#Riddley Walker

[fluentisonus]

YES

[deermouth]

That dog. I wunnert what the name of him myt be. Which I dont mean name like my name is Riddley or formers myt call a pair of oxen Jet & Fire. I knowit he dint have no name the other dogs callt him by nor I wunt try to put no name to him moren Iwd take it on me to name the litening or the sea. I thot his name myt be a fraction of the nite or the numbers of the black wind or the hisper of the rain. A name you myt play on the boans or reckon up in scratches on a stoan.

Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban

[aaronsrpgs]

book I finished / book I started

[shaenongarrity]

The second most challenging sketch request I got in my most recent crowdfund was this fan art for Russell Hoban’s 1980 postapocalyptic novel Riddley Walker. The most challenging was the one that wanted me to draw a bicycle.

[diamondnokouzai]

erny orfing: i cant believe abels dead i just cant believe it.....ohhhh its sad its so sad to think of him being just ash on the wind, already dead...so young, too.... riddley walker: uh riddley walker: abel, the guy you tortured and whose eyes you gouged out? erny orfing: i tortured him, i didnt kill him

[billlaotian]

[silverslipstream]

A note on perspective and how prose shapes it

Reading Riddley Walker again and jeez this book is the most difficult thing I've read in a long time. I know the theme of language in the post-apocalypse and the corrupted version of English that the novel's written in is the whole point, but it doesn't make the story any easier to parse.

I do love stories told in altered forms of language from the first-person perspective, either societally altered or personally altered. My favourite novel, Cloud Atlas, uses the first kind in the two future-set stories (though not to the extent of Riddley Walker). The second kind is probably best seen in Flowers for Algernon - how Charlie's poor literacy skills and mental disability are portrayed in the way he writes, spells and thinks about the world. Gradually, we see this change as an experimental procedure increases his intelligence, until the novel's prose matches up with modern English syntax.

[hyperions-fate]

Can't overstate how little post-apocalyptic fiction now interests me. The world has transcended the need for survivalist social-annihilation fantasies.

[noisereductions]

reading my its so wonderful bio and seeing how narrow minded i think it is makes me want to really start on that riddley walker reread ive been planning for a long time but also i had surgery 3 days ago and it is unbearable to watch two episodes of TV in a row so i dont think i could cope

[thesiltverses]

I don’t know who types up the ask answers on this blog but to whoever’s reading this: how do you all feel about being alive and sentient? What keeps you going, what purpose propels you through this chaotic void? What do you think (or hope) waits for you after your inevitable end? What do you think constitutes a life well lived?

I'm going to answer this in the most wayward and stupidly overlong manner possible, because the previous ask had me thinking about puppets, and I was already mid-way through writing up a book recommendation that's semi-relevant to your questions.

Everyone (but especially people who've enjoyed The Silt Verses and all the folks on Tumblr who loved Piranesi by Susanna Clarke) ought to seek out Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban.

Riddley Walker is a wild and woolly story set in post-apocalyptic Kent, where human society has (d)evolved into a Bronze Age collective of hunter-gatherer settlements. Dogs, apparently blaming us for our crimes against the world, have become our predators, hunting us through the trees. Labourers kill themselves unearthing ancient machinery that they cannot possibly understand.

A travelling crowd of thugs led by a Pry Mincer collect taxes and attempt to impose themselves upon those around them with a puppet-show - the closest possible approximation of a TV show - that tells a mangled story of the world's destruction, featuring a Prometheus-esque hero called Eusa who is tempted by the Clevver One into creating the atomic bomb.

Riddley himself, a twelve-year-old folk hero in-the-making surrounded by strange portents, ends up sowing the seeds of rebellion and change by becoming a conduit for the anti-tutelary anarchic madness (one apparently buried in our collective unconscious) of Punch 'n' Judy.

