Hyperglossia in Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights

• Main Author: Elidio La Torre Lagares
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hyperion University 2021-08-01
• Series: HyperCultura
• Subjects: hyperglossia; hypertext; heteroglossia; assemblage; rhizome; bodies without organs
• Online Access: http://litere.hyperion.ro/hypercultura/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/La-Torre-Lagares.pdf

Using Édouard Glissant’s vision of ‘poetics of relation,’ I intent to demonstrate how Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Flights (2007; 2017) turns significantly responsive to what I have termed ‘hyperglossia.’ Hyperglossia proposes a magnification of Bakhtin's heteroglossia, in recognition that today's world is informed by discourses that not only complete and complement each other, but also exceed the individual’s capacity to assemble one reality. If heteroglossia encompasses another's speech in another's language (Bakhtin), hyperglossia appeals to both the form that speech acquires and its precedence as utterance (the polyphonic aspect), as it is processed by the writer. Hyperglossia is rhizomatic, hypertextual, and exponential. It is a continuum of fluidity and indeterminacy that challenges Western patterns of reading and thought. On the light of this, I propose a reading of Tokarczuk’s Flights as a hyperglossic text in functions determined by the fragmentation of the narrative voice(s).