Cock and Bull: A Review

In some ways, Will Self's 1992 novella Cock and Bull "works" before the reader even begins, simply in the development in a cleverly shocking premise - in one story, an unfulfilled woman grows a penis. In another, a man grows a vagina in the back of his left knee. It's just shocking, just crude, just strange enough to peek a reader's interest because both stories hinge on an impossibility that is as seemingly perverse as it is intriguing. There are simple, comic immensities in Self's work, but there is also an intense awareness of those immensities, like a comedian who explains the punchline to a rather good joke. Thus the clever awareness of how clever the set-up is breaks the fourth wall not in an engaging, but an unpleasantly jarring manner.

Self's takes a mocking approach to gender roles, presenting a flat, dull character in Carol - a plain, unmotivated college drop out who knows words like "phallocentrism" but cannot apply the word in a real, concrete way. Carol is married to Dan, a walking and sometimes talking metaphor, an impotent, effeminate man who makes Carol feel "less like a woman" when around him. His growing alcoholism, and their withering sex life, lend to Carol's feelings of complete disillusion with a life she has been essentially drifting through since college.

It is when Carol decides to take ownership of her body - through abstaining from his hard partying ways and, later, through masturbation - that she discovers her "frond." As Carol's penis grows, she becomes more assertive and dismissive of Dan, goes out into the world. As her penis grows, so does her freedom, her impatience, and ultimately her violent agression. Her actions become, gradually, more and more "masculine" in the stereotypical sense - culminating in a final, brutal act.

The same supposed reversal in behavior occurs too in "Bull," where John Bull is a journalist who grows a vagina behind his knee, and later finds himself in a strange, abusive affair with his doctor. Bull, once a rugby player, then a sports journalist, then forced to review a cabaret act (the event which leads to his new "growth") gradually becomes more and more feminine, dealing with PMS and other physical and hormonal fixtures of being a woman.

Self's ability to mold his unreal plots into something malleable and almost (almost) familiar is often masterful, as is his ability to anticipate and then in the same movement crush the expectations of the reader (most interestingly executed with his use of three narrators in "Cock"). But despite this ability, and despite his supposed attempt to satirize gender roles in a post-modern culture, there is a disconcerting fog of the misogynistic that hangs over both stories. This fog cheapens a device that could have been elevated to a more clever and even more humorous commentary on sex and gender.

Both stories, instead of shedding an interesting light on gender and sex by mocking sexist stereotypes of both men and women, celebrate and perpetuate them. Men who don't act "manly" enough become, literally, pussies - literally and figuratively emasculated - worthy of only being viewed as sex objects, worthy only of rape - as women, in Self's world, obviously are. By that same term, women who are not in touch with their femininity and cannot (or will not) find men to bring out that femininity by being real men are men themselves. But, because of their stupidity and their weakness, they cannot filter or harness all that precious male testosterone - they become monsters instead.

What's left is really just so many pretty turns of phrase, some interestingly executed experimentation, some shock value, and an all pervading sense of disappointment. The best jokes are ones that, after that initial raucous burst of laughter, leave you thinking - maybe not a lot, maybe not enough to change your day (or your mind), but certainly enough to linger somewhere in the subconscious. But there is a banality, a blankness in the digestion of both stories. Thus, "Cock and Bull" essentially amounts to a joke that ends with the punchline: "To get to the other side."