The Yard of Wit. Raymond Stephanson

and their alternative (and highly problematic) implications for notions of masculinity and male identity are never clearly resolved. The non-medical discourses are likewise uncertain about the significantly different ramifications of these two models, sometimes exemplifying both systems within a single text. Unlike high and low medical narratives, however, the other discourses provide a clearer picture of how these competing concepts might have informed cultural constructions at large, the first model of direct relationship allowing for equations of male mental capacity with lust, reproductive potency, phallic size, or excessive intercourse (think, for instance, of the libertine sexual energy of the witty Restoration stage-rake). The second model of inverse proportion offered either/or scenarios in which one could possess either heightened mental or genital ability but not both at the same time, allowing for complex exchanges in which large amounts of wit or intellect might compensate a missing phallicism and vice versa.

      The medical commentaries intensified the link between the male reproductive system and an essentialized maleness, refining the conceptual bridging between genitalia and the male mind in particular. But they are also witness to the uneasy and uneven cultural terrain as a newer symbolism about the male organs of generation came into being. As we turn now to the moderns’ approaches to the penis/phallus, we will see that the most problematic and contradictory features of the genitals-mind models were shifted onto the yard.

      The Problematic Penis and Male Identity

      As I have suggested, the penis is problematic in the twofold sense that Enlightenment usage was differential and ambiguous, and that the subject “the penis” has been plagued by a twentieth- and twenty-first century ahistoricism. The history of the penis, I am arguing, has not been well served by current theory. At the heart of my quarrel with psychoanalytical and feminist methodologies is their tendency to separate the penis and the phallus, forgetting that in so doing they are participating in a history of such splitting which privileges the metaphorized erection. An almost obsessive attention to the phallus as symbol has created the illusion that we are studying the cultural implications of male genitalia, when in fact we have focused on a single aspect—the erection as abstract idea—all but ignoring the relationship of hard and soft penis with its implications for studies of the male body. Lacan, as is well known, insists that the phallus is not a penis, but rather “the privileged signifier of that mark in which the role of the logos is joined with the advent of desire.” Lacan’s phallus is thus a linguistic concept, “a sign of the latency with which any signifiable is struck,” and a symbolic attribute no more in the possession of men than of women, both of whom will experience not the transcendental expression of a unitary, integrated self—one version of “having” the Phallus—but rather a perpetual “play of displacement and condensation … [which] marks his [or her] relation as a subject to the signifier.”⁴⁵ Occupying a symbolic role qua signifier at the level of desire in general, Lacan’s phallus is thus to be carefully distinguished from the mundane penis, whose cultural and representational function is all but dismissed. Feminist critiques of the Lacanian phallus have exposed the rhetorical slight of hand which places Lacan himself at the center of definitional power whose patriarchal authority cannot be confronted.⁴⁶ But feminist psychoanalytical frameworks have tended to follow Lacan in their absorption with the metaphorical phallus, as well as in their reluctance to recognize the value, or indeed the necessity, of reconstructing a history of penis-phallus conceptualizations which would explain why we have arrived at our current mode of privileging an ahistorical, symbolic phallus over the material penis.

      There are signs that this theoretical myopia is giving way to a historical curiosity. David M. Friedman’s recent popularized approach in A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis⁴⁷ suggests a mainstream interest in such a history. But scholars have also begun to speculate about a history of penis-phallus relationships in western culture, wondering why and when the penis and phallus came to be separated symbolically, with the latter becoming an intellectual icon and the former a taboo or at best an impolite subject not quite fit for professional academic discussion. One version of this historicization is the difficult question of how to explain the historical distance and differences between the early phallus worshipers of classical periods and the all but invisible phallus of postmodern theory and psychoanalysis. Jean-Joseph Goux has considered the differences between the symbolic “phallophorism of antiquity” (i.e., rites of Osiris, figures of Hermes and Dionysius) and the “modern phallocentrism” of psychoanalysis and philosophy, suggesting that “The modern phallus is a deciphered phallus…. The phallus is rediscovered, but, being no longer religious, sacred, ritualized, figural, it is no longer the same. It is unconscious and structural. There is a major difference between a culture which reserves a mythico-ritual place for the phallic emblem, and one which has a need for the experience and theoretical reconstruction of psychoanalysis to uncover the role and function of the phallus.”⁴⁸ Daniel Boyarin argues in a different vein that “The phallus became the phallus, i.e., became separated from the penis by being veiled in the Mysteries of late antiquity,” and that “it is the ideological separation of phallus from penis, produced in history, but forgotten as history, that enables the phallus [in its Lacanian and feminist senses] to do its work, that founds the Dominant Fiction.” For Boyarin, “Historicizing ‘the phallus’ thus becomes crucial to a political retrieval of the entire psychoanalytic project.”⁴⁹ Paul Smith has likewise called for a renovation of the psychoanalytical by the historical: “the task of historicizing the preoedipal must take on the same importance as the task of historicizing the monolithic psychoanalytical metaphor of the phallus: the imaginary is only ever constructed through phenomenologically available matter which is variable across history, and the body itself is also variably constructed across history.”⁵⁰ Given the sweeping nature of these remarks, how does one begin to imagine the Enlightenment in some grand narrative about the history of male genitalia? Late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century culture certainly had its own array of symbols for the erect penis, and compared to earlier cultural formulations around the penis-phallus relationship, Enlightenment discourses are increasingly the site of a symbolic maleness recognizably modern—one in which the flaccid privy member was separated and understood as symbolically different from the stiffened yard. But in contrast to today’s current focus, the connections among symbolic, biological, and historical realms were then more palpable and not yet abstracted and rewritten within the disembodied and sometimes unreachable terrain of modern psychoanalysis or the reductionist caricatures of some feminisms.

      But historicizing the symbolic phallus is only one important new line of inquiry. Another arises from the recognition that a history of penis-phallus relationships as they are variously conceptualized at different times is also an important aspect of the history of masculinity and the male body. Susan Bordo has recently warned of the consequences of using

      the most abstract and attenuated forms of the phallus … such as the “phallogocentrism” that deconstructionists and feminists have claimed runs throughout Western philosophy, science, and religion…. I have avoided dealing with these kinds of arguments here (although I have made them myself in other contexts) precisely because they move discussion of the phallus so extremely far afield from the male body, and I fear they will pull me into an abstract realm where I would be vulnerable to the very disease that I would be diagnosing.⁵¹

      While she does not pursue her study of male bodies outside the twentieth century, Bordo recognizes that “the symbol emerged historically … out of forms of reverence that did have reference to biology,” and that the connection of the penises of real men to the symbolic cultural level of ideas ought not to be underestimated if we want to understand the history of male flesh as it might have been occupied and experienced by men, or if we wish to understand the relationship of individual men to the cultural metaphorization of the male body: “The phallus,” she writes, “haunts the penis. Paradoxically, at the same time the penis … also haunts phallic authority, threatens its undoing.”⁵² As Bordo realizes, a good deal of academic discourse has demonstrated, somewhat paradoxically, how difficult it has been to keep the male body in view while studying the penis-phallus as subject.

      This emergent intellectual and historical curiosity about male genitalia will perhaps reverse current academic trends, reminding us that there is a history of the relationship between the soft and hard penis—not only experiential