[In the following essay, Madden argues that Morris's “manipulation of clichés” is at the root of his power to render “the sensibilities of articulate and inarticulate characters” effectively.]

Morris says, in The Territory Ahead, “Every writer who is sufficiently self-aware to know what he is doing, and how he does it sooner or later is confronted with the dictates of style. If he has a style, it is the style that dictates what he says. What he says, of course, is how he says it …” (137). No American writer's style, I think, is as perfectly controlled as Morris's. Everything style has been trained over the centuries to do, Morris makes it do in his novels. If Hodler, one of his more articulate characters, “admits to the frailty of language,” Morris forces that frailty to perform amazing feats (In Orbit, 14). “In the beginning was the word,” says Morris, “and the word was made flesh. American character emerges from the American language, as the language emerges from the shaping imagination” (“Made in U.S.A.,” 487). Morris's style—the American language in action—conveys the informal tone and feel of a man talking to men. He makes imaginative use of American slang, clichés, idioms, and especially of midwestern speech patterns and rhythms as a way of getting at the American character. He tunes us in on the resignation, the melancholy overtones, the subtle poetry, the humor, the shrewdness of insight of midwestern speech.

In any work of fiction, the point-of-view technique the writer chooses dictates style. The third person central intelligence point of view that Morris most often uses dictates a conversational, informal tone and style; Morris modulates between a simulation of first-person informality and the more formal syntax, diction, and tone of an omniscient voice. Filtering his character's experiences and reveries through the third person, Morris employs his unique ability to transform the clichés of American language and culture into expressions of wit, satire, and peculiar lyricism. Morris creates a congruence of outer and inner reality—a triumph of style. Examining the immediate emotional and intellectual intuitions and perceptions of his characters from within, as they move from one small, but highly charged moment to another, Morris has evolved a flexible style, based on a manipulation of clichés, that has proved effective in rendering the sensibilities of both articulate and inarticulate characters.

Given the characters he describes, the events he depicts, and the point-of-view techniques he uses, one of the major dictates of Morris's style is his use of clichés. “The cliché told the story,” Lehmann thinks, contemplating Boyd's life (Field of Vision, 70). To achieve his unique style, Morris consciously improvises upon clichés. “Character is revealed cliché,” he says, and character reveals itself through the clichés in which his characters think, speak, and act (“Made in U.S.A.,” 487). Each of Morris's novels is an answer, given in the language of the cliché, to Crevecoeur's cliché question, “What is an American?” The cliché is symbolic of the American dream defunct, and it is in this “dead” language of clichés that Morris tells us of the sterility of modern life. But the special contexts he prepares for clichés simultaneously annihilate their phoniness and resurrect their original vitality; he suggests that the dead past can be made to live again.

Morris's characters share his efforts to salvage something from the cliché. “The pathos of things that had served their purpose had a profound appeal for Cowie. And why not? Chief among them he considered himself. He rather favored clichés. He only picked up a phrase when it has been dropped” (One Day, 87). The clichés, with which Americans conceal whatever deep feelings they have, Morris uses to lift lids; for the reader, the glimpses are comic at first, then pathetic, then self-revealing. Manipulating the clichés of our mass culture and language as a witty and humorous function of style, he turns clichés insight out. What makes them tick would set off a home-made bomb.

If “it is style that sets the cliché” (“Made in U.S.A.,” 487), what moves us is the charm of the style; the charm of his style enables the mythic figure to exchange his mortal life for immortality. Garbo, Babe Ruth, and Lindbergh had this style, the style of the Lone Eagle. In the twenties, the characters in The Huge Season had it, too. But today it is the cliché, not the process of becoming mythic, that proves contagious—those who cast themselves as Mick Jagger, Jack Kennedy, or Ali merely “bear witness to the cliché. We are left with a product rather than a process—a coonskin hat rather than Davy Crockett.” That is a paralyzing quality of the cliché, which has its positive qualities, too. “Clichés, bless them, both destroy life and make it possible” (“Made in U.S.A.,” 490). In Morris's fiction, events of the past are simple and trite, stereotyped, cliché. If “time past … is a mythic land of genial clichés” (“Origin of a Species,” 128) and if “culture is a series of acceptable clichés” (The Field of Vision, 70-71), Morris's stereotyped characters cannot experience the present until they have come to terms with the clichés that flood their everyday lives, and stripped themselves down to the essentials. If one is audacious enough to confront the real thing, one runs the risk of being abandoned by the safe cliché. The real McCoy is what one has after the cliché has been sheared off. Morris's novels depict the process of improvisation in which the cliché is transformed.

