Flying in fiction
Not a snappy title. This is just about flying, in fiction. What more does anyone need?
Dear Gentle Readers,
here’s Margaret Atwood on flying (from a poem called Flying inside your own body. It’s from Atwood’s Selected Poems II (1976-1986), published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1987, although I copied it out from the little book of poems I wrote out by hand starting in my teens):
Your lungs fill & spread themselves,
wings of pink blood, and your bones
empty themselves and become hollow.
When you breathe in you’ll lift like a balloon
and your heart is light too & huge,
beating with pure joy, pure helium.
The sun’s white winds blow through you,|
there’s nothing above you,
you see the earth now as an oval jewel,
radiant & seablue with love.
It’s only in dreams you can do this.
Waking, your heart is a shaken fist,
a fine dust clogs the air you breath in;
the sun’s a hot copper weight pressing straight
down on the thick pink rind of your skull.
It’s always the moment just before gunshot.
You try & try to rise but you cannot.
Only in dreams, and in fiction. I love that the poem has Atwood’s usual arch, no-nonsense (or strictly her nonsense) confidence and irony but gives us the feeling of flying with its unabashed relaxation into pure romanticism, even sentimentality, even cliché: an oval jewel, seablue with love. And that line, “and your heart is light too & huge”, which sounds like it’s sort of crammed in with buoyant enthusiasm.
With that second paragraph she conveys all the reasons we long to fly, all the weight of regular existence, that Sisyphean (per Camus) struggle to push a boulder up a hill, only to watch it come right down again as just part of our daily routine.
There is real flying, the dream kind, the bird kind, in fiction. In the wonderful children writer Jane Langton’s The Fledgling, little Georgie is entranced by the Canada geese that fly over her Concord, New England home on their way south. She wants to fly, too:
Georgie lay in a heap at the bottom of the stairs, a jumble of red overalls and skinny arms and legs. Whimpering, she looked up at the two big faces bending over her with the light from the front door fuzzing around their hair.
“Honestly, Georgie,” said Eleanor.
Gently she picked up Georgie and sat down with her on the bottom step, Georgie pressed her face against Eleanor’s sweater.
“Now, promise me, Georgie dear,” said Eleanor, “you won’t ever do it again.”
“You crazy little kid,” said Eddy, “You know you can’t fly downstairs. I don't you that the last time. Next time you’ll break your neck. Nobody can fly downstairs. Jump, maybe—sure, you can jump. But you can’t fly.”
Later though, she does, though we as readers can’t tell if this experience is dream or imagination or reality (which itself would be only the author’s imagination), on the back of the Goose Prince:
Together they were like a single engine throbbing smoothly through the air. She was filled with delight. The wind blew her hair streaming away from her face, it rippled the hems of her pajamas, and it breathed cool on her bare feet as she lay like a feather between the churning wings, looking down at the houses rushing away below her. Walden Street was a long grey ribbon, turning and bending on its way to Route 2. She could see the flat top of the police station, she could see Laurel Street, she could see Dorothea’s house. It looked as small as a dollhouse.
You usually, even in fiction, need wings to fly, whether they are your own or a goose’s. Or they can be airplane wings. Here is Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (of The Little Prince fame), flying—in a plane carrying mail over South America—in hard wind close to the ocean and the Andes:
I was feeling practically nothing as I stared down at the imprint made by the wind on the sea. I saw a series of great white puddles, each perhaps eight hundred yards in extent. They were running towards me at a speed of one hundred and fifty miles an hour where the down-surging windspouts broke against the surface of the sea in a succession of horizontal explosions. The sea was white and it was green-white with the whiteness of crushed sugar and green in puddles the color of emeralds. In this tumult one wave was indistinguishable from another. Torrents of air were pouring down upon the sea. The winds were sweeping past in giant gusts as when, before the autumn harvests, they blow a great flowing change of color over a wheatfield. Now and again the water went incongruously transparent between the white pools, and I could see a green and black sea-bottom. And then the great glass of the sea would be shattered anew into a thousand glittering fragments.
Here it is the world that is almost rushing to meet him that defines his flight.
