In The Moment Of Danger: Benjaminian History And Theology In Russell Hoban'S Riddley Walker

Walter Benjamin and Riddley Walker: A Dialectics of the Future

In a 1983 critique of the apparent contemporary prevalence of "private and hermetic" versions of "such actively radical positions as Marxism, feminism, or psychoanalysis," Edward Said singled out "the current vogue for Walter Benjamin not as a Marxist but as a crypto-mystic" (1983, 292). In so doing, he was participating in another, longer-standing trend in the humanities, namely the critique of the scandalous misappropriation or misreading of Benjamin's work to more or less politically problematic ends. This critical tendency suggests—if only by negation and implication—that the reception of Benjamin has somehow gone astray: that his oeuvre has not yet reached its proper recognition as one or another 'kind' of criticism. More recently, it also tends to encapsulate a wider anxiety about the appropriation of Marxist or dialectical criticism in the name of "Cultural Studies," conceived as "too cinched in theory, too embroiled in schemas and arguments": Cultural Studies in this perspective becomes "not the study of culture, but the study of studies of culture. It is too far removed from its objects, too negotiated. It forgot the world" (Leslie 2005, 337). Benjamin is one such "object" that scholars have allegedly forgotten. "The reluctance to engage the rigour of Benjamin's thought," contends Eli Friedlander, "is evident in the oft-encountered tendency to adopt his writings piecemeal," in the form of those "[v] arious insights, images and even phrases drawn from his writings" that "lend themselves to the most varied interpretations and appropriations" (2012, 1). Even his "best readers," such as Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, are said to contribute to his problematic "posthumous fame" by propounding an "amazement at Benjamin's marvellous richness of aperçus" that is in fact "catastrophic for the portrayal of the character of his thinking" (Friedlander 2012, 1–2). In order to counteract this fragmentary and fetishistic treatment of Benjamin, Friedlander insists that any interpretation of his work "must strive to explicitly lay out the philosophical armature that both holds his writings together and provides a measure by which to judge the significance of particular moments within them" (2012, 2). Only then will Benjamin's oeuvre realize its proper political and intellectual fate: interpreted as a relatively coherent philosophical object, rather than "appropriated" or quoted "piecemeal" as a kind of "general cultural resource."¹

However, this article will contend that any such attempt to resolve the tension between fragment and unity in Benjamin's work—and consequently to resolve the issue of its "correct" interpretation and reception—is already predicated upon a mishandling of the dialectical treatment of history and theology therein. Indeed, if the likes of Said, Friedlander, and many others have largely been concerned with the question of what Benjamin's work "will" or "should have meant," then this article will suggest the value of reading Russell Hoban's post-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker (2002 [1980])² as a way of challenging the very foundation of such interpretations on the notion of a relatively stable relationship between past, present, and future.³ In this, I am taking something of a lead from Carl Freedman's claim in Critical Theory and Science Fiction that "science fiction is of all forms of fiction today the one that bears the deepest and most interesting affinity with the rigours of dialectical thinking" (2000, xv). As Freedman puts it, "science fiction, like critical theory, insists upon historical mutability, material reducibility, and utopian possibility," and although "there is no question of merely 'applying' critical theory to science fiction, …understanding these two modes of discourse together can reveal much about both" (2000, xvi). Also in the wake of Freedman's method, which places Stanislaw Lem alongside Jacques Lacan, and Ursula Le Guin alongside Marx and Trostsky—and so on—the following pages build upon this broader critical framework by offering a close reading of Benjamin's work in the light of Hoban's novel, and vice versa.⁴ My aim, however, is not simply to offer another example of the benefits of...