For Morris, the cliché serves the purpose of almost every technical device: it characterizes, enhances mood, evokes time and place, points up dialog, describes it; expresses modes of transformation, revelation, and resurrection; it is revealed in gesture and in informal ritual; and it acts as a structural aid.

Let's look briefly at the novels in chronological order, noting a few of their key clich clichés, each of which Morris uses with variations in most of his earlier and later works. Notice that most of the titles are themselves clichés.

The Kid tells the story of My Uncle Dudley in the language of the cliché. Dudley's audacious acts may take their cues from clichés, but only because Dudley's intention is to negate clichés by making them new. The cliché “I'll spit in your eye,” though never said, becomes the real thing, a blend of fact and fiction in the hands of an improvisor, a transformer.

I got out and stood in the ditch grass and he leaned on the running board. He just stayed there looking at Cupid and once Cupid looked at him. … The cigar juice was leaking on Uncle Dudley's chin and he looked like hell yet he looked kind of sporty. He tipped his head and winked at Cupid with his good eye. Cupid thought that was pretty funny and winked back at him—then he closed one eye and opened the other one wide. And right when he did Uncle Dudley spit him, full flush in that eye … he reached for the gun, but Biscuit had it, pointing it at the sky. He made motions with it for Uncle Dudley to get in. …

Uncle Dudley turned and spit the rest in the road, hitched up his pants. He didn't look at me but climbed inside and closed the door. He sat back behind the side curtain so I couldn't see. Biscuit put the gun on the floor and Cupid kept his head down, just his red neck showing. Biscuit backed the car around and they slowly moved away. In the rear view mirror I could see him looking back at me. They went along with a wheel in the road grass like we had come. The wind was faster now and went by, stirring a kind of dust on the road, getting thick, then petering out where the pavement began. On the turn my Uncle Dudley put out his hand.

(202-210)

That unpredictable, foolhardy, audacious cliché gesture ends the novel, elucidating the meaning of Dudley's relationship with his nephew; preparation for that moment is built up by variations on other, similar, clichés. In their raw-material form, both character and cliché are “inflexible” and “appallingly predictable,” but transformed in the characters, they are as resilient as Charlie Chaplin's cane, as unpredictable as that oldest standby of all clichés—the weather. The Kid and Dudley resist the cliché “just passing though.” “I said we were seeing the country, not just passing through” (78). That cliché turns up in most of the novels, until it becomes rich in nuance, almost mystical in A Life.

In The Man Who Was There (1945), Agee Ward turns up missing, as the cliché would have it. But Gussie Newcomb gradually sees that the missing man turns up in the people he left behind—including herself. She intuitively senses mystical implications in the expression “The King is dead—long live the King!” “‘He thinks he's missing,’” says Peter Spavic, “‘but boy, did we fox him!’” (236). Few people really die in Morris's fiction; they are merely missing, and, in a kind of resurrection, they almost always turn up in the living.

For Norman Rockwell, character is not revealed cliché, simply presented cliché. Clyde Muncy, in The Home Place (1948), observes the way his Uncle Harry holds a baby in the barber shop, as though he were a Madonna with child (as though he were a Saturday Evening Post cover). “On the one hand I knew that what I saw was unbelievably corny, on the other hand I knew it was one of the finest things I had seen” (The Home Place, 107). In Clyde's sensibility, both the cliché and the real thing blend in a moment of revelation.

