May 31, 1993
Comic Novellas on Metamorphoses

By Will Self.

The writer with the incongruous name of Will Self has become the latest literary sensation in England. Mr. Self has been voted one of the best young writers in Britain, and he has collected accolades from the likes of Martin Amis, Beryl Bainbridge and Ruth Rendell. "Will Self is already a cult figure," reads a quote from Salman Rushdie on the cover of Mr. Self's perverse new book. A "genuine comic writer," says Doris Lessing.

His first book to be published in the United States, "Cock & Bull," consists of two comic novellas, both based on the time-honored theme of metamorphoses. The result, however, owes less to Ovid or Kafka than to William Burroughs and scores of naughty schoolboys caught snickering in the lavatory about sex and bodily functions.

Just what sort of metamorphosis occurs in "Cock & Bull"? To put it bluntly, the first story features a woman who sprouts a penis; the second concerns a man who grows a vagina behind his knee. What is the point of these peculiar transformations? Presumably Mr. Self intends to satirize a "world in which social and sexual characteristics were already being tossed and dressed like salad," a world in which politically correct graduate students drone on about "phallocentrism" and "waitrons," a world in which women try to run with wolves and men are told to find their inner children.

The man in question in "Bull" is a former rugby player turned journalist, who, like Arbuthnot's archetypal Englishman, is named John Bull. Bull has recently suffered a reversal at work: his editor has killed his sports column and assigned him to cover cabaret, an assignment Bull has come to detest. Sent to cover a raunchy comic who specializes in crude jokes about female genitalia, Bull storms out of the club, provoking a rude and eerily prescient curse from the comic.

The next morning, Bull, like Gregor Samsa, wakes up to find himself transformed. Instead of becoming a beetle, he has developed a vagina on his leg.

Bull thinks the strange new orifice is a wound or a burn, and he immediately makes an appointment with his physician, a sanctimonious, self-deluding doctor by the name of Margoulies. Transfixed by Bull's condition, Margoulies decides to abandon all professional ethics and try to seduce his patient. He wants to make love to John Bull's leg. It's a desire, needless to say, that will create problems for everyone involved.

Similar difficulties ensue in "Cock" when a heretofore pacific housewife by the name of Carol discovers she's grown a penis. Carol, we're told by Mr. Self's mysterious narrator, is married to Dan, a dim design consultant who is "slight, sour, effete, unsure of himself." Carol and Dan met during a drunken pub tour, and since their marriage, Dan has become a falling-down drunk. He is constantly calling in sick to the office, and his pedestrian sex life with Carol has grown even more lethargic.

Eventually, Carol loses patience with Dan's drunken stupor and begins to assert herself. She stops drinking with Dan, stops entertaining Dan's drunken friends and starts seeking sexual satisfaction outside the marital bed. It's then that she discovers her abnormal genital growth.

As one of the characters in the story notes, the obvious implication is that "the increasing emancipation of women throughout this century has meant that they have -- albeit in a rather metaphorical way -- acquired some of the characteristics of men." Indeed, the newly endowed Carol grows increasingly aggressive and belligerent. She learns to drive, studies pinup pictures, and starts bossing poor Dan around. In short, her behavior appears to grow more and more masculine, much the way John Bull's behavior grows more and more feminine as he starts coping with premenstrual tension, water weight gain and hormonal ups and downs.

In recounting such events, Mr. Self demonstrates an uncanny ability, similar to that displayed by Kafka in "The Metamorphosis," to lend utterly absurd events an aura of verisimilitude by grounding the fantastic in the mundane. He possesses all those gifts a satiric writer might want: an eye for the telling detail, an ear for the pretensions of contemporary locution, an ability to write idiosyncratic prose that twinkles with cleverness and wit. Unfortunately, in this volume, these copious gifts are all too frequently put in the service of a misogynistic and ridiculously sophomoric vision.

In both "Cock" and "Bull," Mr. Self dithers on and on about male and female genitalia, as though he's terribly pleased with his own nastiness. His descriptions of these spare parts aren't terribly amusing; they certainly aren't erotic or shocking.

What is disturbing is the blatant sexism that underlies these two novellas. Although Mr. Self writes under the guise of sending up sexual politics and gender wars, his stories end up buttressing the oldest, most sexist views of men and women. In "Bull," we learn that the kind, well-meaning man, who refuses to partake in the crudest, most macho posturings of his sex, ends up being emasculated, raped and literally turned into a woman. In "Cock," we learn that the woman who stands up for herself relinquishes her femininity and literally turns into a man, in Carol's case a particularly foul-minded man filled with homicidal rage.

In finishing this volume, the reader can only regret that a writer of Mr. Self's talents has wasted them on such messages. One hopes his next book, a collection of short stories already published in Britain and due out here next year, better showcases his evident gifts.

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