Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 135

Baker’s Vox and The Fermata

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and constructs his or her own sexual images out of the linguistic play of the text.
What he or she does with those images, well, that belongs to the reader as well.
Oregon State University

William Petty

Notes
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8.

“. . . ces dangereux livres qu’une belle dame de par la monde/ trove incommodes, en ce
qu’on ne peut, dit-elle, les lire que/ d ’une seule main.” For an extended treatment of
this idea see Joan DeJean’s “The Politics of Pornography: L ’Ecole des Filles"' in The
Invention o f Pornography, edited by Lynn Hunt.
In Vox such a problem is solved with the purchase of a “Book Mate 1.” This device,
we learn, “makes reading a pure pleasure! Ingenious design holds paperback books
OPEN and FLAT so even wind can’t ruffle pages— leaves your hands free to do other
things” (68). It is the idea of leaving a woman’s hands free “to do other things” that
excites the narrator and brings him to a state of arousal.
Or, as in Rousseau’s case, not at all. Which is not to suggest Rousseau did not have an
erotic life, for he tells us that in “my crazy fantasies, my wildest fits o f eroticism, and
the behavior which they sometimes drove me t o , . . . I always evoked, imaginatively,
the aid of the opposite sex” (27).
Professor Nussbaum’s observation is directed more to pictorial representations of woman
as found in magazines like Playboy. But the idea holds.
Their conversation does not deal solely with sex. It also details the minutia of their
daily lives. The conversation captures their likes and dislikes and what they have in
common. Perhaps this is what connects them and draws us into their story. In fact,
Randall Short suggests that it is these secondary conversations that “evoke for the
reader a meeting not of bodies but o f souls” (9).
Fermata” is Italian, “from the feminine past participle of fermare, to stop; and from the
Latin flrmare, to make firm” {AHD).
In her text, Hutcheon uses a slightly different sense of the idea of the “erotic” than I do.
However, I do agree with her analysis of the reciprocity—that mutual exchange—
between author and reader within the framing o f a sexually explicit text.
Such a response can be as simple as eye dilation or nipple hardening, to something
more complex like full penile erection or vaginal lubrication.

Works Cited
Baker, Nicholson. Vox. New York: Random House, 1992.
— . The Fermata. New York: Random House, 1994.
Friedler, Greg. Naked New York. New York: Norton, 1997.
Hunt, Lynn. The Invention o f Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins o f Modernity, 15001800. New York: Zone Books, 1996.
Hutcheon, Linda. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. (1984) New York:
Routledge, 1991.