Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 133

Baker’s Vox and The Fermata

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ments of stopped time; rather, he uses these periods in order to fulfill his voyeuris
tic and masturbatory fantasies. While in the fold he carefully undresses various
women: women he knows, women he has glanced at, women who have caught his
eye. Admiring their bodies, their breasts, their sex, he caresses and kisses them,
and at times, ejaculates near or on them after masturbating. However, he does not
attempt to force intercourse upon these women or to harm them in any way. Other
than his ability to stop time, there is nothing special or extraordinary or even sig
nificant about him. Indeed, it would be a stretch to suggest that his very ordinari
ness makes him a kind of “everyman”—a stand meant to recast our own sexual re
imaginings into ordinary (or extra-ordinary) terms. In spite of the novel’s con
ceit—or even because of it—there is very little concerning Arnold Strine’s life that
many readers would share. And that may be because we realize that his text is less
an autobiography as it is a counter-confession. A counter-confession where he
lays bare his secret life and his desire for women who lack in a literal sense any
real autonomy, while at the same time qualifying his desire. It is as if he himself
realizes something about his own private world that speaks to his own personal
perversion or pleasure.
“Nakedness is a great equalizer,” asserts Greg Friedler in the introduction
to his collection of photographs. Naked New York. And he is right on target. Be
cause to be naked before the world—devoid of the elements and conventions that
connects such a sight to sexual gratification, eroticism, or the play of desire—has
the effect of disarming the viewer’s gaze. In The Fermata, however, Strine eroticizes
nakedness; Strine’s gaze is meant to register desire filtered through the safety of an
artificial distance—the distance of stopped time, where the only moving figure is
the only figure moved—in this case, Strine. Any sexual interest felt by the reader
at these moments is defused through the distance of the text, between that which
the text suggests and that which the reader cares to imagine. Such images are pre
directed, of course, since Baker’s narrative utilizes the assumptions and fantasies
of generations of men—and he is not apologetic for doing so. However he does
suggest that such a fantasy, though male driven, may not be gender specific. To
ward the end of the story, for example, Strine attempts to bring his girlfriend Joyce
into his “secret life” and in the process loses his power to enter into the fold though
Joyce now retains it. And it is she who now “strips pedestrians and tells [Arnold]
about the strange genitalia she has seen and known”(302).