Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 129

‘Reading with One Hand”:
Nicholson Baker’s Vox and The Fermata
and the Politics of a Sexual Imagination
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“Ah,” she said, “but you’re supposed to be
telling me something true, not imagined.”
“Yes, but the true thing is shading into the
imagined thing, all right?”
— Vox
I.
As a point of departure, and as a way of entering into my argument, I will
begin with this from Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In Book One of The Confessions,
one of the seminal examples of autobiographical writing, Rousseau relates to us
his youthful love of books and his acts of reading which, he adds, did not include
“obscene and licentious” books. And though his benefactor Mme La Tribu could
have easily provided him with such works, Rousseau considered it his good for
tune not to have taken them. Moreover, Rousseau informs us that it was not until
he was in his thirties that he even “glanced at one of those dangerous works which
even fashionable ladies find so embarrassing that they can only read them in se
cret” (48). Of course this translation by J. M. Cohen for the Penguin Classics
series is a bit misleading and does not do justice to Rousseau’s reason for suggest
ing these texts are “dangerous.” Contrary to Cohen’s translation, these works are
not read “in secret,” they are read “with one hand.” Rather than being “embarrass
ing,” they are “bothersome”—^bothersome because some works are so sexually
charged that young women are reading them with “one hand” while masturbating
with the other. The act of “reading with one” denotes the clear separation of one
type of literature—that which is erotic or pornographic—from that which is not.
The act of “reading with one hand,” also signals a propriety of usage: some books
are meant for public consumption, while some are meant to be enjoyed privately.
To read either Vox or The Fermata is to indulge in the “pleasure of the
text” both privately and publicly since both books open themselves to numerous
levels of private reflection and public discourse; and also since both revolve around
an interplay of erotic and pornographic ideas and situations that Baker uses to
push his narrative and to engage our reading—^reading not simply as a means of
enjoying the text, but reading, too, as a complex interaction with the text, one in
which we are messily engaged with morals and values uneasily upset perhaps by
the language of sex and the politics of a sexual imagination.