In The World in the Attic (1949), the cliché “the finest living creature on God's green earth” is applied in many variations to Nellie Hibbard and, by implication and more appropriately, to Caddy Hibbard. “The finest of God's living creatures—as she would always be to the man who knew her—might have struck you differently when you passed her in the dime store, or out on the street. First of all, you might not have noticed her” (54). More noticeable is Lois McKee to whom the phrase is applied with even more ironic, sardonic variations in The Field of Vision and Ceremony in Lone Tree. In The World in the Attic, and throughout Morris's novels, characters rename each other with clichés. “Hold it a second, Captain,” Clyde Muncy says. “I'm Chief,” says Mr. Purdy, “You're Captain” (119). Purdy also refers to himself as “your Uncle Dudley.”

Will Brady, a strong silent, self-made man, in The Works of Love (1952) manages like many other Morris characters to “live both in and out of this world” (172), because he cannot really feel at home in one place. The house he builds only leads him to the cliché question: “Homelike? Well, that was said to be the word for it” (73).

In The Deep Sleep (1953), Reverend Barr says to Paul Webb, the skeptical artist, “The Lord, Paul, is a mighty warrior—” (241). All day Webb has observed in Mrs. Porter the kind of motherly behavior that made her daughter, Katherine, Webb's wife, come to the conclusion, when she was a child, that she and her brother were “orphans of the storm. That Mrs. Porter, a civic-minded person, had adopted them” (111). She is full of bromides, axioms, sayings. Her husband's death is “all for the best” (15). But it is out of Mrs. Porter's mouth that the most moving cliché in all Morris comes. At the end of a day of funeral preparations in which she has seemed to everyone (except Mr. Parsons, the handy-man) to lack feeling, Mrs. Porter stands alone on the back porch, and the moment is perceived from Katherine's point of view:

The summer night was very lovely, and her mother, while her hands were busy, seemed to be listening to the music of the spheres.

“I don't know what I'd do,” her mother said, “if other people didn't go to bed.”

Katherine waited a moment, then said, “Is it all right if I go now, Mother?”

“Your father would go to bed, but he never slept until I was there.”

“Good night, Mother,” Katherine said, and when her mother didn't answer she started for the stairs.

“Which one is Orion?” her mother said.

“I'm afraid I've forgotten it all, Mother.”

“I'm going to miss your father,” her mother said, and Katherine turned, her hand on the stair rail, as if another person, not her mother, had spoken. A voice, perhaps, from one of the letters she never mailed. Katherine wanted to speak, but now that this voice had spoken to her, broken the long silence, she could hardly believe what she heard. She went on up the stairs, entered her room, then closed the door before she remembered, before she noticed, that Paul wasn't there. Still, she would have called to him except for the fact that she had no voice, her throat ached, and he had been the one who had cried that this was a house without tears.

(302)

Katherine does not know that her husband, Webb the artist, who has spent the day puzzling “over the pattern of the Judge's life” (14), trying to get the picture in a maze of clichés, finally sees the picture he has been trying to get in focus when he finds the watch Mrs. Porter had put in “a safe place” (95), and so misplaced. Webb, who insists on striking down every cliché, responds to the cliché of Mrs. Porter's daylong search for her dead husband's watch with the only truth there is in that situation, a cliché act of compassion. Having accidentally found the watch, he puts it where she will discover it. “That was quite a picture, one that pleased him. …” (312).

To describe the effect the hero Lawrence, in The Huge Season (1954), has on his witnesses, Foley rubs two clichés together, contemplating “the origin of a species based on charm, on audacity, on the powers of the dance, and the music that soothed whatever needed soothing in the savage breast” (168). Montana Lou Baker captures herself and her hero-witnesses in this cliché: “They say it's been real, but we were real” (277). In every work of fiction, there are lines that teach the reader how to hold in his mind the book he holds in his hands. In The Huge Season, when Dickie shows the “unloaded” Colt revolver Proctor used to shoot himself in the foot, Mrs. Pierce reminds them that “it's always the empty gun that kills somebody” (224). Empty clichés in Morris's prose often prove to be loaded.

