Flash forward a couple of weeks and I’m reading Flights. I devour the first hundred pages, finding the prose style poetic and riveting in all the ways I would hope of a Nobel winner. But then, for whatever reason, I stop. Then a month or two goes by, I get back into it and read the rest. I take pages and pages of notes that I can use to refer back to for this review—so many notes that, indeed, this review is even a few more months after I finished reading the book.
But all this seems oddly appropriate for a book about travel, about living in fits and starts and escaping to new terrain. The novel is rhizomatic in that way, with resonances popping up in unexpected places. And, as if the Nobel Prize committee has a type, and history a way of remedying itself, it’s easy to draw comparisons between would-be Nobel winner W. G. Sebald, had it not been for his tragic death, and Tokarczuk—Sebald’s successor. The comparison is, I think, warranted, given that both novelists trace the echoes between histories and phenomena, heavily rooted in the notion of place as integral to experience.
For the uninitiated, W. G. Sebald’s novels often centre on unlikely parallels. There’s a subtlety to his narratives that intimates connections, guiding readers to their own discoveries with an understated style interspersed with seemingly unrelated photos. Contemplation builds the connections. Tokarczuk’s Flights takes a similar approach, including photos of maps, but the fragmentary nature of her novel is somewhat more unified, in my mind, than Sebald, who operates more sequentially.
The more time you spend with the book, the more you see how well-wrought and unified it is. The primacy of motion is explored through various avenues, but even in the first few pages Tokarczuk presents a sort of manifesto of motion:
Standing there on the embankment, staring into the current, I realized that — in spite of all the risks involved — a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest; that change will always be a nobler thing than permanence; that that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ash, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity. From then on, the river was like a needle inserted into my formerly stage and stable surroundings, the landscape composed of the park, the greenhouses with their vegetables that grew in sad little rows, and the sidewalk with its concrete slabs where we would go to play hopscotch. This needle went all the way through, marking a vertical third dimension; so pierced, the landscape of my childhood world turned out to be nothing more than a toy made of rubber from which all the air was escaping, with a hiss. (4)
What a tour-de-force on page four! The phrase “a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest; that change will always be a nobler thing than permanence” is, essentially, the thesis for Tokarczuk’s project. While drawing on an aphoristic style, Flights is nonetheless replete with elevating imagery and metaphor. The image of a river being “like a needle inserted into [her] formerly stage and stable surroundings” is striking in its penetrative quality. It reminds me, almost, of Margaret Atwood’s poem “you fit into me / like a hook into an eye // a fish hook / an open eye.” Here, though, the idea of a needle also takes on the resonance of an inoculation. The needle stabs, but simultaneously protects. The quaint imagery of childhood with “vegetables that grew in sad little rows” and children playing hopscotch is a idyllic notion and the needle “went all the way through.” It’s aggressive, piercing, and the turn at the end of the passage of childhood being a “toy made of rubber from which all the air was escape, with a hiss” is such a powerful rendition of that sentiment that it’s hard to ignore. The fact that the final metaphor draws on an even earlier stage of life to dismantle childhood (I can’t help but imagine a rubber duckie in a baby’s bath) is such a great turn of temporal play. The fact that this needle “went all the way through, marking a vertical third dimension,” also hints at Tokarczuk’s geometry of time, which I’ll return to, as the book does, much later.
Throughout Flights, Tokarczuk’s various sub-topics often orbit around the idea of stasis and, well, flight. The motifs that crop up throughout the text often address bodies in motion in relief against bodies rendered motionless. For instance, substantial parts of the book deal with the development of embalming practices, the ultimate stasis: dead and not decomposing. It’s that fixity the book seems to grapple with, whether through travelogues or historical documents.
