Angelo Soliman’s Importance in Olga Tokarczuk’s “Flights”

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.