The Construction of Language in 

Riddley Walker
Jess Zimmerman
TOR.COM | Tue Nov 30, 2021 1:00pm 

I don’t recommend my favorite book, Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, without a lot of caveats.
People have gotten mad at me—legitimately mad—when they’ve heard me say “this is my favorite
book” and interpreted that as “you should read it” even though I never said so, and then the first
sentence is “On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben
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.”

If you aren’t prepared for that sort of thing—and Riddley Walker, while very much a classic, also
isn’t nearly as well-known as I think it deserves—it’s not unreasonable to be like “Jess what the fuck.”

So I try to make sure that people understand that this is a book about a young boy’s quest through a
post-apocalyptic world in which civilization has been all but destroyed and then gradually, over
hundreds or thousands of years, clawed its way back to approximately the Bronze Age—and like
many other books I love or have loved (A Clockwork Orange, The Faerie Queene), it is written in a
fictionalized English appropriate to the fictionalized England it wants to evoke.

Now that that’s out of the way: it’s my favorite book in the world and you should probably read it.
Because yes, you have to essentially learn a new language or at least a new dialect to understand
what’s going on, but every single part of that dialect is a deeply-considered commentary on how we
remember, forget, and reframe our distant past—and, in the process, often badly distort not only the
past but the future.

Not all of the word mutations are especially load-bearing, but all of them change the way you think
about the palimpsest of older language and culture that underpins modernity. Take, for instance, the
town Widder’s Bel (“widder” is widow in Riddley’s language). Once you understand how this post-
post-post-apocalyptic landscape maps onto the U.K. county of Kent, it’s clear that this is the town we
now know as Whitstable. But Whitstable was previously Witestaple or Witenestaple, “white post”
(from the Old English hwit) or “wise man’s post” (from the Old English wita). Our modern English
plucked nonsense from a meaningful word—whit stable, like a tiny place to keep horses? What?—and
Riddley’s compatriots have put meaning back, combining the familiar concept bell and the probably
even more familiar concept widow.

The most interesting erasures and re-inscriptions in Riddley’s world are biggies: science, religion.
The loss, attempted recreation, and ultimate tragedy of certain scientific capabilities—which turn out
to be inextricable from destruction—drive the plot. But the novel’s biggest moments of epiphany are
animated by old religious (and misappropriated non-religious) artifacts that have been divorced
from their contexts and scrambled into a kind of scriptural-historical pastiche. These are revelatory
moments for Riddley and also, separately, for the reader: he experiences something he understands
as enlightenment, and we, with a clearer understanding of these decontextualized images,
understand a little more.

I love these moments for what they tell us about our unconquerable hunger both for cultural amnesia
and for pattern-finding and mythmaking: we destroy the past, and then use the shards to create an
imagined history. But I also love that Riddley’s patchwork dogma, built out of fragments of religion
and art and language that survived the flood of disaster, has never gotten around to recreating the
concept of God.

It would spoil the story to detail some of the ways that the unspecified apocalypse in Riddley
Walker has digested deistic religion and spat out the godless bones. But it wouldn’t spoil anything to
talk about the one line I think most beautifully epitomizes what Riddley’s language tells us about the
parallel evolution of words, thoughts, and beliefs. Early in the book, only four very short chapters in,
we’re introduced to a hymn that’s survived from our near future to Riddley’s very far one. To the
reader, it’s very clearly a Christian hymn, but written at a time when space travel was routine. Here’s
how it goes:

Pas the sarvering gallack seas and flaming nebyul eye

Power us beyont the farthes reaches of the sky
Thine the han what shapit the black
Guyd us there and guyd us back

That’s all in Riddley’s dialect, but many of the words don’t appear anywhere else in the book, because
the concepts they represent—sovereign galaxies, flaming nebulae—are meaningless in Riddley’s time.
The hymn itself rode some kind of cultural ark into the future, but like many of our modern hymns,
its referents are all but lost. (How many average churchgoers can really unpack “trampling out the
vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored”?) But what’s interesting to me is the word that does
show up again immediately after the song: “Straiter Empy said, ‘Thine hans for Brooder Walker.’ We
all thinet hans then round the fire.” We all did what around the fire? We thined hands.

Did you get what happened there? At some point, the post-apocalyptic, neo-primitive culture in
which Riddley lives heard the phrase “thine the hand”—for us, clearly a reference to a Christian God,
using an obsolete pronoun which has hitched its way into our present in a specifically religious
context just as this hymn did for Riddley—and, lacking context for both the meaning of “thine” and
who the “thou” might be, came to the reasonable conclusion that it must be something you do with
hands. From there it’s an easy leap: obviously if you “thine” hands with someone else it means you
entwine them, because that’s what it sounds like that would mean. And so, as part of the ritual,
you thine hands, and later unthine them.

As a person who is fascinated by language and also has no connection to theism, how freaking much
do I love this! This single half-page is actually full of similarly perfect illustrations of how we struggle
to fit the unfamiliar into our mental framework—see also “well, I don’t know what a galaxies or
nebulae are but I know what seas and eyes are so I guess they’re a kind of sea and a kind of eye”—but
“we all thinet hands” is the line I’ll bang on about if I’m drunk and you get me started about this
book. If you don’t like it, you won’t like Riddley Walker. Like I said, that’s fine; it’s not for everyone,
and I said as much, so you’re not allowed to get mad. For those who do, though—I find this example
especially exquisite, but the language and world that Hoban created is studded with gems like this. If
you’re excited by this, and you haven’t read Riddley Walker yet: don’t Riddley walk, Riddley run.
https://www.tor.com/2021/11/30/the-construction-of-language-in-riddley-walker/
Worth the 'trubba': making sense of Riddley Walker's language
Russell Hoban worked and reworked his story to create his narrator’s strange, post-
apocalyptic vernacular. It makes for difficult but rewarding reading
Sam Jordison
THE GUARDIAN | Tue 7 Nov 2017 05.00 EST

“Riddley Walker just is difficult to read,” says Will Self in his introduction to the novel. “There’s
no point in denying it.” I wouldn’t dream of it. I can also attest that there’s no point trying to
understand the book’s unique English after a couple of glasses of wine and an episode of
Stranger Things. I’ve had to read Riddley Walker wakefully and slowly. It demands
concentration and dedication – and even then it can be confusing and bewildering.

But if you’re struggling to make headway, spare a thought for the author. It might be tricky to
read – but imagine writing it. When Russell Hoban spoke to the Literary Review in 1984, he
revealed that Riddley Walker took five-and-a-half years to complete. Two years into the process,
after he’d written 500 pages, he says, he started again: “Then I went back to page one 14 times,
or something like that. And every page was rewritten many times.”

This was mainly to condense the narrative and trim fat: “I could feel the whole thing wanting to
get very lean and spare and concentrated and dense, and not be all spread out.” But something
else also happened as he got deeper into the process; the English began to “drift”, his characters
moving away from “BBC English” and towards words that didn’t exist, with their own
vernacular. And so it is that you have to be a “clevver bloak” to get the “knowing” of this book,
and to understand sentences like: “Theyre mor blip dogs nor real 1s tho.”

In that interview, Hoban gives the impression that he discovered the strange English in his book
as much as he consciously created it. But while plenty of Riddley Walker’s linguistic quirks may
have come to Hoban intuitively, he still had to systematise and regularise them in a consistent
language with its own rules of spelling and grammar. So far as I can tell, the novel isn’t like the
old manuscripts of – say – Mandeville’s Tales, with variant spellings of the same words and
haphazard grammar. There’s a system here – and so it’s reasonable to assume there must be a
guiding philosophy behind it.

On last week’s reading group post, barnaclegoose raised the interesting question of whether this
philosophy makes sense:

I wonder about the status of the text we are reading. It purports to be a narrative penned by
Riddley himself, thousands of years in our future. That is, however, clearly impossible, given
that the ‘English’ spoken that far in the future and after a nuclear catastrophe would diverge
to a far greater extent from the language we speak today than Riddley’s text. (Compare Old
English texts from a mere 1,000 years ago, which, but for the odd word, are utterly
incomprehensible to modern readers.) It’s also unlikely that someone with Riddley’s
rudimentary literacy would make systematic use of punctuation such as inverted commas in
his writing. So what exactly is the conceit? Is this the ‘author’s’ partial translation of Riddley’s
original or did Mr Hoban just mistakenly think that English would be so little changed so far
in the future?

Several people responded that Hoban had taken “acceptable licence”. We can’t know how the
language of a post-apocalyptic future would sound; maybe this approximation is reasonable
enough. Commenter theupsetappletart pointed out that without the Great Vowel Shift, English
would have remained much more consistent over the past 1,000 years, so it was reasonable to
keep the language in Riddley Walker comprehensible. Equally, you can flip the argument around
and say that Hoban’s predictions about the way English could change are as good as any,
because there can be no hard and fast rules. Only last week, the Guardian reported that a new
study has shown that chance plays a huge role in linguistic evolution. Who’s to say that Hoban
shouldn’t have taken a punt on that basis?