Tokarczuk does not relegate these documents to a static past, however. In fact, she challenges the idea that these serve as representative of reality. In a nearly Baudrillardian move, Flights notes that “we were taught that the world could be described, and even explained, by means of simple answers to intelligent questions. That in its essence the world was inert and dead, governed by fairly simple laws that needed to be made public—if possible with the aid of diagrams” (11). The notion of clear and simple documentation is presented not as a revelation, but an illusion, a sham. The passage continues that “We were required to do experiments. To formulate hypotheses. To verify. We were inducted into the mysteries of statistics, taught to believe that equipped with such a tool we would be able to perfectly describe all the workings of the world—that ninety percent is more significant than five” (11). In one paragraph, Tokarczuk levels critiques against so many of our meta-narratives that we use to explain things: physics, statistics, mathematics, and all those discourses that are used to render the world certain create a deadening effect, rendering the world “inert.”
Hence, the novel is framed around the notion of travel. The central character is on planes, travelling to various countries for various purposes. The conversations and stories about others are also, generally, people in motion (or, in the latter half of the book, people being rendered fixed, willingly or not). A central conceit of the book is around the idea of “travel psychology.” Presented somewhat ironically, but not without merit, is a young woman in an airport touting the new wave of psychology. When she is introduced, she is presented as “a young woman, nervously adjusting her colorful scarf while her companion, a man in a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, prepared the screen that was hanging on the wall’ (74). The duo is presented in a satirical light, one full of hesitation and the other a kind of old-world bumbling professor. I can’t help but imagine the two as grifters selling timeshares (which would also be appropriate for this novel). But, they have a point. Traditional psychology aims to fix people in place, suggesting that their psyche is reasonably fixed (even the depths of the unconscious have a single origin point, presumably—we don’t have unconsciouses in common parlance). By contrast, the two present: “Travel psychology [which] studies people in transit, persons in motion, and thus situates itself in opposition to traditional psychology, which has always investigated the human being in a fixed context, in stability and stillness—for example, through the prism of his or her biological constitution, family relationships, social situations, and so forth. In travel psychology, these factors are of secondary, not primary importance” (74). It’s kind of a radical notion, actually, and whether or not it is satirical is secondary to the possibilities it opens up: we are different people at different times, and the motion is what counts.
In turn, “travel psychology” offers an alternative episteme for conceptualizing identity and conceptualizing the world. They note, “constellation, not sequencing, carries truth” (77), explaining Tokarczuk’s valuing of resonance, rather than linear stories. She continues, “travel psychology envisions man in equivalently weighted situations, without trying to lend his life any—even approximate—continuity. Life is made up of situations. There is, of course, a certain inclination toward the repetition of behaviours. This repetition does not, however, mean that we should succumb in our imaginations to the appearance of any sort of consistent whole” (77). The passage is once again like the book itself. There are a number of “situations” presented, some with and some without resolution. Moreover, there is the “repetition of behaviours.” Various characters, especially in the first half of the book, are looking to escape their situations. As such, the book has “the appearance” of a consistent whole, even when it is not truly there; each situation is unique in its own way.
As such, meaning is never fixed, but ever-present. Again, referring to the travel psychologists, synchronicity is “evidence of the world making sense” (85). She specifies it is “evidence that throughout this beautiful chaos threads of meaning spread in every direction, networks of strange logic, all bearing, if one were to believe in God, the contorted imprints of His fingers” (85). The idea “threads of meaning” in “networks of strange logic” nonetheless being connected to one central force (in this case God), creates a tension of significance, allowing each moment to be both meaningful and not, each moment being a new discovery. Towards the end of the novel, Tokarczuk comments on “A mind that seemed to be aware of everything, even things it didn’t really understand, but that moved fast—a quick, intelligent electric impulse without limits, linking everything with everything, convinced that all of it together must mean something, even if we couldn’t yet know that” (380). It’s sort of a poststructuralist move, in a sense, to see everything in the world as connected. Yet, she notes the central problem: if everything is connected to everything, there is no end-point. There can be no fixity, and thus the very notion of meaning is in trouble.
