Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 132

126

Popular Culture Review

the words and images they share into the highly-charged, erotic (sometimes por
nographic) images they need in order to achieve the sexual release they each de
sire. After all, that is the only “end” to which their conversation, by virtue of
entering into such a conversation, is (or can be) directed. There is no other pur
pose. As readers, then, we are not surprised to find that as we near the end of Vox,
the writing speeds up, our reading quickens, and in a rather long, sustained pas
sage, the frenzy of the on-going conversation is increasingly steered towards that
final climax. Literally and figuratively they rely on one another’s verbal images,
which are rapidly translated by the hearer into mental images, in order to come—
to come in their own singular climax. Afterwards, after talking “hours and hours,”
they hang up and we, well, we close the book (163).
The ease of the reader to develop a mental image of the invented and real
sex that takes place between Jim and Abby, as well as a mental image of Jim and
Abby’s sexual imagination at play, is central here. For it is this ease that allows for
the interplay between reader and story as each re-inscribe the sex that Jim and
Abby imagine and engage in. The ease with which the reader enters into this
mutual interplay, too, implicates—in the sense of being connected intimately—
him or her in the text. Jim and Abby’s imagined and real sex-play become the
imagined (and perhaps real) sex-play of the reader as well.
77ie Fermata is more problematic. The title of Baker’s novel comes from
the name of the music notation which suggests “the prolongation of tone, chord, or
rest beyond its indicated time value” (AHD. The “prolongation,” in this novel is
not musical, but rather temporal. During different moments in his life and utiliz
ing different methods, Arnold Strine has had the ability to bring about a temporal
“fermata,” a pause in the flow of time, and then enter into what he calls “the fold”—
that space where he is “alive and ambulatory and thinking and looking, while the
rest of the world is stopped or paused” (3). “Thinki