Such arguments are fascinating – but, in that same Literary Review interview, Hoban also said
that he just decided to wing it: “I thought, ‘Here, I’ll just rely on my ear.’ Otherwise I could have
stalled endlessly on the research.”

It didn’t matter whether or not the language was authentic. What mattered was how it sounded,
and how it felt. And it really works. Grappling with the language in Riddley Walker creates a
powerful sense that this book comes from a different time and place, that Riddley’s experiences
are different to our own and we are seeing his world through his eyes. It all adds to the force and
urgency of what he is telling us – and, just as importantly, it adds to the entertainment. Puzzling
and feeling your way through his strange constructions is enjoyable in itself. It’s worth all the
trubba.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2017/nov/07/worth-the-trubba-making-sense-of-riddley-walkers-language
Riddley Walker: Thoughts on language
By A.V. Club Staff
Published April 27, 2010

Todd VanDerWerff: Trubba not, fellow Wrapped Up in Books-keteers. It's time to talk about the
one big impediment to most people enjoying this novel: its use of a devolved form of English to
convey just what's going on in the story and build Riddley's world. I know from e-mailing with some
of you that the language was perhaps not as much of an issue for you as it has been for some I've
tried to push the novel on in the past (some of whom can't even get past the first couple of chapters),
so I was pleased in that regard. But I'd be interested to see if any of you think the novel could have
been told via any other dialect.

First, here's a segment from the expanded edition of the novel, which features excerpts from Hoban's
first attempts in standard English and his original 500-page version. If this intrigues you, there are
several more examples in the expanded edition:

"The Eusa man stood outside in the rain and sent his partner in first. The partner was well
over six feet tall, had a bow and a quiver of arrows on his back, a big knife, and four rabbits
hanging from his belt. He had hands that looked as if they could break anything or squeeze it
to death. He poked about with his speak, looked here and there behind things. He seemed to
take the place in with all his senses at once, took in the feel of it as an animal would." (224)

Here's a comparable passage from the novel itself:

"After meat I gone up on the hy walk and looking out for Goodparley & Orfing. Lissening to
the rain dumming down on my hard clof hood and thinking how itwd soun on dog skin.
Persoon I heard the horn blow 'Eusa show' then the poynt hevvys come out of the rainy dark
in to the lite of the gate house torches. 1 of them lookit up at me and said, 'Trubba not. Eusa
show.' I never knowit Goodparley & Orfing say ther oan Trubba not they all ways sent a hevvy
in front of them. I said, 'No Trubba' then I opent and in they come hevvys 1st. Goodparley &
Orfing dint come thru the gate til ther oan men wer in the gate house. They wunt walk unner
a gate house other whys." (37)

The first passage isn't bad or anything, but for my money, it leaves far too little to the imagination.
By telling his story in a worn-down English, Hoban is forced to convey almost all of his exposition
and backstory through what the words themselves have become. Think, for example, of how the word
"diplomacy" has been ground down to "Plomercy," a word used first when the old dog throws itself
on Riddley's spear, seemingly. It's simultaneously a pun on both "diplomacy" and "mercy," a nice
twisting of both central concepts, and a nasty hint of just what must have transpired in Riddley's
world to twist the word to that meaning. There are other places where the language shies away from
what happened and what people had to do to each other after the cataclysm, and that shying away
gives many of these moments a power that mere description wouldn't have.

I can see why some struggle with the language. I'll be honest and say that the first time I read this
novel, I didn't grasp what all of the words meant. (It took me ages to figure out what "blip" and
"blipful" were meant to signify.) But I don't think grasping the meaning of everything that happens is
necessary to enjoy what's happening in the novel at the same time. As I posited yesterday, Riddley
Walker is a novel about the things that come in between the other things, and some of those things
are the missing vowels and mutated consonants that make up the argot of his world. At times, it's
best to just let the language wash over you, rather than try to grasp the meaning of each and every
phrase.

It's also worth pointing out that nearly everything that's funny in the novel stems from the use of
language, from the twisting of "Bob's your uncle" to many of Riddley's asides. By and large, a novel
this heavy on wordplay shouldn't work, but by inventing a language that's at once familiar and alien
to us, Hoban is able to get away with some pretty basic puns with a winking sense of fun. I wouldn't
say every joke in the book lands, but far more do than one would expect from a novel about people
eking out a marginal existence in the wake of a nuclear war. (And if the language is really tripping
you up, this web site is a rather amazing set of annotations for basically everything in the novel,
including place names, suggesting where they might sit in a modern England.)

So was I reading you guys right? Did the language give any of you fits? Or were you mostly okay with
it? And have you worked any Riddleyspeak into your everyday life, as I have with "Trubba not" and
"Master Chaynjis"?

Donna Bowman: No trubba, Todd.  Ah, invented language—how you beguile me! I had
read Riddley Walker once years ago, as I mentioned yesterday, but I don't think that gave me any
appreciable advantage over any other readers when it came to teasing meaning out of the text. Yet
within a few pages, I was immensely comfortable with Hoban's dialect. I find great pleasure in
deciphering a book a word, a phrase, a sentence at a time, lingering over every turn of language. Few
books are worth that effort, and I don't give it unless the book is worthy. (Jane Austen and Charles
Dickens come to mind as authors who always elicit leisurely reading from me; I savor every word and
clause in order to enjoy their full flavor, and to delight in the complex ways they interact.)

I fell into that hypnotic state of slow, careful reading every time I picked up Riddley Walker. It wasn't
at all uncommon for me to look up from the book and find that half an hour had passed without my
noticing, and that I was late for some appointment. The language, in other words, pulled me into the
world of the book because it both demanded my attention and rewarded it so handsomely. For the
most part, I processed the language on a subconscious level; it was always a bit of a jolt when I had to
surface to figure out some set of phonemes that connect Riddley's speech to my own, connecting
knowledge I was supposed to bring to the mysterious words Riddley has inherited. I preferred to
simply immerse myself in the near-liturgical flow of sound Hoban created, hearing his narration as
speech and as incantation.

No episode better illustrates the magic of this language for me than the interpretation of the passage
about St. Eustace. It moved me deeply that the characters saw the text they had inherited as a
hermeneutic puzzle, capable of revealing and concealing. They were convinced that there was
nothing random about it, that its very existence signaled its importance, and that the meaning to be
derived from it was crucially connected to the meaning they already possessed in their rituals and
scriptures. Listening to Goodparley explaining how it all fit together, I felt myself included in a
kinship with him and with all readers. We desire the connexions, we wait for them, we are
transported and changed when they appear, we are disappointed when they do not make the world
fall into place as we wish. Hoban's magnificent accomplishment, for me, is to reveal by hiding,
hinting at the transcendent import of what lies behind his simplified, limited vocabulary.

Zack Handlen: I dug the language. It was so much fun, and the small victories I found in
deciphering even incidental words entertained me through passages where I wasn't really sure of the
big picture. What's interesting about that "straight" passage is that, more direct or not, it's not really
very entertaining to me. So much of the character of Riddley and his environment come through in
the way he expresses himself that losing that would mean losing one of the fundamental reasons the
novel is as good as it is.

Okay, I'm going to get unbelievably pretentious, but: I read Ulysses a few years ago. Parts were rough
going, I'm sure I missed a good deal of the puns and the references, and whole chapters largely
passed me by. (One in particular, the section in the hospital where Joyce mirrors the birth of
language with an actual birth, has a paragraph that haunted my dreams. It reads like a 3 a.m.
hangover.) But I loved  the experience, and I loved the novel, and even typing this now, I want to go
back and go through it again. Part of that is the fun of the puzzle, of deciphering and decoding and
making the right deductive leaps, but if that's all there was, it'd be a crossword, not great literature.
Let's agree that literature is an artificial construct, all right? The act of reading anything on the page
is a stylized abstraction, inherently absurd. To me, great novels are ones that acknowledge this
absurdity and use it to their advantage. The riddles and stream of consciousness and buried meaning
draw attention to this artificiality and paradoxically reduce the distance between the reader and the
story being told. The final sections of Ulysses are like nothing else I've ever read, in their intimacy,
compassion, and empathy. They would not have worked without all the play and oddity that came
before.

On a much smaller scale, I think the language Hoban uses in Riddley works the same way. By forcing
us to concentrate so much on understanding the meaning that's being conveyed, we become attached
to the character and his adventures nearly by default, and while it takes patience, once that
attachment and the understanding reach equal levels, it's an experience that no other art form can
equal. (Tricks don't work on their own, of course. For a long time, I was worried all Hoban had was
some puns and a moderately weird science-fiction story, but I was happily wrong.)

Ellen Wernecke: Put me in the “not as much trubba” category, Todd. It turned out that my copy
of Riddley Walker (the 20th-anniversary Bloomsbury edition) actually had a glossary in it, but I
didn’t discover that until I’d finished, and it’s better that I wasn’t flipping back and forth throughout
the book. If you’ve done any reading in a foreign language, you know that forest-for-the-trees effect
where the individual words rebel against the overall meaning.

