If our consideration of flying were limited to those works where characters literally fly, we’d have a
pretty thin discussion. These examples of actual flight, necessary as they are, remain valuable chiefly for
the instruction they give us in interpreting figurative flight. There’s an Irish novel about a little boy growing
up to become a writer. As he matures, he finds that in order to acquire the experience and vision he
needs to become a writer, he’ll have to leave home. Problem: home is an island. The only way he’s going
to be able to leave is to cross a body of water, which is the most dramatic and final sort of home-leaving
one can take (and he is a young man with a fear of water). Fortunately, he has the right name to help him
out: Dedalus. Not a very Irish name for a young man from Dublin, nor is it the first name he tried for
young Stephen, but it’s the one James Joyce settled on for A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man
(1916). Stephen feels hemmed in by the strictures of Irish life, by family and politics and education and
religion and narrow-mindedness; as we know by now, the antidote to limitations and shackles is freedom.
The latter parts of the novel are filled with images of birds, feathers, and flying, all of which, while not
referring to literal flight, evoke thoughts of metaphorical flight, of escape. Stephen has an epiphany, a
Joycean religio-aesthetic word for an awakening, of a wading girl, in which moment he experiences the
sensation of beauty and harmony and radiance that convinces him he must be an artist. The girl is neither
singularly beautiful nor memorable in herself. Rather, the scene is beautiful in its totality, or perhaps it
p. 133would be more accurate to say in his perception of its totality. In this moment the narration
describes her as a bird, from the feathery edges of her drawers to her breast like that of some
“dark-plumaged bird.” Subsequent to this epiphany, Stephen begins to ruminate on his namesake, the
crafter of wings for escape from a different island, whom he comes to think of as “hawklike.” Finally he
announces that he must fly past the nets he sees as set to trap him into the conventionality and smallness
that is every Dubliner’s inheritance. His understanding of flight is purely symbolic, yet his need for escape
is no less real for that. In order for him to become a creator, his spirit must soar; he must be free.
Indeed, often in literature the freeing of the spirit is seen in terms of flight. In his poetry, William Butler
Yeats often contrasts the freedom of birds with the earthbound cares and woes of humans. In his great
“The Wild Swans at Coole” (1917), for instance, he watches the beautiful birds rise and wheel, forever
young, while he, a middle-aged man, feels the pull of gravity more heavily with each passing year. He
makes much of Zeus taking the swan’s form to ravish Leda and beget Helen (of Troy) on her, and he
sees the archangel’s appearance to the Virgin Mary in terms of wings and birds as well.
Similarly, we speak of the soul as taking wing. Seamus Heaney has several poems where the souls of the
departed are said to flutter away from the body, and in this he is far from alone. The notion that the
disembodied soul is capable of flight is deeply embedded in the Christian tradition, and I suspect in many
others as well, although it is not universal. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, such a concept was
problematic, since the souls of blessed and damned alike went to an underground realm, but the belief in
a celestial heaven leads much of later Western culture to a sense of the soul’s lightness. In “Birches”
Robert Frost imagines climbing the supple birches up toward heaven, then being lightly set back on the
p. 134ground, and he declares that both going and coming back would be good (even without wings).
When Claudius, Hamlet’s villainous uncle, tries to pray, he fails, saying, “My words fly up, my thoughts
remain below.” The spirit cannot rise up, Shakespeare suggests, when weighed down by the guilt of an
unconfessed murder. When Hamlet lies dead at the play’s end, his friend Horatio mourns him, saying,
“Good night, sweet prince, /And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!” As we all know by now, if
Shakespeare said it, it must be true.
These flights of fancy allow us, as readers, to take off, to let our imaginations take flight. We can sail off
with characters, freed of the limitations of our tuition payments and mortgage rates; we can soar into
interpretation and speculation.
Happy landings.