Cock and Bull was published by Bloomsbury in 1992. It contains two novellas whose premises are complementary: in “Cock,” Carol, a neglected housewife, grows a fully-functional penis from her lower body; in “Bull,” John Bull, a rugby player, develops a vagina behind his knee. Self uses these bodily transformations not for comedy alone (though both novellas are very funny) but to explore what gender means when it is divorced from the body that supposedly determines it.
Carol’s penis does not make her a man — it gives her access to male power (specifically, phallic aggression and sexual dominance) while she remains psychologically female. John’s vagina does not make him a woman — it makes him vulnerable in ways his male social identity has never permitted. The novellas argue that gender is not biology (you can have both sets of genitalia and still be “yourself”) but power — and that bodily transformation reveals rather than creates the power dynamics that gender conceals.
Self’s prose is characteristically dense and allusive: both novellas are narrated in different registers (Carol’s story by a detached, clinical voice; John’s by a boozy, matey narrator) and packed with the baroque vocabulary and intellectual digressions that mark all Self’s fiction. The sexual content is explicit and deliberately uncomfortable — Self refuses to make bodily reality palatable.
Collecting Cock and Bull
First edition (Bloomsbury, London, 1992): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $30–$75
- Very good: $15–$30