It's a book in love with twisted reinterpretation, the subjectivity of interpretation, buried or forbidden truths coming back to light (the opening quote is a curious allegory about reinvention and cyclical change from the extra-canonical Gospel of Thomas, which is a good joke and mission statement on a couple levels at once) and human beings somehow stumbling into forms of wisdom or insight through clumsy and nonsensical attempts to make sense of a world that is simply beyond them.

It rocks.

The book starts like this:

On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. He dint make the groun shake nor nothing like that when he come on to my spear he wernt all that big plus he lookit poorly. He done the reqwyrt he ternt and stood and clattert his teef and made his rush and there we wer then. Him on 1 end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy. I said, 'Your tern now my tern later.'

Riddley's devolved language - a trick which has been nicked/homaged by many other works, most notably Cloud Atlas and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome - is a masterwork choice which may seem offputting or overwhelming at first, but which has its own brutal poetry and cadence to it, and ultimately which makes us slow down as readers and unpick the wit, puns, double-meanings and playful themes buried in line after line.

(Even those first five sentences get us thinking about cyclical change, ritual and myth in opposition to the dissatisfactions of reality, and 'tern' to paradoxically indicate a rebellious change in direction but also an obedient acceptance of inevitable death.)

In one of my favourite passages in literature and a statement of thought that means a lot to me, Riddley has been smoking post-coital weed with Lorna, a 'tel-woman', who unexpectedly declares her belief in a kind of irrational, monstrous Logos that lives in us, wears us like clothes, and drives us onwards for its own purpose:

'You know Riddley theres some thing in us it dont have no name.' I said, 'What thing is that?' She said, 'Its some kynd of thing it aint us but yet its in us. Its lookin out thru our eye hoals...it aint you nor it dont even know your name. Its in us lorn and loan and shelterin how it can.' 'Tremmering it is and feart. It puts us on like we put on our cloes. Some times we dont fit. Some times it cant fynd the arm hoals and it tears us a part. I dont think I took all that much noatis of it when I ben yung. Now Im old I noatise it mor. It dont realy like to put me on no mor. Every morning I can feal how its tiret of me and readying to throw me a way. Iwl tel you some thing Riddley and keap this in memberment. What ever it is we dont come naturel to it.' I said, 'Lorna I dont know what you mean.' She said, 'We aint a naturel part of it. We dint begin when it begun we dint begin where it begun. It ben here befor us nor I dont know what we are to it. May be weare jus only sickness and a feaver to it or boyls on the arse of it I dont know. Now lissen what Im going to tel you Riddley. It thinks us but it dont think like us. It dont think the way we think. Plus like I said befor its afeart.' I said, 'Whats it afeart of?' She said, 'Its afeart of being beartht.'

While Hoban is, I think, deeply humanistic to his bones and even something of a wayward optimist, the notion of human beings as helpless and ignorant vessels, individual carriers - puppets, if you like - for an unknowable and awful inhuman power-in-potentia and life-drive that lacks a true shape or intent beyond its own continued survival (even when that means destroying us or visiting us with agonising atrophy in the process) conjures up the pessimism of Thomas Ligotti, another big influence on our work and a dude who was really into his marionettes-as-metaphor.

Let's go to him now for his opinion on the thing that lives beneath our skin. Thomas?

Through the prophylactic of self-deception, we keep hidden what we do not want to let into our heads, as if we will betray to ourselves a secret too terrible to know… …(that the universe is) a play with no plot and no players that were anything more than portions of a master drive of purposeless self-mutilation. Everything tears away at everything else forever. Nothing knows of its embroilment in a festival of massacres… Nothing can know what is going on.

Curiously, both Ligotti and Riddley Walker have appeared in the music of dark folk band Current 93, whose track In The Heart Of The Wood And What I Found There directly homages the novel and ends with the repeated words,

"All shall be well," she said But not for me

These words, in turn, hearken back to Kafka's* famous reported conversation with Max Brod:

'We are,' he said, 'nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts that rise in God's head.' This reminded me of the worldview of the gnostic: God as an evil demiurge, the world as his original sin. 'Oh no', he said, 'our world is only a bad, fretful whim of God, a bad day.' 'So was there - outside of this world that we know - hope?' He smiled: 'Oh, hope - there is plenty. Infinite hope, just not for us."

