Body at war: the weird drama taking place inside us

Eight years ago, Tracy Sorensen was diagnosed with an unusual form of ovarian cancer, which has now returned. Her surreal and clever novel centres on body parts fighting a malignant force.

Tracy Sorensen crocheted 3-dimensional representations of her organs and tumours - pictured above is the stomach ‘Gaster’.

Tracy Sorensen was diagnosed with cancer some years ago but survived to write her extraordinary morality play about the war that raged in her body. Her labyrinth of a novel, The Vitals is out this week, and it is our melancholy duty to report that while she was for eight years free of cancer, it has returned and Sorensen is now undergoing chemotherapy.

The disease she contracted was a form of ovarian cancer, called peritoneal cancer. Her treatment involved getting a colostomy bag. This development forms part of her novel (or antinovel), which is a highly imaginative dramatisation of what is generically a medical condition but is in fact one of those weird (you might say wonderful) dramas that takes place inside a human body.

The book is centrally concerned with the fact that a sweet blonde pert character known to the inter-corporal as Baby is in fact a tumour and seeks to destroy them all and must therefore be done away with. Baby is also the lady and mistress of Bunny – not surprisingly a rabbit – who is also given to creating a proliferating tribe of rabbits affiliated with the tumour world.

In practice, the anthem of the book sung by the normative body parts is “Kill Baby”.

The book is also populated with diverse human figures who may sport, say, a mordant existential slant on life while being identified with the Spleen, or they may be many-armed like an Indian Goddess with thaumaturgical powers though they go under the name of Liv and are to be identified with that central organ the Liver.

There is a famous Hollywood film, Inner Space, with Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid, which exploits the miniaturised drama of the inner life of the body. There’s an unhappy one with Jennifer Lopez that plays on the idea, and there are various literary analogs that tug at the mind and may illuminate it.

Psychomachia: what’s that when it’s at home? Well, a psychomachia is a form of drama – originally medieval – in which various vices and virtues do battle for the individual’s soul. Everyman is the most famous of these mystery plays in our tradition though the German versions dating back to Max Reinhardt at Salzburg of Jedermann with the likes of Maximillian Schell or Klaus Maria Brandauer the most celebrated. These morality plays – Chiwetel Ejiofor was in a pretty ordinary production of Everyman at the National a few years ago – are distinguished from the Mystery plays which are explicitly biblical.

Another reference point is Shakespeare’s late tragedy Coriolanus. At the outset the politician Menenius – the Michael Hordern part – compares the Roman ruling class to the Belly which has a central and sustaining role to play in the whole body politic.

Sorensen’s book has a belly which goes under the evocative name of Gaster who thrives on all that can be tasted and devoured and thrills with taste and succulence even though he has a central role to play in the headlong propulsion of the plot of The Vitals.

Tracy Sorensen, and the cover of The Vitals, which is based on her experience with cancer. It is told from the perspective of her organ, as they fight over her future.

Sorensen certainly makes a supreme imaginative effort to turn her story of endangered life and bodily invasion into a rich and strange world of metamorphic landscapes that shade in and out of conjurations of the real world – characters walk through shops and restaurants even as they are at some biological juncture of feasibility so that the internal world of organic connection is constantly being opened to a panorama of actualities. Ute – short for utility vehicle – is in fact a uterus though she retains in rapid shifts of focus both a human face and the face of a vehicle.

It’s a madcap fantasia of a world Sorensen has created which is – against the odds – consistently “real” in its sustained snatches of enactment. You don’t doubt the formal inventiveness with which fancy is made to yield a consistently surprising dislocation of the world we know. Characters declare that they will spend their lives quoting the theorist Deleuze in French but they also disguise their best laid plans by speaking in a form of that ancient kids’ lingo pig Latin.

Here’s a representative passage of Sorensen’s very buoyantly elaborated cartoonery which encompasses a deft and dazzling mastery of surrealism and all its mutant balletics:

“You probably think of me as an upside-down pair with two raised hands, a football in each hand.

This is reasonable; it captures my basic features.

But I like to think of myself as a ute, the colloquial name for an Australian utility vehicle. Think of a dirty white vehicle with two kelpies riding on the back, barking, and quivering, the wind riffling their fur …”

She has a gorgeous vocabulary – marvellously enhanced and weaponised – and the upshot has more than a little in common with the frilly and frolicsome girls’ own postmodernism of a writer such as Helene Cixous.

The difficulty, though – and it’s a formidable hurdle – is that the central predicament of what to do with Baby and the rabbits (the potentially murderous tumours) can’t really sustain a framework of allegory, of morality play or psychomachia, or call it what you will.

As soon as you give the life-threatener a human face then you define her would-be assassins as murderers which is one reason why The Vitals – which builds to such a hectic and dramatically propulsive penultimate climax – ultimately drifts away and creatures expire like flies. So much effort has gone into creating a halfway world where the pit of the bowels and the sauntering world of human contention and reaction are made cognate but the doodling brilliance of the pictorial plotting is difficult to sustain as human feeling issuing into righteous or bloody-minded resolution.

But The Vitals is full and overflowing with whimsy and the willingness to take risks. It is the anatomy of a world gone haywire and although it will try any reader’s patience – and parts of it are an open challenge to the very idea of literary coherence – the talent on show here is boisterous, audacious and willing to persist with any folly in sight as long as the ball is kept moving. It takes a formidable literary self-possession to go this far out of control and still keep the reader guessing.

The fact that The Vitals is concocted from a tissue of nonsense does not put out the light that shines here in the face of any caution.

Peter Craven is a cultural critic