I agree with Donna that it’s the kind of language you have to sort of immerse yourself in, but that
once you get into the flow of it, at some moments, you barely notice it’s there, even though it's
seemingly a colossal obstacle. The only term I couldn’t figure out on my own was "sharna pax," and
the moments when I found it the most distracting was where it was actively pulling against the
narrative—such as the scene with Goodparley and Granser when they’re combining the "ingredients"
of the 1 Littl 1. As a normally fast reader, being forced to slow down and allow Riddley to puzzle
through something that seemed like a foregone conclusion was good mental exercise.

I haven’t read Hoban’s plain-speech draft, but I think that direction would have been a mistake,
because the devolution of the language in Riddley brought across the motif of destruction and the
aftermath of a civilization-destroying nuclear war for me just as clearly as Riddley’s descriptions of
the ravaged countryside and dead towns. Granted, what happened to the language—the shifting, the
dropping and mangling of syllables and the decay of the written word—must have happened over
thousands of years in which it was less important to be able to express yourself, and more important
to save yourself. Just as in the "tel," Eusa discovers money can’t save his family. Communication
beyond the power to persuade (of which eloquent speech is part but not all) can’t keep a small band
of people alive, or help them determine where to find clean water or how to take shelter against wild
dogs.

I feared that the bias against “clevverness" was going to turn out to be a stronger theme, but I
suppose I should save that conversation for the world-building discussion. Meanwhile, I’m already
planning to press this book on a few friends with a linguistics background.

Keith Phipps: As a fellow Joyce veteran (and Joyce admirer) like Zack, and as someone who will
explain why you really have to read Chaucer in the original—mostly because it's not that hard, and it
rewards tenfold the time it takes to pick up a basic understanding of Middle English—I liked the
language. I will confess it left me swimming a bit at times, and became something of an annoyance
when I lost track of what was supposed to be, you know, happening. But I took that as a tradeoff to
spend time in such a one-of-a-kind world of words.

Leonard Pierce: When you chose Riddley Walker as our next Wrapped Up In Books selection,
Todd, I was immediately grateful we'd brought you into the fold, because it's a book I'd been
meaning to read for ages. I bought it more than a year ago when I was on a mini-kick of novels
featuring invented languages, and it arrived in the mail the same day as David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas,
but I never got around to it. Your pick allowed me an excuse to finally crack it open, and as I'm sure
should be clear from my first post, I loved it.  But I'm really looking forward to these discussions with
you, the rest of the staff, and the readers, because curiously, none of my friends—all of whom are
literary nerds to one degree or another—seem to have read the thing, and the two people I know who
tried were turned off early on by the language.

Now, I love constructed languages.  I'm a big artificial-reality dork, and while a lot of invented
languages strike me as arbitrary and gimmicky, I think when they're well done, they can add a
tremendous amount of depth and complexity to a text, as well as whole new layers of meaning. 
Sometimes they can be pulled off in a very simple way; Gene Wolfe's Book Of The New Sun series,
which I mentioned before, made a language that sounded new simply by repurposing obscure
English vocabulary and Latin loan-words.  Other times, it can be exceptionally complex, as with the
Nadsat slang used in A Clockwork Orange; I found the book, on first read, to be terribly challenging
(though worthwhile) for this reason, because Anthony Burgess' street argot contained completely
new vocabulary, strange rhyming phrases, and references that were alien to me.  Only the fact that
Nadsat had an essentially English-language structure and syntax let me get through it.

By contrast, I didn't find Riddley Walker's future-Kentish all that hard to understand.  Most of it was
just a quirky phonetic English that was easy enough to decipher by reading "aloud" in my head, and
the few times new pieces of vocabulary appeared, I found them pretty simple to suss out in context. 
There were a few uses of altered meaning or new uses of familiar phrases that I didn't have a handle
on, but nothing that kept me from moving forward in the text. And of course, as has been mentioned,
a big part of the book's humor revolves around puns, ranging from the vulgar (Bernt Arse) to the
whimsical (Do It Over), in the place names, which I found both enjoyable and informative.  I've read
a ton of British literature, so I didn't have too much difficulty sorting out the place names with the
help of Hoban's map, but I could see how this might bug people not as familiar with English
geography.

The important question, though, isn't whether I found the language easy or hard; it's whether it
suited the narrative. I think it did, and on levels deeper than the obvious. At the surface, it resembles
the language used in a lot of post-apocalyptic literature: a degraded form of modern English, where
important clues as to the nature of the doomsday world are made available to us, the reader, but are
kept hidden from the characters, who have no context in which to place it. But it also functions nicely
as a reflection of the setting: to echo what Donna said so eloquently above,  Riddley Walker's world is
one of mystical revelation, religion made of tradition instead of understanding, adherence to
forgotten norms (witness the importance of the Punch and Judy show, without Punch)—in other
words, it is a perfect futuristic echo of the medieval period.  The language thus serves another
purpose, not of concealing, but revealing, of illuminating the past in service of the future.

Of course, it serves Hoban's purposes as well, as a writer:  it lets him go in on the secrets he wants to
reveal while masking the ones he wants to leave open (here I'd call attention to the multiple levels of
meaning possible in "Eusa"), but if it were that alone, it would risk the charge of being arbitrary. It's
in how the language both hides and shows, how it places the characters in shadow while showing the
world in sharp relief, that it works best, and makes it an improvement both stylistically and
practically over a telling of the story in more standard language.

Emily Withrow: Those initial e-mails Todd's referring to, I will admit, filled me with dread. The
references to the language made me think maybe I was about to open some dense thing written in an
alien language. But once I opened up and realized what was going on, I enjoyed the language, putting
on a strong Irish accent in my head to help me along. (This is before I got the Inland/England
connection. I'm like commenter The Howling fan Todd; I neglected to read the back of the book and
knew absolutely nothing going in.) The language certainly didn't help my speed, though. I'm a slow
reader to begin with, and I clocked it around three pages per minute.

What I loved about the language is how effectively it plants us in Riddley's world, mirroring his
attempts to grasp at something just beyond his understanding, with a sense at every step that more
could be discovered with a little digging. It not only "slows the reader down to Riddley's rate of
comprehension," as Hoban says in the afterword, but also captures the shortcomings of the society,
significantly limiting what they're able to unearth.

The "straight passage" is a crucial moment, I believe. For those missing pieces here and there, it
grounds the Eusa story in something concrete, and though we've known it all along, quite plainly
puts forward the severity of the gap between our world and theirs. This moment both pulled me
closer to Riddley's world in terms of pathos, and firmly planted me outside of that world. Without the
magic of Riddley's language, the passage seemed almost naked to me, sad in its matter-of-factness.
Oh, I thought, I'm one of them, and so far away.

Tasha Robinson: I guess I'm glad my edition didn't have an afterword or a glossary, because it was
a welcome and personal revelation to me when I realized, three-quarters of the way through the
book, how the language was making me slow down and puzzle through what I was reading, and how
that process mirrored Riddley's painstaking struggle to set his words down on paper. Everyone above
seems to have assumed that everyone in Riddley's world speaks exactly as his words look on paper; I
didn't. He admits that most people in his world don't read or write, and he himself is a borderline
illiterate, sweating to capture his experiences because he knows he's on the edge of something
important—literally, in the sense that he's been nearby but apart as gunpowder was rediscovered and
humanity started clawing its way back toward killing the baby, and figuratively, in that he's
constantly working for his tels and connexions, trying to puzzle out what it all means. I got the sense
throughout that it's all on the tip of his tongue to say what it all means, why Punch kills the baby and
why people want to put the Shining Addom back together, and what both symbolize and signify—but
he's still young, and it's all a bit beyond him. Still, he hopes that by getting it all down laboriously in
text, he can pass it on to future generations, and maybe help them take that first step up from the
mud. Having Hoban spell all that out for me in an afterword would have taken some of the sentiment
and sorrow out of it for me.

Riddley Walker did remind me at times of A Clockwork Orange, which similarly delighted me but at
times frustrated me. I tend to be a fast reader, and I read faster when things get exciting. Clockwork
Orange and Riddley Walker both stymied me in that regard, by making me work for meaning. And
they both earned my respect for it—they're both beautifully crafted and consistent in the richness,
texture, and symbolism of their created languages, but they're also both from crafty writers who want
people concentrating instead of skimming. Good for them.

Still, Riddley reminded me more of another book that uses debased language to convey the limits of
the author's intellect, and the strain he puts into every page: Flowers For Algernon. As with the
"dumb Charlie" segments of that book, Riddley Walker engendered an automatic sympathy in me for
the good fight that the narrator is fighting. Meaning is hard. Communication is hard. And yet it's so
crucial that it's worth all the sweat and tears that go into it. That's what we get out of the form
of Riddley Walker that we wouldn't have gotten from a plain-text version, and I wouldn't have it any
other way.

https://www.avclub.com/riddley-walker-thoughts-on-language-1798219802
A FEW THOUGHTS ON RUSSELL HOBAN’S ‘RIDDLEY
WALKER’
Joanne M. Weselby | https://magpiecws.wordpress.com/2014/08/30/a-few-thoughts-on-russell-hobans-riddley-
walker-study-notes/

Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker is wrought with struggles and conflicts. These present themselves in a
multitude of ways. The first of these, and the most obvious, is the readers’ (and characters’) battle to decipher
the text’s unique dialect/lexis. Plurality and ambiguity of meanings are deliberately created by Hoban in his
chosen language, dubbed ‘Riddleyspeak’ by Will Self in the introduction to the twentieth-anniversary edition
of the novel.

