“But Who Is Speaking”: “Novelisation” in the Poetry of Craig Raine

Abstract

In an essay published in 1978, John Osborne¹ lamented the dismissiveness with which Craig Raine’s first book The Onion Memory² had been greeted by reviewers. He pointed out that they had failed to take account of the extent to which Raine was in a postmodernist tradition stretching back to Wallace Stevens, the Joyce of Finnegan’s Wake, international surrealists like Lorca, Dali and Breton, and including, more recently, figures like Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, Angela Carter and David Hockney. In these artists, he said, “the intense Modernist quest for a sense of the real is subordinated to, or abandoned in favour of, an aesthetic of the fictive” (54). Osborne pointed out that Raine, like all postmodernists, draws attention to the “ludic, fabulatory structure” (53) of his work. In answer to reviewers like Julian Symons and Derek Mahon, who took this as merely self-conscious and flippant smartness, he demonstrated how such self-reflexiveness works (albeit playfully and wittily) to reveal “the fact that our sense of the real is dependent upon our perceptual equipment, and that the said equipment is fanciful and capricious” (60) and that “all sentient beings are at the centre of their own universe but at the periphery of everyone else’s” (61).