The narrator of the story seems to embody this tension. She redirects her attention to that which is commonly not the focus, but is unclear to what end: “Instead of paying attention to the faces of people passing by, I watched their feet, and all these busy types were reduced to hurrying steps—toward what? And it was clear to me that our mission was to graze the dust in search of a mystery stripped of anything serious” (23). In attempting to find another angle for examining the threads that connect us, she looks instead towards feet—again, focusing on motion. Yet, there’s a skepticism that there is an actual destination. There’s a kind of purposelessness to the motion and even when she wants to “graze the dust in search of a mystery,” it is “stripped of anything serious.” The great unifying force is not a capitalized Significance. Another narrator has a similar issue, though in reverse. Rather than thinking of destinations as end-points, he reflects on destinations as past experience: “Lost in thought, he gazed out the window at the landscape that seemed to hurry off somewhere. Didn’t ever think: What does ‘We were there’ really even mean? Where did those two weeks in France go? Those weeks that today can squeeze into just a couple of memories” (22). This compression of time is here inversed; distance has been travelled, locations have been reached, but their lasting impact is ambiguous. Again, she speculates what he might be thinking when she notes what the remaining memories actually are: “the sudden onset of hunger by the city’s medieval walls and the twinkling of evening at a café where the roof was covered in grapevines. What happened to Norway? All that’s left is the chill of the water in the lake that endless day, and then the delight of the beer bought just before the shop shut, or the arresting first glimpse of the fjord” (22). There is a mix, it seems, of the glorious and the banal. We often think about the first glimpse of the fjord as a stunning moment, but the chill of the water, or buying a beer, a minor detail. The interplay between the small and the large is critical to the text as a whole.
The coincidences in my own reading continue—or perhaps Tokarczuk simply trains the reader to see parallels. For instance, I finished Flights on the back of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos, and towards the end of Tokarczuk’s novel, there is an extended meditation on the word. A character reads a definition of the word, “written in Polish, in the Latin alphabet”—which in itself is an odd unfixed doubling, two languages at once—and there are three definitions (347), each of which seems to have its own resonance for Erpenbeck’s novel. The definition for measure is that kairos is “Due measure, appropriateness, moderation; difference; meaning” while on place it is “a vital, sensitive place in the body” (347). Both of these resonate for Erpenbeck’s Kairos, where the central characters’ calculated behaviour fits with measure, and the broken hearts and prodding of wounds is critical to the narrative.
While the third definition, on time, is useful for Erpenbeck’s project as well, it serves as the most salient definition for Tokarczuk’s purposes:
Critical moment, right time, appropriateness, opportunity, nick of time, the propitious time is fleeting; those who turned up unexpectedly; miss the moment; when the right time comes, help in the event of a storm, on time, when the opportunity arises, prematurely, critical moments, periodic states, the chronological sequence of facts, situation, state of things, placement, ultimate danger, benefit, use, to what aim?, what will help you?, where would be convenient? (347).
The novel’s vignettes all hover around the idea of time, whether it’s a disappearance where time is critical, or a static time where no change occurs, or the illusion of chronology—characters trying to place events into a logical sequence that is forever illusory, and ultimately, as implied by the questions at the end of the definition, not all that useful. The sequence of the vignettes provides no consolation, either. Tokarczuk will begin a narrative, stop it partway for a seemingly unrelated and potentially banal discussion of everyday phenomena, and then switch back to a different narrative. The idea of telling one story start to finish gives way to an ever-fragmentary recollection, a history penetrated by glimpses of the present.
The continued discussion of kairos (which, incidentally, takes place forty pages later), notes that Kairos “always operates at the intersection of linear, human time and divine time—circular time. And at the intersection between place and time, at that moment that opens up for just a little while, to situate that single, right unrepeatable possibility. The point where the straight line that runs from nowhere to nowhere makes—for one moment—contact with the circle” (387). Tokarczuk creates a new geometry, or more appropriately a new map, of time. The particularity of the moment is described as an “unrepeatable possibility,” fleeting and “open[ed] up for just a little while.” It’s those precise moments of meaning that Tokarczuk seems to strive for.
