Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 134

128 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