Talking about the physical body, Dr. Blau, in Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, says, “It is an outrage that it’s permitted to disintegrate underground, or given to the mercy of flames, burned like rubbish. If it were up to Blau, he would make the world differently — the soul could be mortal, what do we need it for, anyway, but the body would be immortal.” For Blau, the modern-day equivalent to the 17th century Flemish anatomist and surgeon Phillip Verheyen. While a student studying theology, Verheyen brushed up against a rusty nail and had to have his leg amputated. This event led him to study medicine instead of theology.

One of the sections in Flights deals with Verheyen’s life and shows him, after seeing his amputated leg following his surgery, taking the leg with him and dissecting it, pinning it to his work table. Willem van Horssen relates all of this to the reader in Flights, and van Horssen talks about going to some of Verheyen’s public dissections, events that drew large crowds. Sitting in the seats watching Verheyen cut into the flesh of a deceased individual, van Horssen describes looking a man who “worked on his own atlas of the human body methodically and persistently,” laying out the topography of the body, its crevices, its mountains, its valleys.

Following Verheyen’s death, van Horssen recieves a stack of Verheyen’s papers. Amongst the papers, van Horssen discovers letters that Verheyen wrote to his ampuated leg describing the phantom limb syndrome he experienced. Verheyen writes about spending his “life travelling, into [his] own body, into [his] own amputated limb,” mapping out all of the contours. At the end, he poses a question to himself; he asks, “What have I been looking for?” The body contains the physical pieces that make the structure we inhabit. Verheyn traces the structure, physically mapping it and chronicling the pieces that make it whole. Yet, he still asks, at the end, what exactly he sought in the process.

Something exists beyond the physical casing we inhabit. Dr. Blau doesn’t see this. He sees the body as the whole, wishing it could remain “immortal” while the soul, our true being, passes away. What does the body represent? Does it represent the person? The very being and essence of an individual? Is it part and parcel with the soul, constituting the entirety of an individual? I would say the latter. The physical and the spiritual, the body and the soul, the beating heart and the active mind, make the whole. Each working together creates an individual, a being.

Josefine Soliman makes this abundantly clear in her letters to Francis I asking him to return her father’s body to his family for burial. Following Angelo’s death, Francis I had Angelo’s body stuffed for display in her personal collection as an example of a “physiognomic Moor.” Josefine write to Francis, chronicling her father’s accomplishments and the fact that he served, even while enslaved, as an esteemed courtier. She appeals to the “age of reason” and asks when the world will cleanse itself of inhumanity that uses individuals in life and dehumanizes them even after death. Josefine implores Francis to return her father’s body, telling him that things won’t change, even in the age of reason, while individuals stripped all humanity from her father and “chemically treated and stuffed, and exhibited [him] to human curiosity in the proximity of dead wild animals.”

In her final letter to Francis, Josefine continues to rhetorically praise the emperor while at the same time chastising him for not returning her father’s body or replying to her missives. Josefine tells Francis she visited her father before she left Vienna. She visited the “horrible place” where her father stood displayed for all to see, the “hell,” as she puts it, because as Catholic she fears that “without his body he will not be able to be resurrected in the Last Judgement.” She details how her father “was skinned like an animal, stuffed haphazardly with grass, and placed in the company of other stuffed human beings among the remains of unicorns, monstrous toads, two-headed fetuses floating in alcohol, and other similar curiosities.” Josefine points out how Angelo has been stripped of his very being, his humanity, and place on the shelf like a mere specimen.

Josefine points out the ways that the powerful wield their power over human bodies, forcing them to succumb to the will of the ruler. The powerful “determine, too, which bodies will be important, and which less so.” They determine which are “worthy” of existence, both during life and following death. They determine humanity. “To rule over the body,” Josefine writes to Francis, “is to truly be king of both life and death, which is greater than being emperor of even the greatest country.” It becomes akin to being God. Yet, the emperor cannot be God because the emperor cannot govern “our souls.”

When the emperor rules the body, the emperor can tax the populace, having “sway over what his subjects will eat, what they shall sleep on, and whether they’ll wear silk.” When the emperor declares war, he sends “thousands of human bodies into pools of blood.” The emperor controls the body, becoming “king of both life and death.” By keeping Angelo’s body on display, Francis extends his rule past Angelo’s physical death, refusing to let his soul free through burial. Josefine ends her letter by no longer pleading with Francis but demanding her father’s body, and if he refuses, she pledges to follow him “like a voice from the darkness” after she dies, never leaving him alone.

Angelo’s “body” remained on display remained on display until the October Revolution of 1848. During the revolution, Angelo’s remains, along with those of others, were burned and destroyed. This moment appears in Flights during a story about Frederick Chopin’s death, his funeral in Paris, and his funeral in Poland where his sister smuggled his heart. We get a scene from the October Revolution during a flashback from the Italian soprano Graziella Panini. The church in Paris that will host the funeral, La Madeline, denies women positions on the stage, even singers, and Chopin’s sister fights this because she wants Graziella to perform. Graziella does preform, behind a screen. Nadia Padilla points out how this scene highlights the ways that Flights depicts women thriving amidst oppression with the help of other women. What Padilla does not note, though, is that this story also highlights the ways that Angelo gets pushed to the side, even erased, because of his ethnicity.

During her flashback, Graziella talks about rioters flipping over her carriage because they see her as wealthy. They remove her from the carriage, she injures her leg, and the rioters burn the carriage. The crowd ransacked buildings, throwing anything they deemed luxurious into the streets and set it on fire. They were “[h]urling fossils out onto the sidewalk” before moving on “the skeletons and the stuffed animals.” Finally, one of the members of the crow “called for all the stuffed humans and other mummies to be given a proper Christian funeral, or at the very least for these proof of authorities’ usurpation of the body to be destroyed.” They build a “great pyre” and burned everything.

Angelo is part of that great fire, his body reduced to ash in the mob’s removal of his body and those of others from the reign of the emperor. However, at this point, Angelo and the others are nameless. They are not individuals any more. Their memory has been erased. They are nothing more that “stuffed humans and other mummies,” specimens without identity, without existence, with a “soul.” Angelo is no more. He has, even in the narrative of Flights, been reduced to nothingness. While the women thrive, as Padilla rightly points out, Angelo gets erased, never to grace the page again. Josefine’s fears become true.

Yet, he does remain because we see Josefine, Dr. Blau, and others mention him. We must remember what happened to Angelo because forgetting, as Josefine writes in her first letter to Francis, makes it easy for us to claim innocence at the atrocities we commit. We never see Angelo like we see Grazielle, Verheyen, Dr. Blau, or others. In fact, we only hear his story from Josefine in three short letters. We see his name a couple of times in the text, but without the knowledge of who he is and without thinking about the connective tissue running through the text, we miss it. He becomes a blip on the page. Through Josefine, we remember him and he becomes one of the most important individuals in the book because he represents, in many ways, what Flights is about, memory, life, death, and legacy.

What are your thoughts? Please let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.