A Novel by Any Other Name?

Fiction that is long enough, considered prose, and has an overarching story is typically called a novel. If it’s too short, it’s a novella or a short story. If it’s poetry rather than prose, then it’s an epic (or for cases like Evgeni Onegin by Pushkin a novel in verse). If there is no overarching story, it’s a collection of short stories. But what if a book is long, prose, and has a disjointed narrative that’s linked by the same narrator and themes, as is the case for Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. Is it a novel or a collection of short stories, and does it matter?

I was in Burlington, VT this past weekend. Like any new place, I looked up bookstores to visit. It was a nice bookstore, except that it had Flights in the short stories, rather than fiction section of the shelves. Now, sometimes different booksellers make unusual choices in how they stock their shelves. I’ve seen A Song of Ice and Fire and the Lord of the Rings show up in classics. I’ve seen Toni Morrison in both the fiction and classics section of the same bookstore. So, I asked one of the people that worked in the bookstore why they put Flights in the short stories section, and he told me it was a marketing decision on the part of the publisher. This bothered me, perhaps more than it should have. 

Flights is a novel, at least in the eyes of Tokarczuk. She recognizes that it’s not a novel in the conventional sense, but all the same considers it to be a “constellation novel.” Flights is told by a single, unnamed female narrator in 116 different vignettes. These range from the narrator talking about her time spent in airports, to a man looking for his missing wife and daughter, to 19th century scientists preserving human tissue. The shifting between these these snippets of story is jarring. It takes hundreds of pages to ever hear from the man with the missing family again. Most of the stories are never heard of again. What binds them together is the voice of the narrator and the shared themes.

This is a lot like collections of short stories. Many short stories end in abrupt, ambiguous ways that are never resolved. Short stories generally have no narrative elements in common with the stories before or after them. But what bothered me about the classification of Flights as a collection of short stories is that Tokarczuk intends Flights to be read as a novel, and that changes our expectations for how the piece works.

We expect novels to have continuous narrative threads that build to some climax or resolution. On the other hand, we assume a collection of short stories to shift between narratives and perspectives. If we read Flights as a collection of short stories, we don’t have to grapple with the disorienting shifts in time and place. We don’t consider their varied nature, because it's expected. But Flights wants us to have to piece together the displacement of the vignettes because that is what traveling is like. Flights are like the novel. One moment you’re shivering in Boston on Eastern Standard Time, the next you’re in London on Greenwich Mean Time. Or you’re in Los Angeles and it’s sunny and 80 degrees out. The disjointed structure reflects the disjointed reality of modern travel.

I also think that Tokarczuk is making a statement about our unmorred present. Her New Yorker Profile is called “Olga Tokarczuk’s Novels Against Nationalism.” Her goal is to probe and question the founding political and religious mythos of, specifically, the Polish state. As skepticism grows for the institutions that once united people, I’m left wondering what is left? The structure of the novel that brilliantly captures the displacement of flights also reflects the sense of displacement in the world. Toward the end of the novel, the narrator says that the plastic bag is the most successful new species on earth, able to travel along to any environment and survive for hundreds or thousands of years. Their handles and emptiness make plastic bags perfectly suited for drifting on a passing wind or tide. Immediately after this discussion on plastic bags, Tokarczuk reintroduces a story thread about the ongoing efforts to preserve the human body, speculating that one day our corpses could be perfectly recreated and preserved in this same plastic. 

Flights doesn’t state, it juxtaposes. Placing these stories of plastic people together with the adaptability and listlessness of plastic bags unites them. Without nations, without religion, without family, are we the plastic bags, unrooted and empty, thoughtlessly drifting over the surface of the earth because there is nothing else left? Airline flights and Flights become a distillation of modern life: disorienting, with fleeting relationships, and short. Moving periodically for school or jobs, I worry that I’ll never have a place to consider home. The friendships I make typically have an expiration date.      

The structure of Flights embodies this sense of displacement as well. As soon as we know something of what a character wants and needs, we leave, in search of a new character and a new story. As soon as we think we know what’s going on, we move on. Nothing is settled, no one is secure, there is only the self and motion. This is why I ultimately don’t like Flights. The world it conveys makes me sad. It’s a world that doesn’t believe in home, the beauty of the familiar, or the faithfulness of others. It is a world where only movement, only running, can keep evil at bay.

And this is why we must read Flights as a novel. If Flights is a collection of short stories, its power to represent the current milieu is lost. Read as mostly independent short stories, the work merely becomes a series of small pleasures, small pains, and small insights. Calling this thorny, mess of a narrative a novel forces us to reconcile it with what we expect a novel to be. Novels have a beginning, middle, and end. The characters and place of a novel are consistent. Novels come to a resolution. Flights does none of these things and this juxtaposition is its brilliance. Flights sees the world how it often is, disorienting and alienating, and placing Flights along side the clean lines of most novels makes them look like lies.