Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 134
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Popular Culture Review
III.
All literature, as Linda Hutcheon has written, seeks “to tantalize, [and]
seduce the reader into a world other than his own” (86). Once seduced, readers
imagine, interpret, decode, order, and construct the world of the text and its inhab
itants (86). Our reading, therefore, is concomitant with an active production of
meaning since meaning is an always on-going exchange between the reader and
the text—an exchange mediated by and through the printed word. And that is
where the illusion begins. Unlike visual representations of erotica or pornogra
phy, for example, that show us what they want us to see and through the framing
how they want us to see it, the printed word demands that we be active agents in
the creation of the text and the images contained therein. Any act of reading is
dependent on the reader’s willingness to enter a writer’s linguistic codes. With
novels like Vox and The Fermata, those codes are already highly charged since
they rely almost exclusively on erotic and pornographic images, and since any
erotic or pornographic work has, at bottom, the purpose of tantalizing or teasing
out of the reader some sort of sexual response.
Since the politics of a sexual imagination require both risk and satisfac
tion, how far does the writer take the fantasy? What pleasures or perversions does
he or she describe? And how explicit can the language be? The answers to those
questions depend on the audience and on the purpose set forth by the writer. Joined,
but certainly not limited by it, any level of sexual expression depends on how
much the audience will allow, which depends, it seems to me, on what the audi
ence seeks: is the work meant for private or public reflection? Does the text stand
in the place of the absent other? Or is the text to be a shared event between two
lovers?
The codification o