Abstract
When I was a child, I had lucid dreams of flying. That was many decades ago but I remember the sensation vividly and nostalgically. By comparison, the rest of my life has been an earthbound affair. So, I picked up Peter Adey’s new book Levitation with pleasure and anticipation. I was not disappointed: it does manage to conjure the strange allure of effortless flight. It is also a lovely looking book with umpteen pictures of assorted people who are all some distance above the ground.
Defining levitation as ‘[t]hat act of the body’s lifting up, rising from the ground without mechanical aid or rocket power’ (pp. 7 and 8), Adey has produced a compelling history of its curious and curiously insistent presence within both modern and pre-modern cultures. Quoting Italo Calvino’s observation that there is a strong connection ‘between the levitation desired and the privation actually suffered’ (p. 41), Adey reads the urge to levitate as, in part, a reflection of constraints and limitations. The more held down we are, the more we dream of rising up. However, it is one of the book’s admirable qualities that the author also tries to break free from sociological determinism (the stolid assumption that everything is rooted in and explained by ‘the social’) and grasp or, at least, pay homage to levitation as something that exceeds its era. Across eight chapters and many centuries, Adey moves to and fro between historical and social explanations and material which is more primal, universal but also more ineffable, ‘Neither committed to man and woman “as such” nor as “historical”’, he tells us, ‘this book will spend its time hovering appropriately between the two’ (p. 11). As this implies, Adey is interested in the levitator as an ‘ambiguous and vulnerable figure’ (p. 264); a body that is ‘really quite other’ (p. 243).
Levitation starts with medieval and classical sources but soon ranges into the scandals and dramas of its colorful Victorian practitioners. Various surrealists, superheroes, and spacemen float through subsequent chapters. The book concludes with something of a kaleidoscope of radical activists, Jewish exiles, and many more besides, all of whom have used levitation as a form of release and defiance.
Adey’s chapters never quite settle down. The book dips in and out of different centuries and examples, keeping the reader on their toes. One is not sure which thread Adey will start tugging next. This can be a little exasperating; the tumble of instances and names sometimes feels like a roll call and the book an overflowing curiosity cabinet of every flying, rising, and hovering person Adey has managed to make a note of. But if one goes with the flow and gives oneself over to its heady, quixotic pleasures, Levitation will soon dispel these kinds of objections. Indeed, reverie is part of Adey’s method. Drawing on the medievalist Nicola Masciandaro, he argues for ‘a particular kind of medieval possession that encourages an unknowing of our established ways of thought or writing and an embrace of “poetry as knowledge and philosophy as joy”’ (p. 54).