Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 130

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Popular Culture Review

Vox relies on the spoken word where The Fermata relies on overt images.
Vox is a 90s love story where The Fermata is an adolescent’s fantasy gone wild.
Vox speaks the images that The Fermata makes real. In Vox, desire is viewed as an
integral component of the imagination since neither Jim nor Abby—Baker’s pro
tagonist in this tale—can see or touch one another. They are separated by the
distance of a continent; there is a three-thousand mile gap between them as Abby
resides on the East Coast and Jim on the West. Thus, they can only imaginatively
create in their own minds—as the reader must do—how the other looks, how the
other touches, how the other feels. That distance between, too, heightens for ei
ther of them the other’s own materiality. Each one’s bodily presence is felt through
its very absence. The voice, but more importantly, the seductive, erotic image that
the voice harkens, stands in place of the real. We, of course, hear their voices; we
listen in on their talk, intimate and playful, and are mesmerized by their discover
ies, their truths, and the jouissance of their single and singular sex.
In The Fermata, however, the imaginary, at least on one level, is made
concrete. Arnold Strine, the protagonist of The Fermata, has the ability to stop
time and to move about in a frozen world. He uses this ‘gift’ not to enrich himself,
but to remove women’s clothing and to gaze on their naked bodies. It is a view
that is both erotic and unsettling: in stopped time, the frozen female form retains
the shape of the clothing, so breasts are pushed up flat as if housed by an invisible
brassier, pubic hair is pressed against the skin as if panties were still on. As read
ers, we imagine the scene and in constructing the images in our minds, we under
stand quickly the erotic impulse; but at the same time we are unsettled by it be
cause it is such an uncompromising masculine view: a woman, naked, frozen,
passive. It is a view that reduces the women to the role of object. And as much as
Baker’s protagonist reassures us that he is not a sexual predator—and that, in fact,
he genuinely likes and respects women—we are reminded of Martha Nussbaum’s
observation that no matter how much power and authority a woman has, sexual
objectification reduces her to the status of “a cunt” (310). And no amount of
special pleading by Arnold Strine can shake this observation from our minds.
Vox and The Fermata contain within them a sensual-sexual edge whereon
the imagination intersects again and again with the familiar and the unfamiliar;
that is, what the reader may already have experienced or not expe