The only familiar aspects retained in Hoban’s post-apocalyptic setting are those which reinforce and
compliment the sense of primal dereliction and regression. A good example is the presence of hash, not only as
a recreational drug, but as a form of payment for the travelling show men within the primitive society. Hash, in
fact, plays a vital role in Riddley’s world. It reinforces the hierarchy within their community that places the
‘Eusa show’ men firmly at the top.

This makes sense, as they are in the business of ‘promoting a government through collective access to
narratives of dreams and dreams of narratives’, and hash is a ‘reverie-producing substance’ which encourages
lateral thought and skewed interpretations. Self describes hash-ingesting as an ‘Iron Age sort of thing to do’
due to hash’s elemental feel, ‘as if it were the earth itself’.

Use of the word ‘rizla’ firmly anchors Hoban’s link between Kent in our time (‘rizla’ being the leading
cigarette paper brand in 1974 (and still in 2010)) and the post-nuclear holocaust Kent Riddley’s community
inhabits. Hoban achieves this by keeping the original names. Present-day readers would also recognise
references within the formula for the ‘1 Littl 1’ to sulphur and charcoal, and to the desolate, damaged ‘Punch’
puppet that Riddley finds at Widders Dump. However, all the other references made in the text must be
deciphered by the reader, mirroring the characters’ relationship with their disjointed world.

Experimental language of this kind has been created in literature before. For his novel A Clockwork Orange,
Burgess devised a language known as ‘Nadsat’. Another example, ‘Newspeak’, was created by Orwell
for 1984  as a form of commentary on mass-societal control. These linguistic concoctions provide an
interesting contrast with one another, because in all three texts language is used to limit, bias and complicate
the collective consciousness of both the readers and the subjects themselves (the characters).

‘Newspeak’ shares some of the peculiarities of ‘Riddleyspeak’: their words are interchangeable as verbs,
adverbs, adjectives and nouns. So, ‘think’ suffices as both noun and verb, rendering the word ‘thought’
redundant. Similarly, ‘knife’ also acts as verb and noun, so that ‘cut’ is no longer required.

‘Newspeak’ has the same tendency to disregard unnecessary variation words. So, just as ‘Riddleyspeak’
dismisses the entire lexical range (e.g. ‘small’, ‘petite’, ‘miniscule’, etc.) and simply retains one word (e.g.
‘littl’), or scraps all but the simplest term (‘farness’ instead of ‘distance’), ‘Newspeak’ does the same, using
prefixes and suffixes to determine the scale of variation (e.g. ‘ungood’ instead of ‘bad’; ‘uncold’ instead of
‘warm’, ‘pluscold’ or ‘doublepluscold’ instead of ‘very cold’; ‘goodest’ instead of ‘best’).

In 1984, Big Brother’s governmental ‘Ministry of Peace’ is abbreviated in ‘Newspeak’ to ‘Minipax’; Hoban’s
‘Riddleyspeak’ similarly abbreviates the phrase ‘true facts from the Ministry’ to ‘trufax from the Mincery’. Of
course, in 1984, the title ‘Ministry of Peace’ is an ironic euphemism, seen as the ‘Minipax’ controls Oceania’s
military power, and is really the ‘Ministry of War’. This creates a coincidental but intriguing echo alongside
another phrase used in Riddley Walker containing the word ‘pax’. ‘Sharna pax’, which literally means ‘sharpen
the axe’, reinforces the aggressive connotations of the governmental body literally being ‘the Mincery’ – as far
as the Eusa folk are concerned, they represent the slaughterhouse and the executioner, who would like nothing
more than to stick their ‘heds on poal[s]’.

In both texts, language is used by those in authority to control its users. In 1984 Big Brother effectively re-
writes Oceania’s history again and again in order to fabricate an eternal war. When going into war with
Eurasia, history is re-written to declare that Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia. Riddley
Walker demonstrates a similar tendency to attempt the alteration of history. Just like in 1984, written records
cannot be relied upon to provide the absolute truth. A ‘Eusa show’ man attempts to rid Eusa of the blame of
creating the ‘1 Big 1’ and using it as a weapon of war, despite the teachings of ‘Eusa 18’ which specifically
name Eusa and Mr Clevver as the bringers of the ‘Bad Time’, guilty of friendly fire and war crimes beyond
description.

However, the elimination of words from the ‘Newspeak’ language that are considered undesirable is a more
malicious act than any utterance in ‘Riddleyspeak’ could describe, despite the savagery of the primitive clan
when compared to the clean and clinical Orwellian Ministries. For example, the word ‘free’ is stripped of its
political connotations in a bid to eliminate freedom itself. So, in ‘Newspeak’ the speaker is unable to express
the concept of freedom of speech; political freedom; the freedom to disagree. It merely serves to describe the
absence of something (as in ‘the garden is free of weeds’), which is ironic when you consider the absence of
the freedom of the speakers of ‘Newspeak’.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity and determinism explores the concept that human thought
can be limited – and even determined – by the language of the thinker. Sapir, the promoter of linguistic
relativity, believed that the worlds in which different societies live are distinctly different, ‘not merely the
same world with different labels attached’. Because languages represent reality differently, speakers of
different languages perceive reality differently. Riddley Walker is full of examples of this philosophy. The
most intriguing of these (in my opinion) is the word ‘foller’, as it has no direct translation. ‘Follerme’ has
similar connotations to ‘influence’ and ‘power’, but its other main usage indicates the act of following, which
is essentially a submissive act. Sapir would argue that this demonstrates a fundamental difference in the way
each society collectively perceives reality.

Whorf went further. Instead of merely assuming that language influences the thought and behaviour of its
speakers, he attempted to account for the ways in which differences in grammatical systems and language use
determined the way their speakers perceive the world. He believed that ‘the world is presented in a
kaleidoscope flux of impressions, which has to be organised by… the linguistic systems of our minds’. His
understanding of how we do this suits the structuralist approach well. Whorf wrote that we ‘cut nature up,
organise it into concepts, and ascribe significances [to it]’. However, when we do this, we enter into an
agreement to organise it in a way that ‘holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns
of our language’. This is known as ‘linguistic determinism’.

The idea that the use of certain words may actually manipulate and influence the reality of the speaker is
directly addressed in Riddley Walker. Goodparley advises Ridley that words have a power all of their own –
‘theywl move things… theywl do things… put a name to something and youre beckoning’. The power that the
individual word has within any society is certain. Words are allocated this power when we give them
significance by using them to link ideas and concepts together.
Many structuralists support this view of language: as a complex system constructed from signs which can be
broken down and examined. An orthodox approach to structuralist theory requires belief that the individual
units of any system have meaning ‘only by virtue of their relations to one another’. This is to say that signs do
not have their own intrinsic, ‘substantial’ meaning, merely a ‘relational’ one.

The plot of Riddley Walker  as a whole, as well as some of the intrinsic legends/folklore of the society
portrayed, revolves around the concept of deciphering lost secrets and extracting hidden information by
forming links between concepts and ideas. This can often go wrong due to obvious problems with interpreting
signs from the distant past, using an incompatible linguistic system to do so. Riddley Walker is riddled with
plurality, ambiguity and confusion, and is thus difficult to interpret and examine.

Often in Riddley Walker, characters use incorrect terms or are without an appropriate word (signifier) to
describe the concept (signified). A poignant example of this is given by Riddley, upon examination of the lump
of iron which crushed his father, saying: ‘my dad ben kilt by some thing I dont even know the name of’.

However, the arbitrary nature of language ensures that the signifier of the sign is not fixed. In fact, if new
signifiers are agreed by the community using them, the old ones that they replace become redundant, as they
are no longer required to represent the signs.

So, the misinterpretation of historical names in Riddley Walker (whether these are place names or other nouns
in everyday use) may be an irrelevant fact, as the authenticity of the newly selected words is confirmed by
their agreed use within the community. The old names become redundant when the signifier (word) is no
longer associated to the signified (concept). For example, if the words ‘knowledgeable’, intelligent’ and
‘intellectual’ are no longer in use, and those particular combinations of letters and sounds become alien, then
they are no longer signifiers representing the ‘clevverness’ apparent in Riddley’s society. The same goes for
place names, such as ‘Fork Stoan’. There is nothing intrinsic to that area of land that dictates that it is
undoubtedly ‘Folkestone’, and their society’s use of the former name is as equally valid as our use of the latter.
Then again, Riddley reverts to the old name for ‘Canterbury’ because ‘the new name wernt no good it wer a
stanning in the mud name it dint have no zanting to it’. The new word (‘Cambry’) does not seem to hold the
same beauty and meaning for Riddley as the old one does (‘Canterbury’).

