Unabridged

In most of these books, those quoted below, circumcision is a plot point, and the issue is only whether or not a character is circumcised, and why. The treatment varies widely, depending on whether the culture is circumcising or intact.

Horse Heaven and 3001, on other pages, deal with sexual consequences of intactness and circumcision respectively, in very different ways, and Tales of the City with growing up intact.

1. 3001: The Final Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
2. Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx
3. Diary (Sunday December 24, 1911) by Franz Kafka
4. Glue by Irvine Walsh
5. Horse Heaven by Jane Smiley
6. Live from Golgotha by Gore Vidal
7. Lucky Town by James Brown
8. Sellevision by Augusten Burroughs
9. Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
10. Love's Labours Lost, The Merchant of Venice
    and Othello by Shakespeare
11. The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman
    
12. The Temple by Stephen Spender
13. Trowim Way Leg by Tim Flannery

... He stood up, said you bet he'd like to see Jack's room, recalled one of Jack's stories about this old man. Jack was dick-clipped and the old man was not; it bothered the son, who had discovered the anatomical disconformity during a hard scene. He had been about three or four, he said, always late getting to the toilet, struggling with buttons, the seat, the height of the thing, and often as not left the surroundings sprinkled down. The old man blew up about it and this one time worked into a crazy rage.

"Christ, he licked the stuffin out a me, knocked me down on the bathroom floor, whipped me with his belt. I thought he was killin me. Then he says, 'You want a know what it's like with piss all over the place? I'll learn you,' and he pulls it out and lets go all over me, soaked me, then he throws a towel at me and makes me mop up the floor, take my clothes off and warsh them in the bathtub, warsh out the towel, I'm bawlin and blubberin. But while he was hosin me down I seen he had some extra material that I was missin. I seen they'd cut me different like you'd crop a ear or scorch a brand. No way to get it right with him after that."

First published in the New Yorker, October 13, 1997

This story gets it right, that when a circumcised boy discovers what he is missing - especially something his father has - he is traumatised. In a circumcising society he may take comfort from being the same as his peers, but for many this only delays the shock and loss.

This morning my nephew's circumcision. A short, bow-legged man, Austerlitz, who already has 2,800 circumcisions behind him, carried the thing out very skillfully. It is an operation made more difficult by the fact that the boy, instead of lying on a table, lies on his grandfather's lap, and by the fact that the person performing the operation, instead of paying close attention, must whisper prayers. First the boy is prevented from moving by wrappings which leave only his member free, then the surface to be operated on is defined precisely by putting on a perforated metal disc, then the operation is performed with what is almost an ordinary knife, a sort of fish knife. One sees blood and raw flesh, the moule [mohel] bustles about briefly with his long-nailed, trembling fingers and pulls skin from some place or other over the wound like the finger of a glove. At once everything is all right, the child has scarcely cried. Now there remains only a short prayer during which the moule drinks some wine and with his fingers, not yet entirely unbloody, carries some wine to the child's lips. Those present pray: “As he has now achieved the covenant, so may he achieve knowledge of the Torah, a happy marriage, and the performance of good deeds.”

Today when I heard the moule's assistant say the grace after meals and those present, aside from the two grandfathers, spent the time in dreams or boredom with a complete lack of understanding of the prayer, I saw Western European Judaism before me in a transition whose end is clearly unpredictable and about which those most closely affected are not concerned, but, like all people truly in transition, bear what is imposed upon them. It is so indisputable that these religious forms which have reached their final end have merely a historical character, even as they are practiced today, that only a short time was needed this very morning to interest the people present in the obsolete custom of circumcision and its half-sung prayers by describing it to them as something out of history.

-- It goat so fuckin tight it just went ping! Gally elaborates. -- Up like a fuckin Venetian blind. Ah wis in agony. Ah thoat it wis jist the burst Durex wrapped roond thair at first, bit it wis way too sair. Then ah realised that it wis ma fuckin foreskin! Aye, like a fuckin broken roller blind wrapped roond the bit whair the shaft meets the bell end, cuttin oaf the blood supply ay blood. Ma bell end went blue, then black. The Brook sister phoned the ambulance, they took ays up tae the hoaspital: emergency circumcision job.

(He didn't have to: see paraphimosis.)

In the beginning was the nightmare, and the knife was with Saint Paul, and the circumcision was a Jewish notion and definitely not mine.

I am Timothy, son of Eunice the Jewess and George the Greek. I am fifteen. I am in the kitchen of my family's home in Lystra. I am lying stark naked on a wooden table. I have golden hyacinthine curls and cornflower-blue, forget-me-not eyes and the largest dick in our part of Asia Minor.