And yet, amid all this discussion of fixity and permanence, there is the counter-current, that none of these moments really exist. In her deconstruction of time, Tokarczuk notes, “if the future and the past are infinite, then in reality there can be no ‘once upon,’ no ‘back when.’ Different moments in time hang in space like sheets, like screens lit up by one moment; the world is made up of these frozen moments, great meta-images, and we just hop from one to the next” (385). I love the way Tokarczuk addresses paradox through metaphor. The idea of these moments hanging in space like sheets is such a cosmic vision of the world with “great meta-images” where “we just hop from one to the next.” The notion of transitions, that non-time between moments, is addressed beautifully here, offering commentary on her fragmentary vignette style. It is a book of meta-images, rather than a cohesive story, because, in the philosophy of the book, it is impossible to tell stories when their very foundation (the concept of time) has eroded away from us.
It’s hard to grapple with time and its implications. I’m striving to find some optimism in Tokarczuk’s method for examining time. She presents linear time as a problem to be solved earlier in the text: “That time is linear time, more practical because it was able to measure progress toward a goal or destination, rises in percentages. Every moment is unique; no moment can ever be repeated. This idea favors risk-taking, living life to the fullest, seizing the day. And yet the innovation is a profoundly bitter one: when change over time is irreversible, loss and mourning become daily things. This is why you’ll never hear them utter words like ‘futile’ or ‘empty’” (53). It’s a pretty dark idea, but maybe there’s an optimism underneath: if time is linear and that inscribes every moment with loss and mourning, if we reconsider time into a less linear geometry, that would perhaps open our minds to a more rich and rounded discussion of human experience. Linear time is quantifiable; circular time could never be.
At this point, you’re probably getting the impression that Flights is an intellectually rigorous book, and it is. That said, it isn’t without a heart. There are some powerful moments relayed through the vignettes, inspiring sympathy and joy. Early on, Tokarczuk’s narrator, precariously situated in relation to the author herself, comments on being a writer. There’s a mournful quality, if a little ironic from a Nobel Prize winner, in the statement: “But I never became a real writer. Life always eluded me” (13). Her description of where she finds meaning then follows: “I’d only ever find its tracks, the skin it sloughed off. By the time I had determined its location, it had already gone somewhere else. And all I’d find were signs that it had been there, like those scrawlings on the trunks of trees in parks that merely mark a person’s passing presence” (13). This notion of her writing being the discarded, the wound that remains behind in a tree or “the skin it sloughed off” feels like loss for sure. Instead of a novel being written after life, her life takes on the shape of this novel: “life would turn into incomplete stories, dreamlike tales, would show up from afar in odd dislocated panoramas, or in cross sections—and so it would be almost impossible to reach any conclusions as a whole” (13). Though presented in a mournful tone, a purposelessness that casts her adrift, there is a kind of freedom in the incomplete and dreamlike: a sense of possibility continues on.
Of course, the non-linearity of the novel is the perfect accompaniment, thematically, to the notions of time. Tokarczuk writes that “Anyone who has ever tried to write a novel knows what an arduous task it is, undoubtedly one of the worst ways of occupying oneself” (13). It’s a bitterly amusing and relatable statement, but she extends the conversation once more to the notion of stasis: “You have to remain within yourself all the time, in solitary confinement. It’s a controlled psychosis, an obsessive paranoia manacled to work, completely lacking in the feather pens and bustles and Venetian masks we would ordinarily associate with it, clothed instead in a butcher’s apron and rubber boots, eviscerating knife in hand” (13). See what I mean about the language? Tokarczuk’s style is extraordinary. From there, she echoes the motif of feet and faces:
you can only barely see from that writerly cellar the feet of passerby, hear the rapping of their heels. Every so often someone stops and bends down and glances in through the window, and then you get a glimpse of a human face, maybe even exchange a few words. But ultimately the mind is so occupied with its own act, a play staged by the self for the self in a hasty, makeshift cabinet of curiosities peopled by author and character, narrator and reader, the person describing and the person being described, that feet, shoes, heels, and faces become, sooner or later, mere components of that act. (13)
I find the passage compelling for a number of reasons, not least of all because of its internal coherence with the rest of the novel. The idea of seeing a fragment of a human body passing by is an effective echo, but also this link of feet and faces and hardly seeing faces comes back; there’s a circularity to the text that comes across effectively. The interplay of the singular and the multiple also returns; the author is simultaneously one and many, characters popping up all over the place, but then also the multiplicity of faces is amalgamated into the singular experience of writing a novel. It’s a cerebral experience that all comes together beautifully.