Jakobson would argue that when experimenting with language of this type, the usual relation between sign and
referent is disturbed, which allows the sign a certain independence as an object of value in itself’. He believed
that the poetic functioning of language ‘promotes the palpability of signs’ when their poetic function is
‘foregrounded’ in our attention. Jakobson believes that words are more than ‘counters in communication’ – the
words themselves have material qualities which should be appreciated.

Mukařovský reiterated his view, stating that the work of art is only perceived as such when it becomes a
‘systematic deviation from a linguistic norm’.

Saussure, however, taught that there were only two main ways, or patterns, in which units form relationships
within one another within a system. The first of these is known as a ‘syntagmatic relationship’, and it refers to
the linear relations between words and how their meanings are dictated by their position within a sentence. It is
crucial to examine their relationships within discourse, advises Klages, because here ‘ideas of time, linearity
and syntactical meaning are intertwined’.

Saussure noted that signs can also be stored in the human memory in ‘associative relationships’, or groupings.
Examples of these are apparent in literature primarily in the form of metaphors. ‘Associative relations’ are
important because they break patterns established in strictly grammatical, syntagmatic relations and allow for
the creation of new ways of linking units.
These links between concepts and ideas do not have to be linear and obvious. A good example is a word
existing in both our vocabulary and Riddley’s: ‘cunt’. Its use is illogical in many ways, as the female genitalia
is an organ which provides pleasure and brings new life (‘funny what peopl will use for a hard word… the
name of a pleasur thing and a place where new life comes out of’).

Structuralist critics would approach the analysis of this text as a whole by striving to ‘schematise the story in
diagrammatic form’, analysing the relationship between units. To achieve this, they must fence off the text’s
content in order to concentrate on its form. The focus here is placed on the relationships between various items
of the story, analysing examples of ‘parallelism, opposition, inversion [or] equivalence’.

So, for example, Riddley and his father create an inversion as he is killed (a fall from high to low) and Riddley
rises from low to high (by coming of age and replacing his father). When Riddley kills the ‘woar out leader’,
the ‘far come close’ is taken by ‘the littl come big’. Later, as Riddley and Lissener are hunted by the
‘Mincery’, the ‘littl come big’ will be taken by the ‘far come close’.

There are examples of parallel links too, for example, between their society’s understanding of nuclear
physics, their mismatched, misunderstood religion and their initiation rituals during puberty.

Another way of interpreting these links is in terms of psychoanalytical criticism. Psychoanalytic criticism is a
form of literary criticism which uses some of the techniques of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of
literature.

The two approaches of analysis – structuralism and psychoanalysis – are complimentary to one another.
According to Eagleton, structuralism is the ‘modern inheritor of [the] belief that reality, and our experience of
it, are discontinuous with each other’, because, ‘like Freud, it exposes the shocking truth that even our most
intimate experience is the effect of a structure’.

Freud is the figurehead of modern psychoanalysis. His work depends on the notion of the ‘unconscious’, which
is the part of the mind beyond consciousness which has a strong influence upon our actions. However, the
unconscious is only one part of the three-part model of the psyche that Freud proposed.

Freud identified three levels of the personality – the ‘id’, which corresponds to the unconscious (the child); the
‘ego’, which relates to the consciousness (the adult); and the ‘super-ego’, which acts as the conscience (the
parent).

The ‘id’ is impulsive and childlike, unafraid to express its desires. However, these desires may be opposed by
another part of the self, on either moral or logical grounds (the super-ego and ego, respectively), and as such,
they are repressed.

However, Freud believed that these ‘repressed desires, fears or memories seek an outlet into the conscious
mind’ through dreams. He identified two processes by which real events or desires are transformed into dream
images: ‘condensation’ and ‘displacement’. These correspond to Saussure’s ‘syntagmatic’ and ‘associative’
groupings, although Freud’s ‘displacement’ and ‘condensation’ techniques originate from a different field of
literary criticism.

Lacan, another psychoanalyst who regarded the unconscious as ‘the nucleus of our being’, drew important
links which provided evidence that the unconscious is essentially linguistic in structure. Lacan provides a
happy medium between the two perspectives by reinterpreting Freud in light of structuralist and
poststructuralist theories, turning psychoanalysis from an essentially humanist theory into a poststructuralist
one.
He stated that Freud’s ‘dream work’ mechanisms, ‘condensation’ and ‘displacement’, also correspond to the
two basic poles of language identified by Jakobson: ‘metaphor’ and ‘metonymy’.

‘Condensation’ corresponds to metaphor in language, where one thing is condensed into another or a complex
meaning is condensed into a simpler one. ‘Condensation’ and ‘metaphor’ correspond to Saussure’s
‘syntagmatic relations’, which happen in a chain.

‘Displacement’ corresponds to the mechanism of metonymy in language, where one thing is replaced by
something corresponding to it or associated with it, evoking an image of the whole thing by naming a part of it.
This is similar to the ‘associative relations’ identified by Saussure.

The idea of the unconscious is actively explored, even pursued, in Riddley Walker, though the characters lack
the appropriate definition for the concept. It is given many names and definitions (for example, ‘the hart of the
chyld’, which is ‘that same and very thing what lives inside us and [is] afeart of being beartht’).

What they are trying to name is the origin of their shared dreams – the collective unconscious of the whole
community. Self states that Hoban’s text is an examination of what consciousness is, and an analysis of ‘the
confused collective dreams that humanity terms ‘history’’.

Frye goes further, seeing literature of this type as a displaced version of religion, leaning towards more
psychoanalytical interpretation. He reached the conclusion that literature is ‘not a way of knowing reality, but a
kind of collective utopian dreaming’, allowing the ‘collective subject of the human race’ to create archetypal
figures of universal significance.

It is certainly true that religious ideals of sin and redemption are approached in Riddley Walker. There are
obvious similarities between Addom’s hanging between the stag’s antlers and Jesus’ crucifixion. The ‘cross of
radiant light’ depicted in the painting of St. Eustace is misinterpreted by Goodparley as a confirmation of the
power they would have if the ‘clevverness’ that was once possessed by man could be reinstated, and its
importance in progressing their current society beyond the crudeness of the Iron Age.  There are obvious
similarities between names and ideas: between their Eusa and our Jesus, and between the Littl Shyning Man
the Addom and the biblical Adam. It is ironic, though, that our Jesus and their Eusa are inverted in their roles.
Modern Christianity teaches that Adam sinned by gaining knowledge from eating a stolen apple from the Tree
of Knowledge, and Jesus was our saviour who died on the cross for humanity’s sins. The idea of the tree being
‘the root of all evil’ is duplicated in Riddley’s mind as he considers the possibility that ‘wrongness [could]
hang therein the branches… the wrongness [could have] ben the 1 st frute of the tree’.

According to the primitive religious folklore of Riddley’s community, the ‘Addom’ is hung between the
antlers of ‘the Hart of the Wud’ and is torn in half by Eusa (written in ‘Eusa 13’). The ‘Addom’ becomes the
‘Littl Shyning Man’ because of Eusa’s attack. The ‘wite shadders’ that are created as he is torn apart are
reminiscent of those created by the ‘1 Big 1’ – their creation and use is the cataclysmic event that brought
about the ‘Bad Time’.

This act of violent separation is mirrored and echoed throughout the text. Just as ‘wite shadders’ are released
when the ‘Addom’ is divided and (in the description of the painting of St. Eustace) the crucifix of Christ
radiates light, the splitting of the atom releases large amounts of nuclear energy. It is implied that the
knowledge of how to split the atom was the downfall of the now-archaic society, as the massive destruction
caused by the ‘1 Big 1’ (the A-bomb) nearly wiped them out completely and stripped them of their modern
technology and luxuries. Just like the atomic potential of all matter to unleash a powerful, violent energy,
Granofsky noted that the source of all energy and power in Riddley Walker  can be traced back to the dormant
potentiality in everything.
This is not the only demonstration of conflict that psychoanalytical criticism would be interested in. Hoban’s
text is ripe with examples of sexually violent, generational and Oedipal conflict.

The ‘12th naming day’ ritual is a good example, as it highlights the boy’s potential to mature into the man; the
future father. Riddley’s entry into manhood is marked by an act of violence: the killing of a wild boar with a
spear. Upon doing this, Riddley acknowledges that it is the boar’s turn to die now, but that his time to die
would also come one day (‘your tern now, my tern later’).

Three days after his ‘12th naming day’, Riddley loses his father in a tragic accident. According to the logic of
guilt, the father has died because his son has become a man ready to take his place. His entrance into social
responsibility and sexual maturity coincides with the death, and exit, of his father.

His emerging identity as the community’s ‘connexions man’ seems to require the total extinction of his
father’s identity, which actually occurs – after the accident, Riddley’s father is physically unidentifiable (the
face of his corpse ‘mytve ben any body’).

