It would be hard not to personalize estrangement when writing fiction. One can crave a more proximate estrangement: how about, rather than an alien sending a postcard home, a resident alien, or a butler, or even a cloned human being doing so?īut it’s one thing to achieve that effect in a poem, which can happily float image upon image, and another to do so in a novel that commits itself to a tethered point of view. Human partiality is more suggestive-intermittent, irrational, anxious. The Martian’s job, after all, is to misread the human world. And since Martians don’t actually exist, their misprision is less interesting than the human variety. Raine’s poem, turning estrangement into a system, has the effect of making the Martian’s incomprehension a familiar business, once we’ve got the hang of it. Splendid.Įstrangement is powerful when it puts the known world in doubt, when it makes the real truly strange but most powerful when it is someone’s estrangement, bringing into focus the partiality of a human being (a child, a lunatic, an immigrant, an émigré). What is the haunted apparatus? A telephone, miss. The poem systematically deploys the technique of estrangement or defamiliarization-what the Russian formalist critics called ostranenie-as our bemused Martian wrestles into his comprehension a series of puzzling human habits and gadgets: “Model T is a room with the lock inside- / a key is turned to free the world / for movement.” Or, later in the poem: “In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps, / that snores when you pick it up.” For a few years, alongside the usual helpings of Hughes, Heaney, and Larkin, British schoolchildren learned to launder these witty counterfeits: “Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings / And some are treasured for their markings- / they cause the eyes to melt / or the body to shriek without pain. / I have never seen one fly, but / Sometimes they perch on the hand.” Teachers liked Raine’s poem, and perhaps the whole Berlitz-like apparatus of Martianism, because it made estrangement as straightforward as translation.

It was launched by Craig Raine’s poem “ A Martian Sends a Postcard Home” (1979). In the early nineteen-eighties, when Kazuo Ishiguro was starting out as a novelist, a brief craze called Martian poetry hit our literary planet.

Klara and sun