In The Field of Vision (1956)—itself a cliché of perception—Morris improvises again upon most of the key cliché expressions he resurrected in previous books. Having played with the clichés “hit bottom” and “walk on water” in The Huge Season, he focuses on them in The Field of Vision. In The World in the Attic, Clyde Muncy muses on the trite painting of The Lone Wolf in the snow and “the never-ending problem of what [he] intended to do” (60). In The Field of Vision, McKee compares Boyd the loner with the Lone Wolf. “He could hear the iron creak of Boyd's shoes in the snow. Like that wolf in the picture he had moved in close, then he had turned and run off” (177). Lone Wolf, Lone Eagle, loner are clichés Morris uses with many variations throughout his work. When the bull charges the bull fighter, McKee remembers two cliché events of the past: Boyd charging Ty Cobb to get his baseball autographed and Boyd trying to walk on water. “Don't it take you back?” (77) McKee asks Boyd. Twenty-three pages later, Boyd improvises sardonically upon that cliché: “Don't it take you back, Boyd? He knew sure as hell it did. But to where? And when? And for chrissakes why? Taken back. Always taken back. Never ahead” (100). The cliché phrase “helpless and hopeless” (256) helps to explain the charm of the fool the whole world loves, and that phrase goes through many variations in The Field of Vision, Ceremony in Lone Tree, War Games, among others.

In Love Among the Cannibals (1957), Earl Horter, the narrator, is immersed, by profession if not by temperament, in the submediocre mass-media culture of contemporary America; he transforms clichés into song lyrics for mass consumption. “If you live in a world of clichés, as I do, some of them of the type you coined yourself, you may not realize how powerful they can be” (92). Horter has become so saturated with clichés that after he meets the Greek in Hollywood, where the phony pitch is strident, he tells her, “Earl Horter, master of the cliché, did not say to you what he thought he was feeling, since he hardly knew, without the clichés, what it was he felt” (227). “What next?” (a question Morris characters often ask) is the title of the song Earl is improvising when he meets the living answer, the Greek. Academic in the beginning, the question, at the end of the novel, is real. The conflict between the cliché and the real thing is one between the inessentials and essentials. By example, the Greek teaches Horter that the “first problem, surgically speaking, is to remove the encrusted cliché from the subject” (“Made in U.S.A.,” 487). With the Greek, Horter improvises on the act of “bolting” from the phony. Free of clichés at the end, Horter can explore new possibilities. He has learned that “you've got to take what's phony, if that's all you've got, and make it real” (112). That, of course, is exactly what Morris has been doing from the first novel on, but this is the novel in which he most obviously meditates on the process.

One of the conceptual clichés in Ceremony in Lone Tree (1960), sequel to The Field of Vision, is “now you see it, now you don't.” Another is “the call of the wild.” “Mr. Jennings, do you ever feel the call of the wild?” Eileen asks. “Not especially, ma'am,” he says, “But I know people who do” (209). Sixty pages later, he sees a sign in the ghost town of Lone Tree: “VISIT THE LYRIC TONITE. And why not?” he thinks. “If the call was wild enough maybe some of them would” (270). The mild cliché “everybody needs a little push” is introduced in this way. “I thought you might need a little push,” Daughter says, referring to Boyd's Plymouth. “Didn't everybody need one in the good old days?” A major variant is this: “I just got tired of bein' pushed around,” says Lee Roy, who pushes his hot rod into a bunch of bullies, thus stirring up another cliché: “Lost control of it, eh?” a highway patrolman asks Lee Roy. “No, he hadn't lost control. He had been in control for once in his life” (127). Jennings thinks of Lee Roy and the mass murderer Charlie Munger as “Local boys. Local boys who made—or unmade—good” (137). Another local boy, out of the past, a returning creative native, thinks of himself in terms of similar clichés. “Morgenstern Boyd, pop-squirter, water-walker and friggin bore. First and last of the completely self-unmade men” (302). For many reasons, Boyd knows “it's later than you think. I'm clowning it up before the bomb” (172). But heeding the call of the wild, the hometown folks behave in such a way as to leave Boyd speechless and stymied. “It was McKee's look,” McKee notices, “on Boyd's face … his jaw slack as if he still had adenoids. Stymied. That was how he looked. Never before had McKee seen him speechless” (149). But Boyd remembers his own speechless response to Lois's charm, forty years ago. Boyd had “mailed a letter enclosing a blank piece of paper. Speechless. For the first and last time in his life” (228). McKee finds that undelivered letter in the Lone Tree hotel mail box, and, wondering what Boyd had written to his wife, not knowing it is blank, almost gives him a heart attack. Such is the power even of the unspoken cliché in Morris's fiction.

