Articles Available Online

In Alexandra Kleeman’s 2015 novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, we are presented with the image of a man who, coughing up blood, is suspected of having cancer when an X-ray shows a spreading, rag-edged shadow on his chest When they open him up, however, they instead find a six-inch fir tree embedded and growing inside his left lung It is an image which informed a fleeting passage in my own novel, Our Wives Under The Sea (2022): a scene in which two characters read a newspaper report about a woman who eats improperly prepared seafood and unwittingly winds up with a dozen squid paralarvae incubating inside her cheek In both cases, the image unfolds from the fact of the body as site, or even as habitat, and a markedly opaque entity in either instance We are made to understand that the body, unchecked, will happily go about its business, playing host to things that ought not to be there It is a feature of broader mistrust, this sense that our physical bodies cannot be relied upon if they will keep secrets from us How, after all, is one supposed to have faith in something that claims to protect you if it chooses to withhold information of a potentially dangerous breach?   This is something I have often thought about: the fact of knowing and not knowing, the sense of the body as self and as something altogether different; as you but also as something liable to attack you, to harbour things that mean you harm It is frightening, to be in one sense wholly inextricable from your body and yet not know what’s happening inside it How do you square that – the fact of the physical dark inside you? The fact that anything could be going on in there? The monster in Alien (1979) is scary because it’s a foreign object, but it’s also scary because of how easily the body accommodates it, at least for a little while   I’m obsessed with the concept of The Thing Inside The Body – the squirming something Noomi Rapace surgically