So, we walk on.

We carry this thing that's riding on our backs, endlessly bonded to it, feeling its weight more and more with every passing day, unable to turn to look at it. Buried truths come briefly to life, and are hidden from us again. Perhaps they weren't truths at all. We couldn't stand to look the truth directly in the eyes in any case.

If there is hope, it's for the thing that looks out from our eyeholes, which thinks us but cannot think like us. We'll never get to where we're going, and the thing will never be born. There's no hope for it. Perhaps we don't want it to win anyway. It's nothing, and the key to everything.

The Jesus from the Gospel of Thomas says:

'When you see your own likeness, you rejoice. But when you see the visions that formed you and existed before you, which do not perish and which do not become visible - how much then will you be able to bear?'

Kafka, writing to his father, begins by expressing the inexpressibility of his own divine terror:

You asked me why I am afraid of you. I did not know how to answer - partly because of my fear, partly because an explanation would require more than I could make coherent in speech…even in writing, the magnitude of the causes exceeds my memory and my understanding.

Kafka concludes that while he cannot ever truly explain himself, and that the accusations in his letter are neat subjectivities that fail to account for the messiness of reality, perhaps 'something that in my opinion so closely resembles the truth…might comfort us both a little and make it easier for us to live and die.'**

It doesn't bring comfort to Kafka, whose diarised remarks both before and after the 1919 letter make it clear that he views his relationship with the things (people) that birthed him as an endless entrapment that prevents him from attaining any kind of self-actualisation or even comfort, since he cannot escape their influence or remember a time before them:

I was defeated by Father as a small boy and have been prevented since by pride from leaving the battleground, despite enduring defeat over and over again.

It's as if I wasn't fully born yet...as if I was dissolubly bound to these repulsive things (my parents).*** The bond is still attached to my feet, preventing them from walking, from escaping the original formless mush. That's how it is sometimes.

Samuel Beckett returns again and again (aptly) to this pursuit of a state of true humanity and final understanding that is at once fled and unrecoverable, yet to be born, never to be born, never-existed, endlessly to be pursued, pointless to pursue. From the astonishing end sequence of The Unnameable:

alone alone, the others are gone, they have been stilled, their voices stilled, their listening stilled, one by one, at each new-com- ing, another will come, I won’t be the last. I’ll be with the others. I’ll be as gone, in the silence, it won’t be I, it’s not I, I’m not there yet. I’ll go there now. I’ll try and go there now, no use trying, I wait for my turn, my turn to go there, my turn to talk there, my turn to listen there, my turn to wait there for my turn to go, to be as gone, it’s unending, it will be unending, gone where,where do you go from there, you must go somewhere else, wait somewhere else, for your turn to go again

I’m not the first, I won’t be the first, it will best me in the end, it has bested better than me, it will tell me what to do, in order to rise, move, act like a body endowed with despair, that’s how I reason, that’s how I hear myself reasoning, all lies, it’s not me they’re calling, not me they’re talking about, it’s not yet my turn, it’s someone else’s turn, that’s why I can’t stir, that’s why I don’t feel a body on me, I’m not suffering enough yet, it’s not yet my turn, not suffering enough to be able to stir, to have a body, complete with head, to be able to understand, to have eyes to light the way

From Thomas' Jesus:

When you make the two one, and you make the inside as the outside and the outside as the inside and the above as the below, and if male and female become a single unity which lacks 'masculine' and 'feminine' action, when you grow eyes where eyes should be and hands where hands should be and feet where feet should stand and the true image in its proper place, then shall you enter heaven.

Tom's Jesus makes a particularly Gnostic habit of both insisting that the hidden will be revealed and demonstrating the impossibility of attaining a state where the hidden ever can be revealed. Contrary to C.S. Lewis, we will never have faces with which to gaze upon the lost divine and the mysteries that shaped us, and crucially, as Christ puts it, we would not be able to bear the sight of ourselves if we did.