The third event to dictate his pride of place within the community occurs as Riddley escorts his father’s body
to the funeral pyre (the ‘bye bye bump’). The leader of the ‘Bernt Arse dog pack’ chooses to die on Riddley’s
spear, thus reiterating the community’s expectation for Riddley to create a connection between these events.
The resulting ‘tel’ (also known as a ‘reveal’ or a ‘connexion’), provided by Reckman Bessup, interprets the
‘old woar out leader [being] took out by a boy what aint a boy no moar’ as ‘the far come close’ (the running
wolf) being taken out by ‘the littl come big’ (Riddley). Riddley is finally recognised as a man.

Goodparley also witnesses the extinction of his father’s identity, and is twice prevented from becoming a man.
On the first occasion, when Abel is ten years old (before he has entered puberty) a raiding party from Outland
kill his father and carry off his mother with the intention of raping her. Although Abel survives, he is denied
the chance to become a man. The Outland gang enacted the ‘primal Oedipal crime’ for him, denying him the
opportunity to do so (symbolically or otherwise).

On another occasion – Abel’s 12th naming day – Granser attempts to prevent the boy he has adopted from
becoming a man. He does this by subjecting Abel to a gang rape. After this ordeal, Abel is informed that
‘becaws [he] ben boyin on [his] 12th naming day… [he] wd have to wait a nother year befor [he] be come a
man’. In response, Abel knifes his surrogate father and leaves him for dead, violently enacting their Oedipal
conflict.

The power that all men within ’the Fools Circel’ desire is linked directly to father-son conflict by Riddley as he
stands near the epicentre of an atomic blast – ‘I fealt like that Power wer a Big Old Father I wantit it to do me
like Granser did Goodparley… let me be your boy, I thot’.

Granofsky noted that connections can also be made within the societal folklore to Oedipal or generational
conflict. One example made by Riddley to demonstrate the seriousness of the ‘Bad Time’ (in the aftermath of
atomic destruction) is a story detailing the cannibalisation of a child by its parents, and their ‘saving [of] the
heart for the clevver lookin bloak’ who helped them cook and eat their baby.

Another example is given in the ‘Punch & Pooty’ puppet show. Punch carries a big stick, which is clearly a
substitute phallus, and uses it to beat Pooty and their baby to death.

According to Frye, literature ‘springs from the collective subject of the human race itself’. Lévi-Strauss agreed
with this idea to a degree. He believed that the relations of meanings between ‘mythemes’ (mythical ‘signs’) in
myths was something inherent to the human mind. This led him to observe that is the ‘myths [that] think
themselves, through people’. Therefore, when studying a body of myth, we are looking less at its narrative
contents than at the universal mental operations which structure the myth itself. Lévi-Strauss believed that
these mental operations, such as making binary oppositions, are what myths are about.

Structuralist critics such as Lévi-Strauss maintain that as long as the structure of relations between the units
contained in the texts remains, it does not matter which items are selected. Specific details about characters do
not necessarily change or manipulate the story’s meaning. It is the way in which the units are placed (their
sequence) and their significance as individual ‘mythemes’ (individual units with symbolic meanings) that
dictates the story’s underlying message. Examination of morals, beliefs and understanding can be explored a
thousand different ways using the same basic group of symbolic units (the ‘mythemes’ Lévi-Strauss describes).

For example, compare Riddley Walker with Dr David Lurie, Coetzee’s protagonist in Disgrace. Riddley’s
vehement protection of the white people (the ‘Eusa folk’); the fall from grace of the white people who were
once powerful (as they possessed the ‘cleverness’, the ‘1 st knowing’ and ‘the Nos. of the Master Chaynjis’); the
treatment suffered by the now-powerless white people at the hands of those considered by them to be inferior
(as they are bred and kept imprisoned like animals, treated without kindness or respect, tortured for
information by the ‘Mincery’ men); his unexplainable longing to understand how it felt to be raped (he ponders
how he wanted the ‘Big Old Father… to do [him] like Granser done Goodparley’); his unexplained affinity
with other animals, particularly with granting them the gift of death (the ‘Bernt Arse’ dog pack; the ‘old
leader’ that died on his spear) – these are some of the individual elements incorporated into the narrative
structure of Riddley Walker. They influence the underlying symbolic meaning of the entire text, and this alters
depending on the way the units are combined.

However, rearrange these individual units of meaning – alter the structure – and you can reconstruct an entirely
different story. David Lurie also vehemently protects the white people (in this case, whites in post-apartheid
South Africa); here, too, the white people are experiencing a loss of power (as reverse colonisation sees the
white people stripped of their land and rights at the hands of the black South Africans); the white people,
again, suffer at the hands of those they considered as inferior and conquerable (Lucy is raped, David is beaten
and set on fire, the farm is no longer a safe place); a certain longing to understand how it feels to be in the
position of a rape victim (as David tries to imagine being Lucy, as he already understands how it feels to be the
rapist); a curious and unexplainable pull of sympathy towards the dogs (allowing them to be treated with
respect and love – significantly so in death, where the ending of their lives is seen as an act of kindness), and
yet, the two texts could not be more different.

Learning to read Riddley

By Anna Lawrence Pietroni
Posted: 16/10/2012 13:50

In Riddley Walker, thousands of years in our future, the people of Inland are trying to drag
themselves out of the mud. Theirs is a post-nuclear society hungry for a story to make sense of what’s
happened. They have no creation myth, only hellish narratives of destruction played out in the Eusa
Story and an inherited, tentative dream-fragment of ‘boats in the air and picters on the wind’.
English as we know it has been worn down and reconfigured, but while Riddley’s world may be
stumbling through a new Dark Age, his language isn’t primitive. Riddleyspeak is direct, economical
and energetic; we roadit, we meatit, we Norfed, we Eastit; a command is a ‘Do It’; leadership is
‘follerme’. The vocabulary of survival is snappy and efficient, fitting with the brutality of Inland life
where you’ll get eviscerated by wild dogs if you stray from the crowd and ‘Sharna pax and get the
poal’ is less of a nursery rhyme than a prediction.

Riddleyspeak is at once familiar and strange. We have to slow our reading right down if we are to
give ourselves any chance of understanding it in full. Riddley is ‘walking his riddels’ on paper and we
have to read at a similarly steady pace, stopping from time to time to pick up a stone on the road or
taking a moment to catch our breath. At first we may need to read the words aloud to ourselves to get
the sense of them. Hoban provides us with a glossary and explains, for example, that ‘pirntowt’ is
‘printout’. But much of the figurative language in Riddley Walker (blip, datter, programmit) refers to
pre-conflagration technology of which Inlanders have no direct knowledge, so finding out that
‘pirntowt’ is ‘printout’ is of limited use: Hoban doesn’t spoon-feed us with a meaningful translation.
For a start, ‘pirntowt’ is a verb rather than a noun. We have to work out for ourselves what ‘pirntowt’
means to Riddley and deduce that ‘I pirntowt’ might mean something like ‘I concluded’. If we simply
‘translate’ the word, we end up with only partial understanding.

We’re justified in beginning to read Riddley Walker this way, moving from word to word and trying
to reconcile Riddley’s language with our own. We have to learn Riddley’s language one way or
another, and starting with vocabulary, at the level of the word or phrase, is one way to ‘acquire’ the
knowledge we need to find our way about. Hoban explains how some names came about: Belnot
Phist is a twisted-up Nobel Physicist; Belnot’s father, 1stoan Phist is a worn-down reference to
Einstein. We could work our whole way through the text like this, untwisting ‘Reckman Bessup’ (who
gives Riddley ‘comping station’ after his father’s death) into ‘a man who reckons up numbers as best
he can’. But this word-for-word method won’t serve us well. The just-enough-to-get-by, phrase-book
approach would keep us moving through the text with a thumb in the glossary, reducing meaning to
a series of transactions (swapping words in and out), as if communication were about words alone,
each carrying a fixed, single value. If we continue to read this way, we’re in danger of treating
Riddley’s text in the manner of Abel Goodparley, the smooth-talking Pry Mincer of Inland who
moves from ‘form’ to ‘fents’ playing out ‘trufax from the Mincery’ in a puppet show. When he shares
the Legend of St Eustace with Riddley, he says with unwarranted confidence, ‘I can as plain mos of
it.’ As Goodparley’s way of reading shows, when you try to ‘as plain’ a text, you mainly get it wrong.

The Legend of St Eustace is startling and disorientating even before Goodparley starts his exposition.
The Legend is written in standard English so, after full immersion in Riddleyspeak for over half of
the book, we’re suddenly plucked out of one current and plunged into another. What’s clear and
fluent to us as Riddley’s readers is at best opaque to Riddley and Goodparley, but Goodparley
approaches the text as if it were encrypted and esoteric (‘seakert’). He decodes, breaking the text
down into dislocated units and mistranslates at every opportunity. It’s a brittle, fragmented way of
reading. He takes ‘hamlet’ and reads ‘little pigs’; he takes ‘St’ and reads ‘sent’. He interprets ‘the open
sea’ as ‘an open see meaning a look see’: his own vision isn’t just blinkered, it’s utterly distorted and
he’s reading to find evidence to confirm his way of seeing the world. He reads for allegory and for
alchemy. He wants ‘teckernogical progers’ and he’s trawling the text for clues about how to make the
1 Big 1. (The two boys in the Legend, for example, become Goodparley’s ‘catwl twis’). He’s hunting
for a list of ‘gready mints’ and his is a greedy, grasping way of (mis)reading: “What can I get from this
text?” not “What might this text have to give?”