The nightmare always begins the way that it did in actual life. I am surrounded by Jews except for my father, George, and Saint, as I called Saul of Tarsus,

...

Little did I realize when I became a Christian and met Saint and his friends, that my body-specifically, my whang-was to be a battleground between two warring fac­tions within the infant Christian Church.

... although the Jerusalem Jews liked the money that Saint kept sending back to head­quarters, they still couldn't, in their heart of hearts, stomach the Gentiles, and so they refused to eat at the same table with us, since our huge uncut cocks were always on their minds. Finally, things came to a head when Saint took a shine to a young convert and stud named Titus and took him down to Jerusalem for a long weekend of fun. After having drunk too much Babylonian beer, Titus took a leak up against the wall of Fort Antonia, where the Roman troops were stationed. As luck would have it, his snakelike foreskin was duly noted with horror by some loitering Jews, who reported to the rabbinate the presence of a Gentile on the premises a stone's throw from the Temple. The central office then leaned on James, an employee of the Temple, and James told Saint that in the future those goyim who became converted to Jesus must be circumcised. That tore it.

... . Finally, Saint suggested to John Mark that he undergo a public circumcision in order to convince Jerusalem that Saint was in no way an apostate or self-hating Jew. John Mark split, leaving an opening not only in Saint's office staff but sack, too. As an all-Greek Greek boy who wanted to see the world, I figured that Saint's fussing around with my bod was a small price to pay, or so I thought when I signed on. It wasn't as if there wasn't plenty of me left over for the girls of Lystra. Also, as secretary and gofer, I was pretty good, if not in John Mark's league. The work was never dull. And what a learning experience! Then came the shock. Saint was denounced by the pillars of the church in Jerusalem: He ate with goyim. He christened goyim. He was having carnal knowledge of a teenage Greek with two centimeters of rose-velvety foreskin, me. This last was only whispered, but it would have been quite enough to get Saint stoned to death by a quorum of Jews anywhere on earth if James were to give the word.

That explains why I am in the nightmare that I can never get out of once it starts.

... The dream's always the same. I am on my back. The room is chilly. I have goose bumps. All around me are Jews, wearing funny hats. Saint stands beside the table, my joint resting lightly in his hand. Needless to say, between the cold and the approaching mutilation, my fabled weenie has shrunk considerably.

"Let it be reported by all who presently bear witness that Timothy, our youthful brother in Christ, has now, of his own free will, undertaken to join the elect of the elect through the act of circumcision."

... I can hear Saint's deep voice as he says, "Mohel, do thy business!"

A rough hand seizes my organ of generation. I feel a sharp pull. Then a burning, the knife ... I scream, and wake up.

... I am as mad as I must have been back then at what had been done to me just so Saint could stay in good with the Jerusalem pillars of salt of the church. Historically, as well as theologically, he should have made a clean break with the Jews then and there, using the preservation of my perfect dong as a perfect pretext.

In that silent smoky hall you could have heard an unweighted pin drop or the loosest foreskin slide back.

- p 32

"The presence," said James, "of non-Jews is very dis­tressing to many members of our congregation, particularly at table where we are entirely kosher, and often dairy. That is why the two tables have been a compromise that the brethren can live with." James was staring with disgust at my hyacinthine golden curls and cornflower-blue eyes, the per­fect Gentile youth so hated by every proper, self-loving Jew. "Barely," he added.

"Timothy has been circumcised," said Saint, intuiting James's revulsion. "Timmy, show Brother James your ..."

"Not in the dining room," said James, looking ill.

- pp 106-7

Saint was very grim. "Am I to be tried by the Sanhedrin, Stephen?"

"No. By us. The Jesists, as they call us at the Temple."

"What is the charge?"

"In general, infidelity to the Torah. Specifically, at Ephesus, you told a Jew that since he followed Jesus he need not circumcise his son."

Saint laughed. "There is no truth in that. To the con­trary, I have even gone so far as to insist that many of the Gentiles close to me undergo circumcision. Timothy, show him your member."

James was appalled. "Please. Not in front of the yentas."

- p 111

[Nero']s eyes focused on my mutilated whang.

"Jew boy?" Nero's eyes narrowed.

"No, a Christian," I squeaked. "I just had this done because it was too tight..."

"Phimosis!" Nero was now all smiles. "It could happen to anyone. Did you know that there is an epidemic of phimosis ... in Britain? Don't you love it?" ..."

