The Middle Ages as Ludic Space in Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker

While the Medieval Era is generally acknowledged to be a historical period, a ‘time before’ preceding modernity, the Middle Ages have also been appropriated in various media and to different ends as a fantastical ‘elsewhere,’ a spatialized ahistorical region of time that holds the potential to be visited, revisited, and reflected upon. In particular, the contested subset of medievalism, that is neomedievalism, is largely agreed upon by medievalists to engage with the medieval in a ludic manner, treating it as a site in time and space that can be playfully deconstructed and reorganized by cutting and pasting medieval fragments and reassembling them into new wholes, while rejecting historical accuracy, temporal linearity, and employing postmodernist strategies of irony, pastiche, bricolage, anachronism and fragmentation in self-reflexive ways. In this context, this paper aims to analyse Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980) as a neomedievalist novel, where the medieval legend of Saint Eustace is deconstructed to constructive ends, functioning as a site of revisitation and as a ludic space that engenders new narratives and origin myths. The proliferation of multiple interpretations of the legend is tightly connected to the ambiguous nature of “Riddleyspeak,” the broken dialect of the postapocalyptic world in which the novel is set, whose lack of one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signified leads the creation of wordplays, riddles and puns that give rise to new, potentially subversive meanings that have serious consequences on the characters’ worldviews and practices.