Toward a Tender, Decolonial, Feminine Universality in Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights

Abstract

Abstract Can literature re-imagine universality in a way that would not be an expression of an underlying urge toward homogeneity and totality? Beginning with the remarks from Olga Tokarczuk’s Nobel Lecture “The Tender Narrator” where she calls for literature to “universalize our experience” that involves—somewhat counterintuitively—a tender attunement to the fragment, this article discusses a new, paradoxical, feminine formulation of universality in Tokarczuk’s bestseller Flights. By analyzing mobilizations of flight in the novel, the article suggests its universal is woven out of “the shadows of consciousness,” untranslatable idioms of language, pagan Slavic mythologies, old Slavic sect of Bieguni that is virtually unknown in Eastern Europe, and forgotten historical figures and incidents that the narrator “tenderly” narrates. It proposes that universality in Flights emerges as an ethical and political question of reading, translating, and writing across not only national, social, historical languages and contexts, but also across itinerant and fractured subjectivities, languages, myths, and temporalities embedded within the fabrics of Tokarczuk’s novel. This universal is also structured of ambivalent capitalist presents and socialist pasts—though not explicitly addressed, post-socialist transition surfaces here as the unresolvable political, temporal, and subjective liminality. Finally, the article proposes that Tokarczuk’s unique formulation of universality in terms of attention to the fragmentary, forgotten, and fleeting informs recent decolonial, emancipatory attempts in Eastern European feminist scholarship and offers a way out of a certain deadlock created by the frequent dismissal of universality due to its association with the patriarchal status quo and the repression of difference.