The Irrepressible Rise of the Unvanquished Phallus
[T]he sainted David Foster Wallace… called Updike “just a penis with a thesaurus” and predicted the end of the primacy of “Great Male Narcissists in American fiction. “Most of the literary readers I know personally are under 40,” Wallace wrote, “and a fair number are female, and none of them are big admirers of the postwar G.M.N.’s.”
…
In showering Mr Díaz with prize after prize, literary jurors seem to be saying the post-war GMN isn’t dead yet. Is it the wars, the terrorism, the recession, driving the longing for a regenerated machismo that Mr. Díaz’s multi-culti cred makes acceptable again? Is it a feminist backlash?
– source
The rebel penis stalks the land…
like the whispered name of a South-American guerilla, whom no amount of gunfire can seem to repress. The villagers have all heard of him, but none of them has ever seen him. You can put out rewards for his head, you can blanket the jungles in camo-clad killers, you can bug his lovers and bomb his hideouts — none of it is ever any use. Yesterday came reports that he’d been killed in a gunfight — a colonel saw the corpse, its distended length as limp as a washcloth, covered in blood, dirt, and leaves. ‘Not so tough now, are you?’ he thought. But then he looked down to light his cigar, and when he looked up again, the damned thing was sprinting away into the undergrowth. The colonel emptied his clip — too late! The irrepressible penis was once again on the loose.
Now the reports come in daily that he’s been spotted again. He is everywhere and nowhere at the very same time. In the lowlands he’s leading an ambuscade. In the highlands he’s executing a loyalist mayor. In Guayo, he pokes an old woman in the eye. He even leads a parade through the slums of the capital — there’s video footage of him, erect as a matador, his beret jaunted forwards and to the side, swaggering like Mussolini before the throngs of the rabble. Goddamnit! What kind of generals do we have? What kind of soldiers? What kind of bullets? Is he immortal or are they made of cotton? You knock him down and he springs up again, swinging as lethally as a knife strapped to a booby-trapped sapling. He’s as cunning as a rat, as cowardly as a possum, and he’s got a mental patient’s drive for freedom! freedom! freedom! Goddamnit, somebody catch this maniac! The resistance has got to end! We’re trying to run a country here!