But I’ve drifted away once more from the ‘heart’ of the book to focus instead on its brain. There’s a relatability to the characters in the text, who all feel they have lost something. There are some deeply human stories, like the one of a woman and child who disappear while on vacation and her husband desperately trying to find her. In another series of vignettes, Tokarczuk offers an epistolary story in which a man tries to reclaim his father’s corpse from the king who he had served and for whom he is now on public display. There’s also a love-esque story between a corpse-preserving scientist researching methods with the widow of a renowned colleague.
When the man is looking for his lost wife, the despair in his search is quite wrenching. There is a “sound [...] long, mournful, like the voice of an animal. Then it stops, shattered into cicadas’ small echoes. They move through the olive brush. Bellowing out from time to time” (30). The search continues across the vineyard and “they scour rows half in shadowing, calling out for the missing woman: ‘Jagoda, Jagoda!’” (30). Every private sorrow takes on a deeper significance, another resonance: “It occurs to Kunicki that his wife’s name means ‘berry’ in their native Polish. It is such a common name that he had forgotten about that until now. Suddenly it seems to him that he is taking part in some sort of ancient ritual, blurry, grotesque. From the bushes there hang grapes in swollen, deep violet bunches, perverse, multiplied nipples, and he wanders the leafy labyrinths, shouting, ‘Jagoda! Jagoda!’ Who is he saying that to? Who is he looking for? (30). Several layers emerge at once: there’s the linguistic angle, seen elsewhere in the discussion of the word ‘Kairos’, there’s the historic layer in which he feels like he’s part of some ancient ritual, a sexual layer in the “perverse, multiplied nipples” of the berries, and there’s the dissociative quality of the experience: it is no longer clear who the woman they’re actually looking for is. The recipient of the message is a ghost.
In one of the most moving vignettes, the narrator of the book reconnects with an old flame over Facebook. She had not seen him for years, but he is now dying. His sister cares for him day-to-day and the narrator goes to see him. When she arrives, he reveals to her that he wants to die, but cannot ask his sister to do it for him. The implication is that the narrator needs to take his life for him. After visiting several times—all of this unbeknownst to her husband—she fulfils his request in a haunting and bittersweet scene:
She removes the drip from the IV and slowly injects all the droplets of the liquid she has brought. Nothing happens aside from the fact that his breathing stops, suddenly, naturally, as though the movement of his rib cage from before had been an odd anomaly. She runs her hand over his face, reinserts the drip into his IV, and smooths out the place on the sheets where she’d been sitting. Then she leaves. (305)
The scene itself is pretty powerful but Tokarczuk twists the knife in the final interaction between the narrator and her friend’s sister. The sister is on the porch smoking and offers the narrator a cigarette: “This time she says no” (305). The sister then asks, “Do you think you’ll be able to visit him again? [...] It’s been so important to him that you come.” The narrator responds, “‘I’m leaving today’ [...] as she goes down the stairs, she adds ‘Yout ake care of yourself’” (305). It’s such a cold moment, a depressing goodbye. We are left to imagine what happens when the sister discovers her brother has passed, and it produces such a chilling effect where the narrator’s emotional response is muted, despite the weight of her act.