We will never become the thing that's riding on our backs.

Jesus again:

The disciples ask Jesus, 'Tell us how our end shall be.' Jesus says, 'Have you found the beginning yet, you who ask after the end? For at the place where the beginning is, there shall be the end.'

The Unnameable:

I’ll recognise it, in the end I’ll recognise it, the story of the silence that he never left, that I should never have left, that I may never find again, that I may find again, then it will be he, it will be I, it will be the place, the silence, the end, the beginning, the beginning again, how can I say it, that’s all words, they’re all I have, and not many of them, the words fail, the voice fails, so be it

The final passage of The Unnameable, which often is hilariously shorn and misinterpreted as an inspirational quote about how if you don't succeed, try again:

all words, there’s nothing else, you must go on, that’s all I know, they’re going to stop, I know that well, I can feel it, they’re going to abandon me, it will be the silence, for a moment, a good few moments, or it will be mine, the lasting one, that didn’t last, that still lasts, it will be I, you must go on, I can't go on, you must go on. I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know. I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on. I’ll go on. †

We bear this thing that's riding on our backs. We'll never get to where we're going, and the thing will never be born. If it was born, it'd be too terrible for us to bear. There's nothing riding on our backs.

It will never speak us into being.

We keep on calling out into the silence, we keep trying to explain or understand the thing that's riding on our backs, searching for a way to birth it before we die. Our words about the thing are crucial, and they're meaningless, and they're all we have, and they're nothing at all. We cannot name it and we cannot express it, but we cannot stop trying, and we will keep turning back to our words about the thing, obsessing over them, tearing them to pieces, putting them back together.

I'm fumbling at something I can't think or say, but fumbling is all we're capable of. There could be beauty and meaning and comfort in the fumbling, but it's also vain, and foolish, and pointless, and we're lying to ourselves about the beauty and the meaning and the comfort, and we're indulging ourselves pointlessly by going on and on about the pointlessness of it. Nothing can know what's going on. We will never get close enough to understand without being destroyed.

Thomas' Jesus again, warning those who seek to reveal what's hidden:

He who is near me is near the fire.

Riddley Walker, reflecting on the Punch puppet's inexplicable desire to cook and eat his own child:

Whyis Punch crookit? Why wil he al ways kill the baby if he can? Parbly I wont ever know its jus on me to think on it.

If you got to the end of this, congratulations: but the above is honestly the most appropriate patchwork of what I believe, what propels me, what I feel.

As for what comes after life, I think it's fairly straightforwardly a nothingness we are tragically incapable of fully knowing or accepting - it's Beckett's unimaginable and unattainable silence, a silence that his characters' voices keep on shattering even as they cry out for it.

-Jon‡

*I can't remember if Kafka makes prominent reference to Czech puppets in his work, which is interesting in its own right given the thematic relevance (the protagonist in The Hunger Artist is perhaps a kind of self-directing puppet show?).

However, Gustav Meyrink - who some unsourced Google quotes suggest was pals with Czech puppeteer Richard Teschner - did write a strange little story, The Man On The Bottle, about an audience watching a 'marionette show' who are too wrapped up in performances and masks to interpret the reality that they're actually watching a human being suffocate to death.

**Thomas Ligotti: "Something had happened. They did not know what it was, but they did know it as that which should not be.

Something would have to be done if they were to live with that which should not be.

This would not (be enough); it would only be the best they could do."

***Beckett's Malone Dies actually kicks off with a related sentiment:" I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now. I don’t know how I got there...In any case I have her room. I sleep in her bed. I piss and shit in her pot. I have taken her place. I must resemble her more and more."

† I don't necessarily align myself in humour with Ligotti on a lot of this stuff but I imagine he would recognise both Beckett's writing and Kafka's frustrations re explaining the causes of his hatred for his father as sublimation: finding artistic and philosophical ways of sketching the inexpressible horror and uncertainty of our existence in order to reckon with it at a remove without destroying ourselves. A higher form of self-deception, but self-deception nevertheless.