In carefully prepared contexts, even simple cliché expletives become highly charged. Private Lipido in Man and Boy (1951), Proctor in The Huge Season, and Etoile in Ceremony in Lone Tree, among others use the expletive “Ha!” to debunk. Bud Momeyer's emotions come out in “Gee Whiz, What the Deuce, and Dang. He never seemed to feel anything those words didn't cover” (76), thinks his wife, Maxine. The young woman Boyd brings with him to shock the folks, says repeatedly, “Sweet Jesus.” It becomes so contagious that Maxine, having come to the end of her rope, says, “‘Sweet Jesus.’ For no particular reason, and hardly caring why” (90).

Even out of simple names Morris conjures connotative values. “Your mother has a headache,” Maxine says, referring to herself. “You want to bring her two aspirin?” “When her mother was near the end of her rope,” Etoile thinks, “she referred to herself as her mother” (90). The problem of identity is played out most fully in Ceremony in Lone Tree. “That you Conley?” (103) Jennings remembers an old man once asked a streetcorner Santa Claus. Almost all the characters are asked a similar question. At the end: “Raising on his elbow, Jennings peered through the moonlight and said, ‘That you Scanlon?’ just as the old man dropped as if through a hole in the floor” (277).

“What a way to go!” in the 1962 novel of that name, is an apt travel slogan for many Morris characters. In an old world of clichés, in Venice and Greece, Soby observes life imitating art, the relation between fact and fiction becoming ambiguous. Like Horter in Love Among the Cannibals, he asks, “What next?” and feels the imperative, “Make it new!” “Feeling no pain,” he learns, “the wisdom of the body” (10). Soby attempts to transform these and other clichés: “the new element forged is oneself.”

In Cause for Wonder (1963), Howe returns to “a combination loony bin and fairy castle” near Vienna that once made him feel “both in and out of this world.” When he left, he wonders now, several decades later, “Was I running for my life, or was I running away?” Seymour Gatz expresses Howe's own fears. “Know what scares me? A place to hide. What if I liked it?” (20). Howe's Uncle Fremont Osborn tells him, “You can't live in the past, boy. Can't even die in it” (47). These key cliché expressions go through more paradoxical, ironic variations than any other in Cause for Wonder. The cliché title Cause for Wonder turns up in a different form in One Day (1965): to ask the question “What next?” on the day President Kennedy is assassinated is “cause for alarm.” Cowie, “a loner who does not want to be alone,” “an artful dodger” who early in life said, “I give up,” observes things “get back to normal”—in a world in which the normal proves to be abnormality. Cowie, the thinker, meditates: “One man's small hand had come between all living men and the sun's face, casting a shadow that momentarily darkened the world. What had he cried at such a moment? Look, Ma, one hand!” “The word from Dallas” “dissolved into a bottomless pool of impotence,” a gibberish of clichés.

In In Orbit, cliché rhetorical questions elicit actual events. “And how is Miss Holly?” Hodler routinely asks Avery, to which Avery always answers, “Who the hell would know that?” But today, “Somebody finally knew.” Jubal, the mysterious stranger, is thought to have raped her. “It is a torment to Hodler that this essential knowledge is what he once desired for himself” (20). When the mailman reports that a spaceman raped Miss Holly, Kashperl asks Jubal a typical, kidding question: “Now why's a boy like you do that?” (85). Today, just by chance, he asks the right person, and Jubal stabs him. A literary cliché Morris often plays with is most effectively used, with variations, in In Orbit: a motorcyclist and a twister hit a small town simultaneously, sending everybody into some kind of dance. “Who can tell the dancer from the dance?” “At the still point, there is where the dance is:” Other clichés enhance this central conceptual cliché. “A dozen or more people are known to be missing.” In many more ways than one.

In One Day, Cowie anticipates the title of one of Morris's nonfiction books: “A Bill of Wrongs—the small print at the bottom of the Bill of Rights.” The title of the nonfiction work puns further on the word “rights”: A Bill of Rites, a Bill of Wrongs, a Bill of Goods (1968).