- p 160

His penis seemed enormous in comparison and the hood of skin over its tip remained, while mine had been removed at birth, which according to my father had been a horrible mistake.

"Your mother wanted it done. If I'd had my say I would have spared you the pain. Circumcision," he said, "it's mutilation. A conspiracy, Bobby, on the part of the American Medical Association in the name of public hygiene. A crock of shit is what it is. All they care about is making that first quick buck off every little pecker in the world. Ain't no reason in hell for it except simple greed at your expense."

His theory stuck me as eccentric, and yet for the longest time I harbored this absurd vision of doctors, gathered in secrecy for the express purpose of deciding the fate of my precious foreskin and those of our nation's male population. I pictured the scalpel, the blood, and though I couldn't recall the pain I knew how sensitive I was down there and could imagine it intensely enough. My father further contended that my loss, in terms of future sexual pleasure, was of greater consequence than I'd unfortunately ever know.

"The head gets numb without the skin and after a while you can't feel much, like a callus," he said, "on your hand. It gets toughened from use."

I could not, of course, ever make the comparison, and I didn't see how he could, given that he hadn't suffered my fate, but I hoped, regardless of the contradiction, that someday I'd have the opportunity to put his theory to the test.

My father's earlier contention regarding the loss of my foreskin, and how it would have a numbing or deadening effect on my future sexual pleasure, proved highly inaccurate.

Howard's normally placid, waspy features contorted with frustration. A vein on his temple pulsed. "Max, the other hosts weren't naked under their bathrobes. It's just - well, there's no excuse - seven-year-old-children and their mothers just should not know that you're uncircumcised."

[English Paul and German Joachim are washing themselves, naked, in their Cologne hotel room in 1929.]

Joachm turned round, away from the mirror, and said in his American drawl, smiling, but with unusual slowness as he looked Paul up and down: 'Well I guess that you and Ernst have one thing in common.'

Horribly embarrassed, Paul asked: 'What?'

'Well, I'm sure you must realise,' said Joachim, watching him all the time -

Paul could not go on standing there, being looked at. Trembling, he sat down on the edge of his bed. Then he said in a voice that he tried to make sound detached, scientific, indifferent -

'In England, being circumcised doesn't mean being Jewish.'

'What does it mean then?'

'Oh, I suppose it is done for medical reasons.'

Joachim stated: 'Unless it was absolutely essential for medical reasons no German parents would let their son be circumcised.'

'Why not?'

'Because they would not wish his school-mates to think he was a Jew.'

In the same choking, scientifically indifferent voice, Paul provided information -

'In England, boys from upper-middle-class parents tend to be circumcised. Not boys of the lower class.'

Oh. Why is that?' asked Joachim, with his usual wide-eyed amazement at the English.

'I don't know I suppose because the doctors of the poor don't think the parents can afford such luxuries.' He tried to laugh.

He wanted to dress, but he feared that if he did so Joachim would think he was hiding that mutilation which he had in common with Ernst. He resisted an impulse to bury his face, scarlet with embarrassment, in his hands. Suddenly, trembling, he was overwhelmed by the sense of those primitive rites which still divided whole peoples - white skins, black skins - into tribes: cutting across nationhood with connections far more primitive, going back to eras when foreskins were cut off with flints. Under their clothes men concealed the marks which revealed which side they were on in the secret, still haunting wars between the races of the circumcised and the uncircumcised. He thought of the Old Testament.

As this conversation progressed, Deyfu leaned close to me and asked in a whisper why I was so different from them.

Startled by the question, I began to grope for explanations about my relative large size and white skin.Deyfu cut short this tangled speech by pointing between his legs and saying,"No, hia" (Not that, here!).

At once the point of the question became apparent- I was circumcised while they were not. Mustering my finest Pidgin, I expounded "Ol tumbuna bilong mi i save rausim laplap bilong kok bilong pikinini man" which translalates roughly as "My ancestors developed the habit of cutting off the little skirt of skin that grows at the end of their children's willies".

Deyfu looked at me solemnly for a moment or two, then tried to translate this explanation for his eagerly waiting clansmen. After a few words he fell to the ground, choking and writhing.

He was in a paroxysms of laughter!

As he spurted the words out, all our companions fell about helplessly in a similiar manner. For a long time, no-one could look at me without becoming hysterical again, and it was at least twenty minutes before the mirth finally subsided.

While all this was going on I began to reflect upon my attitude towards the Miyanmin and their body decorations; their pierced nasal septums bearing pig's tusks had seemed the height of bizarre, outrageous and primitive fashion. Until this moment, I never considered that they could conceivably view me in the same way.