Jean de Meun in his contribution to the Roman de la Rose practices an uncircumcised method of glossing.[1] Jean wraps his controversial defense of punning inside of an image of the foreskin.

Near the conclusion of Jean’s addition to the Rose, Amant brags about his penis, and he employs two litotes to indicate that he is not circumcised (ll. 21323-29). Amant says of his horse that “tel qu’il n’a mestier de ferrer” (ll. 21325; “it does not need to be shod”). And he adds that his staff is made “d’une pel souple san cousture (ll. 21327) “of a supple skin without any seam”). These are obvious euphemisms for his uncut member. Through innuendo, Amant boasts that he is uncircumcised.

These lines serve an important literary-theoretical function. In this particular portion of the poem, Jean defends puns and witticisms. Jean advocates in the Rose for verbal allegory, and a good deal of the controversy surrounding the poem had to do with Jean’s multivalent language.[2]

Soon after describing Amant’s member, Jean explains his theory of interpretation, saying that contraries are always defined in relation to one another and that glossing works through contrariness (ll. 21543-52).

Just five lines after this brief literary-theoretical explication, Amant again refers to his foreskin. He brags that his prepuce has retracted in preparation for the sex act: “a tout mon bourdon defferré” (ll. 21557-58; “my staff became uncovered”).

Amant’s arousal—and his ability to penetrate, erotically and hermeneutically—hinges upon his foreskin, whose existence he thrice acknowledges and whose retraction he describes floridly.

Just after Jean explains how interpretation happens by moving between gloss and text, the movement of Amant’s foreskin embodies this shuttling. The prepuce enacts Jean’s theory of interpretative contrariness. It is protracted, then it is retracted; and so it makes sensible the shuttling of interpretation from sign to referent. In its ultimate unity, however, Amant’s foreskin holds together the contraries.

In other words, Jean’s joke is that the reversibility of figuration—the ability to move from literal to figurative and back again—is realizable through uncircumcision. Jean’s celebration of uncircumcised reading is in marked distinction with orthodox, Pauline hermeneutics, which so often attempted to “cut” the literal from the figurative through readerly circumcision—a process Kathleen Biddick discusses in her Typological Imaginary (U Pennsylvania P, 2003).

[1] Citations from Le Roman de la Rose, tome III, ed. Félix Lecoy (Paris: Libraire Honoré Champion, 1970).

[2] See Earl Jeffrey Richards, “Introduction,” Debating the Roman de la Rose: A Critical Anthology, ed. Christine McWebb (New York: Routledge, 2007), xxi-xxxvi, especially xxxii.

Why do San Pellegrino cans come covered in a thin film of aluminum?

This superfluous skin is, for me, a preputial stylization. It is the redundant foreskin that ornaments the phallus.

The can’s design, with its Mediterranean palette, evokes the zest and the flare that we attribute to Latin culture—the passionate eroticism that we ascribe to Latin men.

Pellegrino’s metallic foreskin is the objet petit a of circumcised, Protestant America’s mad desire for uncut, Roman Catholicism fleshiness.

Clearly, too, there’s something Eucharistic about imbibing carbonated juice!

Legend has it that William Carlos Williams circumcised Ernest Hemingway’s firstborn son.[1]

Actually, the story is an exaggeration. It turns out that the poet only “retracted” Bumby Hemingway’s foreskin (that is, he forcibly pulled back the infant’s foreskin, a rather painful procedure).[2] Williams later wrote that “the redoubtable lion hunter almost fainted” when the child cried.[3]

This fictional circumcision is commemorated in Jack Coulehan’s poem “William Carlos Williams circumcises Ernest Hemingway’s first son.”

[1] This myth is propagated by many popular-press biographies of the writers, such as Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 125-26; Paul Mariani, Williams Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981), 239; James R. Mellow, Hemingway: A Life without Consequences (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992.), 258; John Leland, A Guide to Hemingway’s Paris (Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 1989), 36.

[2] As noted by Kenneth Schuyler Lynn, Hemingway (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 249.

[3] Williams writes in a letter of January 14, 1951, “Do you realize that when I was in Paris in 1924 I retracted Hemingway’s oldest boy’s foreskin for him while the redoubtable lion hunter almost fainted?” in The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, ed. John C. Thirlwall (New York: New Directions, 1957), 294.

New Year’s Day is the eighth day of Christmas, and so it marks the Feast of the Circumcision, the anniversary of Christ’s bris.

In general, Christians no longer celebrate Christ’s Circumcision. But it was an important holiday for most of Christian history.

So, today is a perfect day for me to launch this blog, which I’ll be using to share tidbits from my dissertation project.

My dissertation treats literary theories of the foreskin. I’m investigating how writers conceptualize literature in terms of circumcision and uncircumcision.

For a first post, here’s an excerpt from George Herbert’s “The Circumcision, or New-Year’s Day.” In this stanza, Herbert asks why God would subject the Christ child to the pain of the circumcision. Note the textual figures:

Is it to antedate thy death? To indite

Thy condemnation himself, and write

The copy with thy blood,

Since nothing is so good?

Or, is’t by this experiment to try,

Whether thou beest born mortal, and canst die?

Herbert suggests that the Circumcision is a writerly act. God uses the Child’s member as a pen, its tip dipped in blood, to “indite” the Crucifixion and “write” its “copy.” As Herbert goes on to say, “Thy Circumcision writ thy death in blood.” For Herbert, the Circumcision is a moment of literary creation.

You can see the rest of the poem here. And stay tuned for more!