent trip to—and renewed interest in—Latin America. The man’s a genius.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed hard cover book

Reply:

Pending…