There’s a morose thoughtfulness that lingers over the novel in a number of passages and scenes. The first pages of the book should serve as an indication of that, when the narrator gives an account of her childhood:
I’m a few years old. I’m sitting on the windowsill, surrounded by strewn toys and toppled-over block towers and dolls with bulging eyes. It’s dark in the house, and the air in the rooms slowly cools, dims. There’s no one else here; they’ve left, they’re gone, though you can still hear their voices dying down, that shuffling, the echoes of their footsteps, some distant laughter. Out the window the courtyard is empty. Darkness spreads softly from the sky, settling one everything like black dew.
The worst part is the stillness, visible, dense---a chilly dusk and the sodium-vapor lamps’ frail light already mired in darkness just a few feet from its source. (1)
First of all, the imagery here is highly evocative. Everything points towards darkness: “strewn toys” and “toppled-over block towers,” no longer standing as they once were. The dolls have “bulging eyes,” like bugs or dead things. The rest of the house is “dark”, “cool”, and “dim.” There’s an emptiness to the scene and the solitude of the scene is given a tragic air. The scene continues on to discuss the “darkness” and the “black dew,” tainting even the gentle greeting of morning. It’s interesting that there’s a kind of jealousy towards movement; the narrator notes that “the worst part is the stillness,” being static while “the echoes of their footsteps, some distant laughter” happen right outside.
Meanwhile, inside, “Nothing happens” (1). Although, darkness is in motion: “the march of darkness halts at the door to the house, and all the clamor of fading falls silent, makes a thick skin like on hot milk cooling” (1). There’s a play of size and intensity here, too, as “The contours of the buildings against the backdrop of the sky stretch out into infinity, slowly lose their sharp angles, corners, edges” (1). The immensity of the world outside takes shape in the narrator’s mind from her early years, but it provides the effect of the world escaping her: “the dimming light takes the air with it — there’s nothing left to breathe” (1). The existential and metaphysical horror rounds out the scene: “Now the dark soaks into my skin. Sounds have curled up inside themselves, withdrawn their snail’s eyes; the orchestra of the world has departed, vanishing into the park” (1). There’s a kind of horror in the shifting world.
The fact that this is framed in the mind of a young girl is even more wild. At just a few years old, she recognizes “that evening is the limit of the world, and I’ve just happened upon it, by accident, while playing, not in search of anything” (2). She continues, “I’ve discovered it because I was left unsupervised for a bit. I realize I’ve fallen into a trap here now, realize I’m stuck. I’m a few years old, I’m sitting on the windowsill, and I’m looking out onto the chilled courtyard” (2). You’ll notice a repetition here. From there, she discusses the how “lights in the school’s kitchen are extinguished; everyone has left. All the doors are closed, the hatches down, shades lowered” (2). The sense of confinement is palpable and she notes, “I’d like to leave, but there’s nowhere to go. My own presence is the only thing with a distinct outline now, an outline that quivers and undulates, and in so doing, hurts. All of a sudden I know: there’s nothing for it now, here I am” (2). The moment is presented almost as a reverse-birth. It’s a return to the darkness and confinement. What’s interesting is how the moment contrasts with the later sections of the book: it is in the stillness that she finds herself conscious of herself, although it is given that touch of irony: “there’s nothing for it now” (2), as if finding herself is something she wanted to avoid all along—again, that fear of stasis in one’s identity.