Elsewhere, though, it is height and blue expanse and clouds. Or the peaceful feeling of containment against the elements, as when one is a passenger in a car driving through a rainstorm at night, or looking at thunder and lightning from the safety of one’s cozy bedroom:
Flying, in general, seemed to us easy. When the skies are filled with black vapors, when fog and sand and sea are confounded in a brew in which they become indistinguishable, when gleaming flashes wheel treacherously in these skyey swamps, the pilot purges himself of the phantoms at a single stroke. He lights his lamps. He brings sanity into his house as into a lonely cottage on a fearsome heath. And the crew travel a sort of submarine route in a lighted chamber.
I have cheated, as this isn’t actually fiction, but a particularly lovely and outward-focused memoir. But Saint-Exupéry’s writing, whether fiction or non-, has similar qualities of narrative; clear, simple beauty; emotional truth; and marvellous adventure.
Then there are ‘flying feelings’ that don't literally involve flight, but swimming, or vertiginous height, or buoyancy, or transcendence. Surfers, in Maylis de Kerangal’s Mend the Living, which we’ve talked about here before, seem to be in flight:
[…] it’s here, thirty metres away, it’s coming at a constant speed, and suddenly, concentrating his energy in his shoulders, Simon launches himself and paddles with all his might so he can catch the wave with speed, so he can be taken by its slope, and now it’s the takeoff, super fast phase when the whole world concentrates and rushes forward, temporal flash when you have to inhale sharply, hold your breath and gather your body into a single action, give it the vertical momentum that will stand it up on the board, feet planted wide, left one in front, regular, legs bent and back flat nearly parallel to the board, arms spread to stabilize it all, and this second is decidedly Simon’s favourite, the one that allows him to grasp the whole explosion of his own existence and to conciliate himself with the elements, to integrate himself into the living, and once he’s standing on the board—estimated height from trough to crest at that moment is over one metre fifty—to stretch out space, lengthen time, and until the end of the run to exhaust the energy of each atom in the sea. Become the unfurling, become the wave.
“He lets out a whoop,” de Kerangal writes, “as he takes his first ride”.
Strangely, perhaps, in almost every expression of flight or its simulacrum I can find—and this hasn’t yet been an exhaustive search, mind you—what comes up must come down.
Here’s Patrick Melrose from Edward St. Aubyn’s Bad News, coming down from his own experience surfing, flying, on a quick fix of cocaine:
The rush was over, and like a surfer who shoots out of a tube of furling, glistening sea only to peter out and fall among the breaking waves, his thoughts began to scatter before the onset of boundless unease. Only a few minutes after the fix he felt a harrowing nostalgia for the dangerous exhilaration which was already dying out. As if his wings had melted in that burst of light, he felt himself falling towards a sea of unbearable disappointment, and it was this that made him pick up the strings, finish flushing it out and, despite his shaking hands, begin to prepare another fix.
At another point in his account, Saint-Exupéry experiences, on land, a kind of anti-flight—similar in a way to what Atwood describes in her poem, but emotionally quite different. Coming down in fiction isn’t usually a good thing: Simon in Mend the Living is grounded by death in a car accident, Georgie in The Fledgling falls over and over in her pursuit of flight, and ultimately, don't forget, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry disappeared—in real life, this time—on a Free French Air Force reconnaissance mission over the Mediterranean in 1944, with wreckage from his plane discovered in 2000 off the coast of Marseille ). But here, Saint-Exupéry’s experience of being grounded is joyful:
From nape to heel I discovered myself bound to earth. I felt a sort of appeasement in surrendering to it my weight. Gravitation had become as sovereign as love. The earth, I felt, was supporting my back, sustaining me, lifting me up, transporting me through the immense void of night. I was glued to our planet by a pressure like that with which one is glued to the side of a car on a curve. I leaned with joy against this admirable breast-work, this solidity, this security, feeling against my body this curving bridge of my ship.
Indeed, perhaps this isn’t just about flying, but about its opposite.
Still, for the most part, the true feeling, the true meaning of flying is both transcendent and an experience too beautiful to be true, something we can only access in novels—and if we are inside a novel, then it must be a fiction there as well—or, as Atwood says, in dreams.
Dear readers, I’ll see you next Sunday. Fly you high1.
-Carlyn
As they say in Gregor the Overlander and other books in the Underland Chronicles quintet, an excellent young adult fantasy series by Suzanne Collins, who went on to write the more famous Hunger Games series.
Some beautiful words contained in this substack. Thanks!