Morris's characters often pause to turn clichés over in their minds. “‘The work here is taxing,’ the bellhop said, ‘she's all worn out.’ The word taxing impressed the Colonel as a strange one, but good. He, too, would like to find things taxing, rather than merely hard” (War Games, 1972, 44).

Morris's improvisation upon clichés is less aggressive, less playful, less imaginative, less dynamic in Fire Sermon (1971) and A Life (1973) than in any of his other novels; he seems to be deliberately muting the cliché voice.

In The Fork River Space Project (1977), the imaginative adventures are all meditative flights rather than flights of science fiction action. Imagination is Kelcey's “state of mind”; what he sees and does is less important than what he imagines. What he hears and sees “boggles the mind” and gives “cause for wonder.” “I was ripe for the word, but it escaped me,” he tells the reader. Dahlberg asks him, “Do you grasp it, Kelcey?” He almost does. In the past, Americans, especially on the frontier, had “great expectations,” one of many clichés whose original freshness Morris resurrects in lively contexts. “The word expected was so appropriate to Olivia that the Colonel felt obliged to fulfill her expectations.”

Morris's use of clichés in Plains Song, For Female Voices (1980) is less overt, less intrusive, than in his other novels, with no conceptual clichés repeated in a pattern throughout, as in many of his novels. The clichés are all incidental and arise naturally out of the context of a character's flow of perception. “What was on her mind?” “She was as full of life as a box of kittens.” Sharon looks at a place where the barn once stood “pondering the imponderable.” Into thin air. How did one measure air?” “Sharon was spellbound. Her flesh crawled, an expression she had always found ridiculous.” “Just one day before Sharon would not have marveled at the forces that brought such loose ends together, making them one.” “Alexandra said, ‘Do I look a sight? Who is there to see me but God?’”

Morris's transformed clichés themselves sometimes return to their moribund state through overuse. The phrases “turned as if he might see” and “she lidded her eyes” are two examples. Serviceable rhetorical phrases such as “on the evidence, which is impressive” and “how explain it?” have become perhaps too familiar. Key terms and concepts that Morris develops in his nonfiction and echoes in his fiction, such as “transformation,” “raw material,” “the immediate present,” “permanence and impermanence,” “fact and fiction,” “life and literature,” “conception” run the risk of becoming clichés themselves.

Even when his tone is satirical, Morris's purpose in using clichés is to resurrect, reveal, and transform. In the process of experimenting with phototext techniques, Morris discovered, experienced, the difference between exposure and revelation. In The Home Place, the farmer exemplifies the sanctity of individuality and privacy, themes which reach their most heightened expression in the scene in Uncle Ed's house. In the modern world, the idea has grown that at the root of privacy there is something suspect; the private, therefore, is meant to be exposed. Privacy is so rare today, Morris believes, that there is a quality of holiness about it. Morris photographed a bed, symbol of privacy. Under it squatted a chamber pot, cliché of the rural scene.

One may imagine Morris in his darkroom, watching the picture rise toward him out of the solution in the pan, an effect suggested in this passage from The Home Place: “I wiped my face on the towel and watched the PILLSBURY stamp come up, slowly darkening,” says Clyde Muncy, “like a print in the developer” (27). The sight of the chamber pot, a folksy, Norman Rockwell cliché invasion of privacy, exposure of character, made Morris cringe, there in the dark, with shame. “In the honest guise of telling the facts, this photograph ended up lying, since in such a context the larger statement … the revelation could not be heard above this shout.” Shock, even comic shock, “is the technique of invasion, and it marks a signal failure of art,” the purpose of which is to reveal. Here is a typical instance of Morris's refusal to exploit sensational, comic, or local-color cliché details. He rejected that photograph. In the second photograph, the details harmonize with the conception, a portrait not of a habit but of a way of life, an eloquent expression of the atmosphere and the meaning of privacy and the holiness of artifacts.

