From
Carol’s unexplained penis growth, on we go to the sudden apparition of a vagina
behind Bull’s left knee – what an awkward place to have one… - Will Self knows
how to intrigue this reader. The obvious difference between Bull’s and Carol’s
moments of metamorphosis is a temporal one, Carol’s frond morphed into a penis
over the course of a few weeks whilst Bull wakes up one morning with a newly
acquired sexual organ. Bull’s vagina appears to instantly have a mind of its
own, a distinction from Carol’s penis, which took time to eventually dominate
her behavior.
As Bull
tends to his habit of ‘[exploring] all the nooks and crevices of his body’, he
comes across the vagina. However, the narrator does not credit this discovery
to Bull’s borderline obsessive-compulsive disorder-like practice but rather to
the ‘malevolent reality-gashing interloper, [who] chose that moment to prink
and snag’. The attribution of it mind gives the vagina another dimension apart
from being a character’s body part, but a character in its own right. If the
vagina itself is not a character, it could be the result of foreign intruder in
Bull’s body. Who knows, it might be the symptom of a new pathogen yet to be
discovered by modern science? Bull is thrown into a ‘stereoscopic zone’ where
factuality no longer coheres with rationality and the predisposed conceptions
of human anatomy are thrown up in the air. The same could be said about Carol’s
story as she made her progression from being a feminist, albeit one with little
knowledge or true conviction, to the don, a sex-driven egomaniac with a penchant
for storytelling. It seems as if Bull shall be going through a similar alteration
of identity though in the opposite direction, male to female.
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