Elsewhere, Tokarczuk’s narrator draws a clear parallel between her identity and the nature of the project upon which she has embarked: “My set of symptoms revolves around being drawn to all things spoiled, flawed, defective, broken” (17). These adjectives could easily be applied to the narrator or the novel project underway: the vignettes are never quite cohesive enough for a full story. She continues: “I’m interested in whatever shape this may take, mistakes in the making of the thing, dead ends. What was supposed to develop but for some reason didn’t; or vice versa, what outstretched the design. Anything that deviates from the norm, that is too small or too big, overgrown or incomplete, monstrous and disgusting” (17). Again, there’s an expansiveness of space and a sense of confinement that is resisted. She continues in the description of these ‘monstrous’ tales, commenting on “shapes that don’t heed, that grow exponentially, brim over, bud, or on the contrary, that scale back to the single unit” (17). It’s perhaps in this passage that the critique of discrete mathematics becomes most obvious. All those systems which rigidify are no longer acceptable: “I’m not interested in the patterns so scrutinized by statistics that everyone celebrates with a familiar, satisfied smile on their faces” (17). She explains, “My weakness is for teratology and for freaks. I believe, unswervingly, agonizingly, that it is in freaks that Being breaks through to the surface and reveals its true nature. A sudden fluke disclosure. An embarrassing oops, the seam of one’s underwear from beneath a perfectly pleated skirt. The hideous metal skeleton that suddenly pops out from the velvet upholstery; the eruption of a spring from within a cushioned armchair that shamelessly debunks any illusion of softness” (17). For what it’s worth, I find this passage extraordinarily resonant. It’s a beautiful passage that turns an eye to the unusual and unfamiliar, to those tiny sites of story that are so rarely elevated to an almost divine status.
To that end, I’d refer readers to the vignette titled “Sanitary Pads.” She comments on the wrappers for sanitary pads, which are provided with “entertaining little facts” (102). Among those facts are the following:
The word ‘lethologica’ describes the state of unable to recall the word you’re looking for.
Ropography is a painting term for the attention the artist pays to trifles and details.
Rhyparography is the painting of decaying and disgusting things.
Scissors were invented by Leonardo da Vinci. (102)
I, too, find these facts instructive and interesting. Particularly from a linguistic stand-point, I really appreciate the way that we have invented words for such particular experiences and sensations. This fine attention to sanitary pads continues in the paragraph which follows:
In the bathroom, where I unwrapped the entire box of these pads with their curious teachings, it hit me like a revelation that this way yet another part of the project of the great encyclopedia now coming into being, the encyclopedia that would encompass all things. So I went back to the pharmacy and scoured the shelves in search of the name of this strange company that had determined to unite necessity with usefulness. For what sense could it ever possibly make to wrap pads in paper that had flowers and strawberries on it? Paper was created to be the bearer of ideas. Paper packaging is wasteful and should be banned. But if you really do have to package something, then you ought to be able to do it only in novels and poems, and always in such a way that what is contained and what contains it have some connection. (102)
Tokarczuk’s narrator focuses on the things that are not meant to be noticed. But look at the reverence which she imbues to sanitary pads. It becomes a sort of quest to find the company that unites necessity and usefulness. I can’t help but think about how New Critics see form and content as inseparable, the heresy implied by paraphrase, and so on. Form and function are here united and treated with a kind of philosophical weight evocative of Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. The suggestion that all packaging has to be in novels and poems is a delightful turn that feels irreverent in its own way.
The passage continues with some additional facts, which I include here for your own interest and because you can read it essentially like a found list poem:
Starting at the age of thirty, humans begin to slowly shrink.
Each year more people are killed by kicks from donkeys than from plane crashes.
If you wind up at the bottom of a well, you’ll be able to see the stars even during the day.
Did you know that your birthday is shared by nine million people around the world?
The shortest war in history was waged between Zanzibar and England in 1896, lasting thirty-eight minutes.
If the earth’s axis were titled just one degree more, the planet would be uninhabitable, because the regions around the equator would be too hot and the poles too cold.
Due to the earth’s rotation, throwing something westward will send it flying farther than if it’s going east.
The average human body contains enough sulfur to kill a dog.
A rachibutyrophobia is the fear of getting peanut butter stuck to the palate.
But the one I was most struck by was this:
The strongest muscle in the human body is the tongue.