‡Muna's more of an anarcho-nihilist, I think.

[fluentisonus]

the way this book talks about the idea of Fragmentation/The Whole in these characters' conceptions of the like. cosmology of their world makes me crazy to think abt bc despite being essentially an iron age society centuries to millennia into the post-nuclear-apocalypse who've lost the science & full understanding of 20th century atomic physics etc., they've maintained this Really Strong semi-mythological impression of the significance of splitting the atom (even if they don't understand atoms) that not only features in their stories (about a folk figure splitting a little man named 'Addom' in half), but has seeped into their whole conception of the world itself as having an indefinable Something to it that's simultaneously Whole but also irreparably Fragmented in a way that keeps coming up again & again in different contexts. but also it's mixed in with this half-remembered christrian imagery (addom/atom/adam & the consequences of knowledge; this idea of the parts making up some spiritual whole; this specific painting of st eustace they've reinterpreted etc etc) which adds a whole other element to it. idk idk I need to chew it over more but it's so neat

[deermouth]

I gone to where Gransers head wer on the poal. His eyes wer closd his mouf wer shut. I said, 'Granser wil you tel?'

Lissening him then the words come to me: What if its you whats making all this happen? What if every thing you think of happens?

Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban

[warningsine]

In 2015, we asked Rushdie to share some books that have shaped his life and work.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

"The Devil comes to Moscow and, of course, makes trouble, accompanied by a cat shooting six-guns and an associate who disappears when he turns sideways. But he also assists a writer, known as the Master, who has been writing the story of Christ from the point of view of Pontius Pilate and, in despair, has burned the only manuscript. But, the Devil says, manuscripts don't burn. And there the book is, unharmed and intact. One of the greatest Russian novels. Stalin didn't like it."

The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

"This is a real delight. Among its leading characters are a certain Winston Niles Rumfoord who, along with his dog Kazak, accidentally enters a 'chrono-synclastic infundibulum' and gets stretched out across space and time. There is also a Martian invasion of the Earth, and Salo, a messenger from the planet Tralfamadore stranded on the moon by a spacecraft malfunction. After that the Tralfamadorians distort the whole of human history to get Salo the spare part he needs. (The Great Wall of China is a message from Tralfamadore and so is the Kremlin. Draw your own conclusions.)"

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban

"An unjustly forgotten novel that is utterly unlike anything else, a portrait of a world after a nuclear holocaust — the explosion of the '1 Big 1,' written in a brilliantly fractured language in which a bomb appears to have exploded as well. Folktale and science fiction blend in this portrait of a devastated world trying once again to become, and Riddley Walker's riddles may contain the secrets which, if unlocked, will provide the key."

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

"Carter's sensual, erotic retellings of fairy tales and folk tales — her 'wolf stories' — blend Snow White, Red Riding Hood and Beauty (of the Beast) into shape-shifting creations that are Carter's own. In these tales a girl attacked by a wolf can love the wolf or even become a wolf herself; the beauty can be beastly too."

Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo

"A short hypnotic novel which Jorge Luis Borges thought to be one of the best books ever written in any language, and which Gabriel García Márquez claimed to have memorized, and which, he said, unblocked his imagination and allowed him to create Macondo, the world of One Hundred Years of Solitude. A man named Juan Preciado is told by his mother on her deathbed to go to the town of Comala and find his father, Pedro Páramo, and get what he is owed. Juan Preciado embarks on the journey and as he nears Comala falls into a nightmarish world that may be populated entirely by ghosts."

The Non-Existent Knight by Italo Calvino

"This is a fable, set at the time of the emperor Charlemagne, about an empty suit of armour that believes itself to be a knight and keeps itself going by willpower and strict adherence to the rules of chivalry. It's one third of a trilogy of fantastic fables jointly known as 'Our Ancestors.' The others, The Cloven Viscount and The Baron in the Trees, are just as good."

