Gut Punch: Ethical Education through Carnivalesque Shock in Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker

Multiple scholars criticize (post-)apocalyptic narratives for their tendency to produce defeatist sentiments in the readers, hindering affirmative politics and action in response to anthropogenic issues by mourning over a world ruined beyond any possibility of remediation (Garrard 2004; Haraway 2016; Heise 2008; Malvestio 2022). For this reason, arguments have been made in favor of moving from elegiac narratives toward ones celebrating affirmation and laughter to promote an ecological awareness (Branch 2014; Heise 2016; Seymour 2018). At first glance, Russell Hoban’s post-apocalyptic Riddley Walker (1980) seems to comply with the genre’s pessimistic tones. The novel presents landscapes still devastated centuries after a nuclear event that has brought civilization to ruins. Yet, the work also defies such expectations. The protagonist develops a puppet show, revolving around the puppet of Punch from the English Punch and Judy tradition, that constitutes a counter-model to his society’s dominant narratives torn between sentiments of sorrow over the mistakes of the past on the one hand and desires to repeat the very actions, driven by greed and anthropocentrism, that led to the apocalypse on the other. Punch’s exaggerated features and coarse, violent behavior shocks the audience both to an ethical response of outrage and to laughter. This paper intends to analyze the puppet of Punch in light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnival theory in order to illustrate the latter’s usefulness for ecocritical analyses (Casid; Gardiner; Lousley; McDowell; Murphy). Punch embodies a carnivalesque spirit that moves the post-apocalyptic society beyond sorrow, and forces it to confront the basest aspects of humanity in order to transcend them through laughter and develop new communal ethical guidelines. Through such analysis, the paper demonstrates that the post-apocalyptic genre is not defined by a single, monolithic body of literature and that it may overcome mournful tones by mingling serious ecological concerns with shocking carnival irreverence.