the body, language, and the reader

i don't know if it was the same for everyone else, but it actually took me quite a long time to realise the Isserly isn't really what we know as a normal human being...and after i got over feeling dumb, it struck me then that it could well be intended by Faber: that Isserly has an inner person -- the emotional, the commonly-termed 'soul' that is very much human, as we know it.

So are we all the same under the skin, as Amlis muses? Personally i think yes, and i think Faber does mean to say yes too. It struck me the way Faber highlights very base, bodily needs in the novel, and these needs are common to both vodsel and human (as is meant in the text). Isserly herself is besotten with physical needs to exercise, to eat and to shave, the fulfilment of which are crucial for her functioning as a pseudo-vodsel (p300-301). Besides these, she is also constantly conscious of her having lost her sexuality, after the operation to make her look like a vodsel, like how she looks upon her implanted breasts with "distaste", but was glad that "they prevented her seeing what had been done to her down below" (p71).

Despite being the 'alien' body, the kind of physical constraints and concerns that Isserly faces really sounds very familiar to the human body as the reader knows it. Particularly of interest to me is how Faber draws a response from the reader by not making it known right from the beginning that Isserly is 'alien'. Like the hitchhikers whose first observation of Isserly is her "fantastic tits" (p12), the reader's response to that would probably be sensual as well, much like the hitchhikers' impression that "women don't dress like that...unless they want a fuck" (p36). In fact, when i got only so far in the novel, i was wondering how to talk about something that seems almost pornographic as academia...only when i went on did i realise that Isserly herself had zero sexual thoughts towards her hitchhikers, despite contemplations on how "the bulge on [the hitchhiker's] jeans was promising, although most of it was probably testicles" (p10). (Which, i think, is really Faber's way of misleading the reader into making a physical response himself.) Yet Isserly's agenda is no less physical -- it is that of having these vodsels for meat.

So between vodsels and humans are all these physical desires and needs that overlap, but they serve each other in these purposes differently. There is a complete upheaval of physical needs and their satisfaction as we know it, yet we don't go beyond the fact that being bodied creatures, we are trapped by such needs. And whether it's vodsel or human or alien, these are the needs that seem to rule much of our lives. (I cringe to say "our", but "our" it is...the involvement of the reader in this examination of physicality is undeniable.)

What then is the binary opposite? Something that is not inside, nor part of the body, and that necessarily is the greater space beyond the body -- nature. Isserly herself finds much comfort in nature, and ultimately it is the only thing that can and does release her -- "The atoms that had been herself would mingle with the oxygen and nitrogen in the air...she would live forever." (p310-311)