[horsegirlwithnoname]

"haha this book is so weird" and it's like some romantasy where they open-mouth kiss Riddley Walker (1980) has a young teenage boy get convinced that electricity is a spirit with a real body and his first thought is that he really wants it to top him, like he just really wants Electricity, Who Is A Literal Woman, to fuck his ass, this goes on for several pages

I think anyway it's kind of hard to tell nobody has exactly the same understanding of that book

[diamondnokouzai]

reading riddley walker and dismissing anything supernatural about it and instead thinking about how riddley is psychotic

[grandhotelabyss]

How would you rank Alan Moore’s major works?

Watchmen comes first, because it contains everything he can do done to perfection. Its crystalline structure holds all his contradictions in a sustaining tension, his heart and his head perfectly aligned in one of the most beguiling fictional heterocosms I have ever had the pleasure of entering. I've read it more times than I've read anything, to be honest, and I'm not tired of it yet.

From Hell is also an extraordinary literary achievement, not at all diminished if placed next to comparable or roughly contemporaneous works by Pynchon or McCarthy—I've compared Sir William Gull to Judge Holden—and heartfelt in its own way, if also at an extreme of horror hard to match elsewhere in serious fiction.

There's a lot of dross in the Swamp Thing run, but I love its first and final third, everything before and after the relatively bad "American Gothic," because it's almost all heart, an outpouring of lyricism like nothing else before in comics, the imitation of which would launch Gaiman and Morrison down their own paths.

The Lovecraft material probably has to come next—The Courtyard, Neonomicon, and Providence—his most truly substantial comics work of this century and a profound and ambivalent meditation on how the pop and cult fiction of the last century created our present reality. It's about as horrifying as From Hell, however, with its entire chapter of interspecies rape to balance From Hell's entire chapter of misogynist murder.

Tied for fifth, almost of necessity, are the didactic series Promethea and the prose novel Voice of the Fire. To understand post-1980s Moore, you must understand magic, and these two works, uneven as they might be, suggest what magic means to Moore. Promethea, anyway, for all its faults, is often a pleasant post-Vertigo throwback to the proto-Vertigo qualities of Swamp Thing, while Voice of the Fire—a book a few years ahead in English literature of the technique David Mitchell would be celebrated for in Ghostwritten and especially Cloud Atlas, though both Moore and Mitchell borrow from a book I've never read, Riddley Walker—has passages of such scorching intensity you could put them next to any contemporaneous novelist.

So that's my top five (or top six). Miracleman is too disunified, so clumsy at inception and so polished in conclusion, though Book Three is remarkable. Neither V for Vendetta nor Lost Girls can sustain critical scrutiny on any but a formalist level; Moore at his most politically didactic proves himself politically naive. The first two chapters of Big Numbers are stunning, and I mourn what might have been. Tom Strong, with its bittersweet and poisoned nostalgia, is poignant, underrated, while Top 10 is unreadably dense and overrated. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is good for its first two volumes—volume 2, as an intense refraction of post-9/11 politics, is especially brutal and powerful—and then it becomes a folly and a self-indulgence, which I did not bother to keep up with. I love the performance pieces, especially the first one, The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels. Among the rest of the prose, I didn't finish Jerusalem and didn't love the 250 pages I did read—he seemed to have understood the difference between a comic-book script and a novel better when he wrote Voice of the Fire 20 years before—and I found the novel-length "Thunderman" centerpiece of Illuminations close to reprehensible. Since I've rendered such a negative verdict on that most recent work, let me conclude by recommending what's probably the gem among the earliest work, the tender and clever Delany-esque feminist space opera, The Ballad of Halo Jones, with its memorable tagline, "Where did she go? Out. What did she do? Everything." Moore almost never went out—almost never left his hometown, except for ventures in the astral plane—and yet he has written everything, in every genre, in every style, and for that he has, despite any local judgments I might make against this or that work, my entire admiration.