56 THENEWYORKER,MARCH8, 2021
THE CRITICS
ABOVE: LIANA JEGERS
I
n the early nineteen-eighties, when
Kazuo Ishiguro was starting out as
a novelist, a brief craze called Mar-
tian poetry hit our literary planet. It was
launched by Craig Raine’s poem “A
Martian Sends a Postcard Home” (1979).
The poem systematically deploys the
technique of estrangement or defamil-
iarization—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 Lar-
kin, British schoolchildren learned to
launder these witty counterfeits: “Cax-
tons 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 per-
haps the whole Berlitz-like apparatus of
Martianism, because it made estrange-
ment as straightforward as translation.
What is the haunted apparatus? A tele-
phone, miss. Well done. What are Cax-
tons? Books, sir. Splendid.
Estrangement 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 estrange-
ment, bringing into focus the partiality
of a human being (a child, a lunatic, an
immigrant, an émigré). Raine’s poem,
turning estrangement into a system, has
the effect of making the Martian’s in-
comprehension a familiar business, once
we’ve got the hang of it. And since Mar-
tians don’t actually exist, their mispri-
sion is less interesting than the human
variety. The Martian’s job, after all, is to
misread the human world. Human par-
tiality is more suggestive—intermittent,
irrational, anxious. 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?
But it’s one thing to achieve that ef-
fect 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. It would be hard
not to personalize estrangement when
writing fiction. The eminent Russian
formalist Viktor Shklovsky was inter-
ested in Tolstoy’s use of the technique,
noting that it consists in the novelist’s
refusal to let his characters name things
or events “properly,” describing them as
if for the first time. In “War and Peace,”
for instance, Natasha goes to the opera,
which she dislikes and can’t understand.
Tolstoy’s description captures Natasha’s
perspective, and the opera is seen in the
“wrong” way—as large people singing
for no reason and spreading out their
arms absurdly in front of painted boards.
The twentieth century’s most ecstatic
defamiliarizer was Vladimir Nabokov,
who had a weakness for visual gags of
the Martian sort—a half-rolled and sop-
ping black umbrella seen as “a duck in
deep mourning,” an Adam’s apple “mov-
ing like the bulging shape of an arrased
eavesdropper,” and so on. But in his most
affecting novel, “Pnin” (1957), estrange-ment is the condition and the sentence
of the novel’s hapless hero, the Russian
émigré professor Timofey Pnin. In Tol-
stoyan fashion, Pnin is seeing America
as if for the first time, and often gets it
wrong: “A curious basketlike net, some-
what like a glorified billiard pocket—
lacking, however, a bottom—was sus-
pended for some reason above the garage
door.” Later, we learn that Pnin must
have mistaken a Shriners’ hall or a vet-
erans’ hall for the Turkish consulate, be-
cause of the crowds of fez wearers he
has seen entering the building.
In the English literary scene, both
Craig Raine and Martin Amis have
been, in their devotion to Nabokov,
flamboyant Martians. Such writing is
thought to prove its quality in the de-
lighted originality of its rich figures of
speech; what Amis has called “vow-
of-poverty prose” has no place at the
high table of estrangement. Cliché and
kitsch are abhorred as deadening ene-
mies. (Nabokov regularly dismissed writ-
ers such as Camus and Mann for fail-
ing to reach what he considered this
proper mark.) Kazuo Ishiguro, a con-
summate vow-of-poverty writer, would
seem to be far from that table. Most of
his recent novels are narrated in accents
of punishing blandness; all of them make
plentiful use of cliché, banality, evasion,
pompous circumlocution. His new novel,
“Klara and the Sun” (Knopf ), contains
this hilarious dullness: “Josie and I had
been having many friendly arguments
about how one part of the house con-
nected to another. She wouldn’t accept,
for instance, that the vacuum cleaner
closet was directly beneath the large
bathroom.” Aha, we say to ourselves,BOOKS
THE UNKNOWN KNOWN
Kazuo Ishiguro uses artificial intelligence to show the limits of our own.BY JAMESWOOD