Cliche

I was just reviewing some of Ong's book and I got hung up on a passage yet again.  Ong states that, "There was no use denying the now known fact that the Homeric poems valued and somehow made capital of what later readers had been trained in principle to disvalue, anamely, the set phrase, the formula, the expected qualifier - to put it more bluntly, the cliche" (23).  I find this statement n accurate critique of modern literature study as well as confusing in terms of popular culture. 

For starters, how is it that music is elevated for it's "catchiness" and "cliche" while literature is broken-down for it's utilizaton of similar devices?  Are literary persons just supposed to be more inventive than to use what affects the reader?  Doesn't the absence of easily accessible terms to the ear of the reader distance author from audience? 

I have the sinking suspicion that if we really examine every work, since they are all rehashings of older works, that everything could be called a cliche.  I can appreciate that as literature students we should push the bounds and scope of the literature we read, but the fact that we still much work inside a system reveals a very Derridian conclusion: nothing is every truly outside the system and specifically the works that profess to do so.  Therefore, I have determined that cliche is nothing if not essential to all human communication and especially communtication which relates memory.  Instead of diminishing cliche devices or phrasing, I personally think there should be some oppurtunity to study the cliche.  Every colloquialism, every introduction or epithet can be interpretted as cliche, and I believe that it is through this seemingly universal relatability that communication is even possible.  If we didn't have anchors to the world and some form of collective unconscious (i.e. brains that functioned similarly while interpreting) it would impossible to relate to eachother.  Cliche seems to tell us more of the foundations or first (historically as well as in terms of conversation starting) thoughts which humans function on to communicate.