(102-103)
This love of the bizarre, miniscule factoid is consistent with Tokarczuk’s flights to more strange territories. The whole scene has an almost Walter Benjaminian flare to it; his Arcades Project similarly gathering ephemera and immortalizing them in text form. Tokarczuk goes one further, allowing the sanitary pads section to permeate into other vignettes, receiving reference elsewhere with small echoes. It is its own reversal that the sanitary pads bleed into the other chapters.
It becomes, at least to some extent, an obsession of the narrator’s. In her own words, though: “Obsession is, in any case, the premonition of the existence of an individual language, an irreproducible language through the attentive use of which we will be able to uncover the truth. We must follow this premonition into regions that to others might seem absurd and mad” (207). There is a touch of madness throughout Flights: an associational form of writing that brings us to new areas as we chase an echo. Yet, as previously mentioned, these echoes are unending. There’s never a final point where we can say that we chased an echo enough to reach its origin.
Perhaps a more apt metaphor is Tokarczuk’s own. While on a flight, a man opens the window looking for some sense of place, contrasting with the animation on the screen:
From time to time he raised the shade to see if somewhere on the horizon in the distance a white glow wasn’t visible by now, glimmer of a new day, new possibilities. But there was nothing. The screens were off, the film had ended. Every so often they would show a map, and on it the small shape of the plane as it traversed at a turtle’s pace a distance not indicated on the map. And it even seemed that the map had been designed by Zeno the Cartographer---every distance is infinite in itself, each point launching a new space that cannot be surmounted, and of course, any movement an illusion, all of us traveling in place. (130)
The allusion to Zeno is a reference to the philosophical idea of an arrow being fired. It travels distance by half, then by half, then by half, and can be subdivided to the extent that it never actually reaches its target. It’s an apt allusion, specifically because we never reach the target of our travels, so as we follow our obsessions we never quite ‘hit’ where we can rest. Perpetual motion. Elsewhere, Tokarczuk references pilgrimages as a “striving toward—and reaching—a holy place [that] would bestow holiness upon us, cleans us of our sins” (173). She wonders whether this is true of unholy, sinful, sad, vacant, joyful, and fruitful places too. Can we always be in a state of travelling toward? Essentially, the answer appears to be yes—we can never not be.
This is one of the lengthiest reviews I’ve written in quite a while because Tokarczuk offers us a set of such rich insight and contemplation that it demands response. I think it’s pretty clear why she would warrant the Nobel Prize. I’ll briefly address two remaining passages from my notes. In one, she describes people “glid[ing] towards their spots as though on tethers, heading somewhere in the suburbs, to a tenth floor, where they can pull the covers over their heads and fall into a sleep made up of scraps of day and night. And in reality in the morning that sleep does not dissolve—those scraps form collages, splotches; some configurations are clever, you could almost say premeditated” (236). It poses an interesting contrast to that sense of stasis the narrator experiences in the first few pages of the book, where the world closes in. Here, the world is absorbed at night. The “scraps of day and night” are put to a higher purpose, an artistic “collage,” as if our very consciousness were a canvas for reality. And I think Tokarczuk captures that sensation beautifully throughout Flights.
Now, finally, after much time spent reading, not reading, contemplating, reading, writing this review, not writing this review, and writing this review anew, we come to the conclusion. One of the characters in the book is described as hating traveling alone: “His gripe was: When he sees something out of the ordinary, something new and beautiful, he so wants to share it with someone that he becomes deeply unhappy if there’s no one around” (165). Tokarczuk then has an offset line in a new paragraph: “I doubt he would make a good pilgrim” (165). As for me, I’m not sure whether or not I would make a good pilgrim. I do sometimes love traveling alone and finding that solitary reverence in beautiful things. Yet, I think that sharing something deeply beautiful can transcend that experience of reverence, and even elevate it. I suppose that’s why I’ve written such a lengthy review of Flights: it is something beautiful, something thoughtful, and something well worth exploring. So here I am, sharing it with all of you.
Happy reading! Hope that this book, or whatever you’re reading, takes you to new places—and I hope you never actually “get there”.
