First, They Came for the Foreskin

WARNING:  The text, below, will make mention of a man CUTTING OFF HIS OWN PENIS.

Is that such a hard thing to do?  Attach a warning, I mean.  Not cut off your own penis.

I’ve been reading Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman, a 1998 book about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary.  It’s an okay little read, riddled with redundancies (Do editors actually edit, anymore, or do they just run everything through spell-check?), but not as tedious as the subject matter might lead one to expect.  That’s mostly because Winchester frames the dictionary’s story with parallel biographies of his titular dudes:  Professor James Murray, the man who actually slapped a good deal of the thing together; and William Chester Minor, the surgeon/paranoid schizophrenic/eventual penis-cutter-offer who did tons of invaluable research while serving a lifetime sentence for murder.

Minor’s story is obviously the more interesting one (he’s the only one mentioned in the title of the UK edition), and Winchester naturally opens with the story’s strongest hook, the killing that put the future-dismemberer behind bars.  It’s sad stuff, but there’s nothing particularly grisly – it was a shooting.  Elements of the doctor’s backstory are excitable – promises of nubile native women, the trauma of Civil War battlefield scenes – but once they’re inexplicitly covered, Professor settles in to the humdrum matters of lexicography and Minor’s deteriorating (but usually nonviolent) mental condition.

What I’m saying is:  There’s nothing to prepare you when the story finds Minor fashioning his own abrupt ending.  We’re marching happily along to Z.  It’s page 190 of a 226-page book; a couple taps, a little shake, and we’re done.  Right?

When you’re packed against steamy rush-hour commuters, your gut already knotted from that unique F train mélange of olfactory wonders (three parts urine, one part three-day-old Axe body spray, two parts someone’s beans-and-rice take-out), the last thing you want to turn a page and see is:

“I sent attendant Harfield for the Medical Officer and went to see if I could assist Dr. Minor.  Then he told me – he had cut his penis off.  He said he had tied it with string, which had stopped the bleeding.  I saw what he had done.” (from an asylum attendant’s report)

And like Dr. Minor, our author refuses to leave well enough alone.  Over the subsequent pages he flagellates at the why-oh-whys of The Incident, luring the reading audience once again into complacency... before sadistically dissecting the HOWS of self-castration.

The surgical removal of the penis is at the best of times a dangerous practice, rarely performed even by doctors:  An attack by the renowned Brazilian fishlet known as candiru, which likes to swim up a man’s urine stream and lodge in the urethra with a ring of retrorse spines...

Hey, hey, buddy, enOUGH.  That’s totally uncalled for.  SPINES?!  We’re not in Brazil, and there are no fucking candiru around.  You don’t go off on tangents at times like this.  You stay focused, and get through the necessary nastiness.

It is a brave, foolhardy, and desperate man who will perform an autopeotomy, in which one removes one’s own organ – the more so when the operation is done in an unsterile environment and with a pen knife.

Winchester starts tossing off sentences like “So on that Wednesday morning he sharpened his knife on a whetstone,” words like “ligature” and “pressure-cauterize,” and phrases such as “in one swift movement that most would prefer not to imagine” and “leaving a small stump.”  Yeah, thanks, man.  Thanks a lot.  But there’s always hope, right?  Even in Victorian England, reattachment...

...he sliced off his organ about one inch from its base.  HE THREW THE OFFENDING OBJECT INTO THE FIRE.  (caps mine)

He fucking what-what?

Where, I ask, is lovable old pal Grover when I most need him?

There’s an understood courtesy missing from the presentation here.  You’ve got to put a “Bridge Out Ahead” sign at some distance before the vacancy.  An audience is counting on some notice to build up resolve or avert their eyes.  Guys, back me up here:  While there’s only some har-har phantom pain when you see someone get kicked in the balls, there’s a serious, knee-buckling simpatico sense of biological uselessness when castration rears its ugly head.  You don’t just fling that at us.

Simon Winchester should know that.  I assume he has a penis.

UNLESS HE CUT IT OFF WITH A PEN KNIFE AND THREW IT INTO A FIREPLACE.

I am reading a book about the Oxford English Dictionary, for crying out loud.  It’s a “New York Times Notable Book.”  William Safire, in the NYT Magazine, called it “The linguistic detective story of the decade.”  The Wall Street Journal said, “There is much truth to be drawn... about Victorian pride, the relation between language and the world, and the fine line between sanity and madness.”  USA Today said, “[Winchester’s] writing is droll and eloquent.”

Droll and eloquent?  A couple interior blurbs may hint at the hero’s self-imposed shortcoming – “Brisk and entertaining,” says Washington Post Book World, and Salon calls the book a “slice of history" – but that’s not enough.  Hedwig had the decency to wag its nub in its title.  Why tuck this one away?  A cover redesign is necessary.

Had I bought the book online, however, I would have been clued in:

*

In a completely related story, Slate movie critic Dana Stevens hates men.(via)

tags: dana stevens  castration  simon winchester  

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