Russell Hoban describes how he tries in Riddley Walker to cram as many meanings into one word as
he can (so Riddley is the ‘loan of his name’ at the beginning of the book – he’s the only person
bearing this name, but it’s not fully his yet. He’ll only come to own it as he starts to live out what it
means). If we take our lead from Hoban, Riddley’s spelling should slow us down. For instance, when
Riddley’s world begins to destabilise, ‘It seamt like the worl begun to roal.’ If we read the Goodparley
way, pulling out a word and translating it, we replace ‘seamt’ with ‘seemed’. But in doing so we empty
it out, replacing ‘seamt’ with a smooth but hollow shell of a word that we can slide comfortably over.
Our ‘seem’ is not Riddley’s ‘seam’: he is not holding up an idea of the world with one hand and
comparing it to a children’s toy in the other. If a ‘seam’ is the stitching together of two pieces of fabric
to create something new, Riddley’s two thoughts are so closely stitched that they form a new single
piece of thought and experience, with the join still there if you look closely enough. But that’s not all:
a ‘seam’ is also a scar; it’s a wrinkle, or a vein of coal pressed between the folds of the land. It’s
evidence of woundedness and it’s where we mine, where we find our fuel, our energy. It’s all of these
things, a comment on the very nature of metaphor, packed up into ‘seam’.

Becoming fluent in Riddleyspeak means not smoothing out what might feel like bumps in the text. If
we slip too quickly past the ‘yes’ in Riddley’s ‘onlyes’, we miss the endorsement folded into ‘the
onlyes power is no power’ and the not-so-much coded as screaming ‘No’ at the core of the ‘clevver’
search for knowledge, for the ‘Nos of the rain bow’ that ultimately leads to the devastating 1 Big 1. If
we get too accustomed to reading ‘No.’ as ‘number’ we may not be mistranslating, but we create a
text that’s blunted and less nuanced.

Along with words folded into other words, there are little spaces in the text that speak, and it would
be all too easy to miss them. It matters that Riddley writes ‘be come’ not ‘become’: he unhooks words
from each other and gives them room to move about. We are used to bearing a word in a certain way
because we know the shape of it and how the weight of it will settle, but when Riddley separates
familiar words to make a new phrase, the weight shifts and we have to carry the phrase more
consciously. The phrase means something different: the words within it have a different value and,
together, a different resonance. When the central quest in RW is to ‘the hart of the wud its the hart of
the wanting to be’, there is a hospitality, a homecoming, in this new phrase ‘be come’. The space
matters and if we listen to it, we hear Riddley’s longing all the more clearly.

Sometimes the space operates in a subtly different way: it doesn’t so much transfigure meaning as
show us how Riddley’s world shapes his thinking.Take ‘to gether’: it’s important that we ‘read’ and
sustain the gap between the words. ‘To gether’ is related to our word, but it’s not just an uncoupled
version of ‘together’. Riddley is a forager from How Fents so ‘gethering’ is a means of sustenance and
of survival. In that ‘to gether’ there is a gathering of scattered parts, a harvesting. His ‘to gether’ is his
way of life; it’s not the same as my ‘together.’ 

We must also resist the temptation to use synonyms as a short-cut to deeper understanding. ‘To lose
out of memberment’, for example, is not ‘to forget’. My objection is more than resistance to recasting
the rhythm of a sentence; it’s not about a nuanced difference of degree (say, between Hoban’s
double-cream and my skimmed milk): just as ‘hamlet’ does not mean ‘little pig’, when Riddley writes
about ‘losing out of memberment’, he doesn’t mean ‘forgetting’. In the destruction (rather than
creation) myth, ‘Why the dog wont show its eyes’, the man and woman ‘los out of memberment the
shapes of nite’. This isn’t absent-mindedness, it’s a profound alienation from something primal in
their own nature, from ‘1st knowing’. Inland, the communities are either ‘form’ or ‘fents’ (only the
dyers and charcoal berners live outside the bounds). They’re farmers or they’re foragers – either way
they only travel armed and ‘crowdsafe’, then retreat into fortified compounds at night. To ‘keap in
memberment’ is more than to remember; it’s to keep something within bounds and alive. To ‘lose out
of memberment’ is to cast out into the wild night. If, like Goodparley, we look for equivalence,
trading one word for another, (‘that for you and what for me?’), we risk reading narrow (as distinct
from reading close).
Even when we become fluent in Riddleyspeak, his own ‘spel’ sounds out the roll-call of his themes.
Meaning is sustained as echo through a sequence of separate, repeated words sounding out across
the narrative: I notice ‘hoal’ and ‘poal’, for instance, because they don’t look like ‘hole’ or ‘pole’, and
then because their rhyme calls out back and forth across the text. The hoal and the poal are never
good places to be: Brooder Walker, Riddley’s dad, dies in a ‘hoal’ crushed by a ‘girt old black
machine’ when the winch slips. The Ardship of Cambry is imprisoned in a hoal (‘Sharna pax and get
the poal, when the Ardship of Cambry comes out of the hoal’). Hoals are where you wait before you
die, and the poal (a tool of government) is waiting, ready for your head: ‘These heads ben telling’.
The hoal and poal echo in Riddley’s craving to ‘jus see 1 thing clear the woal of whats in it’ and there
is an ultimately liberating acceptance in Riddley’s realisation that ‘you cant stay hoalt up’ as he steps
out onto the road, ‘in fear and tremmering only not running a way.’ ‘Riddley Walker’ has become his
‘oan’ name’: he’s independent and he’s not the ‘loan’ of it any more.

I thought at first to compare Riddleyspeak with the sacred, abused Eusa Folk, the descendents of the
‘Puter Leat’, responsible for the 1 Big 1 and subsequent Bad Time. The Eusa Folk look like they’ve
been ‘shapit qwick and rough out of clay’ with ‘faces like bad dreams’ and ‘every kynd of crookitness’.
But this comparison would suggest that Riddleyspeak is somehow a mutant variant on a norm, a
nightmarish ‘crookitness’ that needs to be put straight. Ultimately it’s not Riddleyspeak which
resembles the misshapen Eusa Folk, but Goodparley’s own ‘terpitations’ which operate like genetic
misreadings, like warped coding. Goodparley fears words. He acknowledges their power: “Words!
Theywl move things you know theywl do things. Theywl fetch.” If we read fearfully like Goodparley -
fixing meaning and trading words like cuts of hash, eliding differences and sliding over (rather than
acknowledging) the parts we don’t understand, seeing the text as ‘crookit’ and trying to make it
‘strait’ - we’re left with bad translation. It’s a mannered reading that’s controlled and pragmatic,
depleting both text and reader. Riddley himself offers a different way. A ‘Riddley’ reading doesn’t try
to ‘as plain’. He comes ‘in emtyness and ready to be fult.’ I think Iwl yes with that.
First published in The Reader (journal of The Reader Organisation at the University of Liverpool), No. 44 Winter 2011

http://russellhoban.org/essay/learning-to-read-riddley

Riddley Walker, Riddles Included

By Ron Robinson

Posted: 05/06/2016 17:28

It is perfectly possible to read and  enjoy Russell Hoban’s masterpiece Riddley Walker without

solving or even being aware of the riddles woven into the story. You struggle with the language for a
time until its phonetic nature becomes clear, and you congratulate yourself for having passed a
barrier that few casual readers breach. You struggle with the mysterious myths and legends that
abound but fasten inevitably upon what seems to be an answer to Riddley’s comings and goings
about “Inland,” his name for the future dystopia of Kent. It is all about the rediscovery of the secret
of gunpowder, the first step in mankind’s march to the suicidal beat of technology toward a second
(or third, or fourth) “one big one” destroying “the world as we know it.”  You understand now. You’ve
stuck in your thumb and pulled out a plum; what a good boy (or girl) you are!  You have entered that
elite group of those who actually “grasped” Riddley Walker. Or have you?
There is that ending.  All that business about Punch and the piglet baby.  It seems in a way
unnecessary, a letdown. But never mind, the novel is, after all, that brass ring of those who ride the
carousel of popular literature — “a good read.” 

Still, there is something about the story that keeps drawing you back.  You read it again. The second
or third or fourth time through perhaps you become aware of a shimmering, intriguing,  consistent
suggestiveness behind all the tales and lyrics that occupy so much of the story. Perhaps you are now
ready for the final great revelation that Hoban has planned for the truly knowledgeable and
observant, the even better boys (or girls).

Reality is ungraspable. For convenience we use a limited-reality consensus in which work can
be done, transport arranged, and essential services provided. The real reality is something
else—only the strangeness of it can be taken in and that’s what interests me: the strangeness
of human consciousness; the strangeness of life and death; the strangeness of what the living
and the dead are to one another; and the strangeness of ideas . . . that seem to have been with
us from long before the stories of them happened.

