Cock & Bull

Will Self Cock & Bull (1992)
I've always regarded 1993's My Idea of Fun as Self's debut novel, but coming back to Cock & Bull after at least a couple of decades, I realise it was this. It's actually a pair of novellas, Cock and Bull - hence the title, and even without a recurring character, the two comprise the yin and yang of a central theme which might be seen to lack balance were it further bifurcated. That theme, for what it may be worth, is genitalia - the organs which have driven human society forward from the very beginning by one means or another. No-one could possibly accuse Self of lacking ambition, but how the hell does one write about cocks and fannies without all the centuries old accumulation of bullshit, porn, and ideology getting in the way and defeating its own analysis? Self deftly defuses context by shifting everything a few feet to the left, and so we have Carol who finds she has grown a penis in Cock, and the eponymous star of Bull who wakes one morning to find a working vagina has opened up behind his knee just above the calf - the placement seeming necessary so as to circumnavigate the possibility of anything so reductionist as straightforward transgender fiction, Cock & Bull being closer in spirit to Kafka's Metamorphosis. It's about the smelly, wrinkly biology and how we deal with it, how we square it up with the fictions by which we've deodorised our toilet parts.

'There is that horror and its interaction with another horror. The bloody horror of gynaecological fact. Modern horror films are all blood and the membranous stria of bio-goo. But really they have simply rendered external what is at the core of our dearest friends. They have just turned inside out the sock of feminine biology.'

That being one perspective given herein, specifically by the Oxford don who narrates Cock to the author as they meet on a train like characters in a Graham Greene short story; but not even the bias of the author himself, the one recording this narrative, is exempt from scrutiny as the don seemingly glares out of the page to observe:

'You're typing me, boy, aren't you? You're turning me into something that I'm not. An amusing character, an oddity, a type!'

A couple of pages later we read that:

Carol and Dan's life was thus exactly like literature: thin and pulped into existence. They floated in vacuou, cut off from parents, isolated from one another. Since there was no other conduit to direct them into the corpuscular circulation of society, while the current was on they flew like filings towards the healing magnet.

This tendency to populate the novel with smaller models of itself achieves an admittedly gruesome climax in the person of Razza Rob, the foul stand-up comic.

'Razza is an ironist. You probably didn't notice' - but naturally, Bull gritted mentally, you did - 'but all these cunt jokes are just that: cunt jokes. They aren't jokes about women at all. They have nothing to do with women. Razza is cutting the archetypal cunt out of the woman - and displaying it for the world to see, and appreciate, that it's just a cipher - an empty category on to which people project their own distorted attitudes. After all, what's a hole once one removes it from the ground?'

Naturally, with horrible inevitability Razza Rob is subsequently revealed as entirely bereft of irony, and Juniper's somewhat forced rationalisation seems particularly timely given certain contemporary narratives wherein sexuality - and usually female sexuality - is divorced from biology in resumption of nineteenth century ideas about those feminine lady-brains.

Self's conclusion seems neatly summarised by the pejorative meaning of the title, although this is hardly a neatly binary discussions drawing yes, no, good, or bad conclusions, and as such it might arguably provide clues as to where so many of us get it wrong. The novel is an illusory medium which probably shouldn't be too easily mistaken for either anything directly allegorical or even conclusive regarding human society, but Self's satire comes about as close as we're likely to get in this instance, and it also helps that it's fucking funny for reasons which Razza Rob wouldn't have understood.