Looking at that photograph, we know why sarcastic, finger-snapping, scornful Peg, Clyde's wife, reacts as she does. “‘That's Ed's room,’ I said, and my wife stepped up to look at it. Then she backed away, as if she saw someone in the bed” (135). Had she seen the thunder mug there under the bed, Peg might have barked a laugh, taking her cue from Morris himself. Clyde muses on the implications of the response Peg did make: “There are beds with a single image, overexposed. There's an etched clarity about them, like a clean daguerreotype, and you know in your heart that was how the man really looked. … Without a word, or snapping her knuckles, my wife turned away” (135). Revelation becomes “the problem of stating what remains unsaid,” says Morris, and this photograph, with its text, is one of the finest illustrations of what he means. Here is also a good example of the technique of revision that Morris employs in the process of refining his style. That verbal image (and even the photograph itself) goes through several variations throughout Morris's books.

This passage from Man and Boy is one of the most revealing examples of Morris's ability to transform the cliché.

The basement toilet had been put in to accommodate the help, who had to use something, and Mother wouldn't have them on her Oriental rug. But until the day he dropped some money on the floor, and had to strike a match, inside, to look for it, Mr. Ormsby hadn't noticed just what kind of a stool it was. Mother had picked it up, as she had told him, second-hand. There was no use, as she had pointed out, why she should buy anything new or fancy for a place that was meant to be in the dark. He hadn't pushed the matter, and she hadn't offered more than that. What he saw was very old, with a chain pull, and operated on a principle that was very effective, but invariably produced quite a splash. The boy had named it the Ormsby Falls. That described it pretty well, it was constructed on that principle, and in spite of the splash they both preferred it to the one upstairs. This was a hard thing to explain, as the seat was pretty cold over the winter, but it was private like no other room in the house. The first time the boy had turned up missing, he had been there. It was that time when the boy had said—when his father nearly stepped on him—“Et tu, Brutus,” and sat there blowing through his nose. Laughing so hard Mr. Ormsby thought he might be sick. Like everything the boy said there had been two or three ways to take it, and there in the dark Mr. Ormsby couldn't see his face. He had just stood there, not knowing what to say. Then the boy stopped laughing and said: “You think we ought to make one flush do, Pop?” and Mr. Ormsby had had to brace himself on the door. To be called Pop had made him so weak he couldn't speak, his legs felt hollow, and when he got himself back to the stairs he had to sit down. Just as he had never had a name for him—the boy had never had a name for him—one, that is, that Mother would permit him to use. And of all the names she couldn't stand, Pop was the worst. Mr. Ormsby didn't like it either, he thought it just a vulgar common name, a comic name used by smart alecks to flatter old men. He agreed with her completely—until he heard the word in the boy's mouth. It was hard to believe a common word like that could mean what it did. Nothing more had been said, ever, but it remained their most important conversation—so important that they were both afraid to improve on it.

(26-29)

After Morris's use of it, a cliché is never quite the same—it is intellectually demolished and emotionally transformed in the moment of usage, so that the reader feels as Mr. Ormsby did when his son called him by the cliché nickname “Pop”: “It was hard to believe a common word like that could mean what it did.” Or consider Mother, who asks us to “Consider the Lilies.”

… she always seemed to be saying more than she said. He had never seen nor heard of a woman with a greater store of pithy sayings, though it sometimes took a little reflection to figure them out. The saying was plain enough, but Mother always managed to use it, like she did the lilies, in a very original way. It gave what was generally described as depth to everything she said.

(45)

One might say the same of Morris. The tone of the fresh context Morris creates makes the familiar cliché sound strange—it has an aura of having just been coined. It never loses the sense of wonder that gave it birth, the sense of the unique on which it first thrived. “Every cliché once had its moment of truth,” says Morris. “At the moment of conception it was a new and wonderful thing” (“Made in U.S.A.,” 488). In carefully prepared contexts, Morris revives that “moment of truth” in his use of each cliché.

From the common man's viewpoint, Morris describes people who live in the mode of sentimental clichés. With artful control and contrivance, he creates a unique diction that does with the cliché three things simultaneously: 1) presents them, as such, with a fidelity that reveals their essential emptiness; 2) presents his characters in the language of the clichés by which they live and communicate; but in so doing, he 3) reveals what is genuine and viable. In the same moment that the cliché works against itself, it is transformed and becomes, at times, both eloquent and significant.