The real reality, the flickering of seen and unseen actualities, the moment under the moment,
can’t be put into words; the most that a writer can do—and this is only rarely achieved—is to
write in such a way that the reader finds himself in a place where the unwordable happens off
the page. Most of the time it doesn’t happen but trying for it is part of being the hunting-and-
finding animal one is.
(Russell Hoban, foreword to The Moment Under the Moment)

If reality is “ungraspable,” as Hoban suggests, what is it you have grasped? Will you open your hand
and discover, as Easyer will at the end of the novel, not a real baby but merely a painted puppet made
of wood? What kind of trick is this?

After laboring over the first draft of the novel, a not-insignificant 500 pages, Hoban spent another
long period, five years in all, coming up with the revised version as finally published. Five years doing
what?  Well, reworking the language, obviously, but it seems apparent, also restructuring the novel,
cutting half its length. Perhaps taking the real reality off the page, but still leaving it in the aura of the
novel for astute readers to discover?

That, at least, is the premise of Farring Seakert Sailor, Darrell Emmel’s remarkable reading of
the novel, subtitled Unriddling Riddley Walker. (Ex Machina Publishing, on Kindle). Having
conceived of the idea of instilling this novel with an “off the page” reality, Emmel suggests, Hoban
conceived of a kind of “reality” that would be consistent with the culture of which Riddley was a part,
a foraging band,  or in anthropological terms, a band of hunter-gatherers. 

Riddley Walker presents the reader with a foreshortened view of the story of mankind, in which the
various waves that more or less sequentially washed over the planet — the hunter-gatherers (the
“roaders”), the agriculturalists (“formers”), and the statists, pseudo-technological, proto-
industrialists (the “Ram”) — all exist together, overlapping each other and providing the story with
much of its combustible conflict. Riddley himself, at twelve years of age, labors in each of these
realms, but it seems obvious from the first page that the “roading” tradition is doomed.  He himself
has killed the last boar in this part of Kent, so that, lacking wild game, roaders will have to “sing for
their supper” like anyone else.  Not only do he and his compatriots work in the dangerous pits from
which they extract the iron from a long-past industrial age, but he inherits from his father the semi-
official  role of “connexion man,” a kind of local translator of Ram propaganda. In the “connexion
man” we recognize a common tactic as one culture takes over another, appropriating the aspects of
the “lower” culture to fill parallel but quite different roles in the “higher.”  In his own culture, Riddley
and his father Brooder would have been “reveal men,” or as we might say, shamans. The “tel” woman
Lorna Elswint recognizes Riddley’s particular talents — his super-sensitivity to “signs,” the emotion
(and motion) he displays in reaction to forces unseen, his tendency to go into a trance, as he did in
his first “connexion” following his father’s death — all of which sustain this interpretation. 

Hoban might have chosen the “real reality” of any of the other hunter-gatherers known to man—the
American Indians of the northern plains, the bushmen of Africa, the aborigines of Australia, all those
who lived off wild plants and animals, moved from one camp to another throughout the year, and sat
around a campfire at night watching the sparks rise up toward the great panorama of stars, telling
stories of creatures and beings who seemed to inhabit the nighttime sky. But Hoban was an
American expatriate, an Anglophile who had made himself familiar not only with the canon of
English and European literature, but also with the mythologies of England and Europe. And
predominant among the mythologies was that of the Celts, those mysterious people who arose in the
Mideast and spread across Europe prior to the rise of the “civilizations” of Greece and Rome, and
had perhaps arrived at their “last stand” in the British Isles, notably in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.

Hoban was acquainted with the great works that conveyed the culture of the Celts, including Robert
Graves’ The White Goddess, Welsh bards, Taliesin, and those who, like William Blake, used the
ancient Celtic faith to turn Christianity on its head.  Of particular interest to Hoban were the Celtic
bards who used riddles to refer to their tradition. The Celts were known by the Greeks and Romans
as strange barbaric people who spoke in riddles that obscured their culture from the uninitiated;
even Julius Caesar spoke of it in his well-known work on the Gauls. In fact, the Celtic faith lay in
direct opposition to the patriarchal religions of the Mediterranean, which did everything possible to
demonize such beliefs. 

Moreover, Hoban seems familiar with the eco-radical writings appearing in America and elsewhere
in the 1960s and 1970s, which, like the writings of Paul Shepard, embraced the notion that since the
agricultural revolution, mankind has ceased to see itself as part of the ecology of the planet, facing
extinction as a result.  Shepard’s seminal work, Man in the Landscape, An Historic View of the
Esthetics of Nature, seems to have been a quite possible influence particularly, leading to such
riddling tales as The Lissener and the Other Voyce Owl of the Worl  and Why the Dog Wont Show
Its Eyes. The last wild boar, at the beginning of the novel, is reflected in the Punch show at the end,
in which Punch has become the boar,  Judy the sow, and the baby a piglet. Riddley knows that in
losing the boar, they have lost something essential to their well-being,  both physically and
spiritually. His whole progress toward the end of the novel might be christened Coming Home to the
Pleistocene, the name given Shepard’s posthumous collection of writings. 

The center of the faith that Riddley secretly follows is Mother Night, “She who has her woom in
Cambry,” but also her other manifestations. In a talk given at a conference on the short stories of
Walter de La Mare, Hoban identifies those alternate forms: 

“In Robert Graves’s The White Goddess and in the work of other mythographers you can
read of the triple aspect of women as perceived by ancient primitive males and recorded by
modern scholarly ones: she is successively the maiden, the mother, and the hag.
(Hoban,“Three Short Stories by Walter de la Mare,” Paper. Conference on Walter de la Mare. King’s
College, University of London. 7 November 1996.)
The version of “the hag” in Riddley Walker is deliciously bizarre: “Aunty,” an unforgettable
personification of death. 

The “triple aspect” of women in The White Goddess reflects the phases of the moon, but Mother
Night is more than a moon goddess; she encompasses all aspects of the night sky, including the
moonless ones in which the stars predominate. In his rendering of the Celtic star-myths, also probed
by Graves, Hoban is at once most brilliant and most obscure.  Readers may not realize that stars are
not mentioned at all in the work, except obliquely in reference to the “Sarvering Gallack Seas” of the
time well past when “sky boats” travelled through the firmament. Except for the full moon on the
night of Riddley’s naming, the skies are overcast. Even a relatively incurious reader must ask why.
Emmel’s answer is that secret constellations of an ancient zodiac, each one constituting a rune,  are
at the very heart of the story.  The bag of “yeller stoan” that Riddley removes from the pocket of the
“farring seakert” sailor contains more than just the final ingredient needed for Goodparley’s and
Granser’s “one little one.” It holds what haunts Riddley about the dog’s “yeller eyes.”  It symbolically
holds the significant stars of the night sky that have been so notably missing elsewhere. It is
Taliesin’s “crane-bag well-filled.”

Every thing has a shape and so does the nite only you cant see the shape of night nor you cant
think it. If you put your self right you can know it. Not with knowing in your head but with
the 1st knowing. Where the number creaper grows on the dead stones and the groun is sour
for 3 days digging the nite stil knows the shape of it self tho we don’t. Some times the nite is
the shape of a ear only it aint a ear we know the shape of. Lissening back for all the souns
whatre gone from us. The hummering of the dead towns and the voyces before towns ben
there. Befor the iron ben and fire ben only littl. Lissening for whats coming as wel.
(17) 

A star legend without stars? Is that even possible? For Hoban it seems not only possible, but
necessary. In another portion of his paper on Walter de la Mare, Hoban cites his criteria for a good
story:

My favorite kind of story is the smoky evocation at which de La Mare excels: with his
perceptions of the perhaps, his attention to the whispers of the unseen and his recognition of
those realities not always recognized, he spins invisible webs to catch the unspoken.
(Op. Cit.)

The unspoken in Riddley Walker is a mythology of ancient constellations. The stars are absent in the
skies because they are present in the story itself. 

This is not the place to furnish all the connective tissues for Emmel’s complex but persuasive
argument.  For that you must go to his book. There you will be given guidance enough to find hints of
“the first knowing” which of course can not be told in words. 
Emmel, Darrell. Farring Seakert Sailor: Unriddling Riddley Walker. Ex Machina Publishing. 2016. [ISBN 978-0-
944287-30-9  Available on Kindle.  $4.99.]

Riddley
The breadth and depth of Hoban's reading in human ecology, psychology, anthropology, and
literature are evident in his novel. Ron cites Shepard's Man in the Landscape book, but note also his
Tender Carnivore & the Sacred Game for parallels. The American edition of Jung's
Psychological Types, appearing in 1971, may have suggested the name "Brooder" for Riddley's father,
as Darrell notes. Clearly, symbols and signs in the novel show that Hoban was aware of Gimbutas'
work on the civilization of the goddess. David Erdman's The Illuminated Blake and S. Foster
Damon's A Blake Dictionary also appeared just before Hoban began Riddley Walker and may have
influenced the novel's cast of characters and their portrayals. Hoban must indeed have been a
voracious reader.

Gayle Emmel

Friday, 10 June 2016 - 9:43pm

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