The synopsis on the back of my copy reads:
Vox is a novel that remaps the territory of sex—sex solitary and telephonic, lyrical and profane, comfortable and dangerous. It is an erotic classic that places Nicholson Baker firmly in the first rank of major American writers.
And these are some of the plaudits the book received in hardcover:
“A brilliantly funny, perversely tender and technically breathtaking erotic novel.” —The New York Times
“A remarkable tour de force...Vox is hilarious...a delightful novel.” —Alexander Theroux, Washington Post Book World
“Imagine Chagall being commissioned to do the illustrations for The Joy of Sex.” —Michael Upchurch, San Francisco Chronicle
“This is Ravel's 'Bolero' played out on the page.... The conversation gets sexier and sexier and...well, I'm too wrung out to go on.” —Louise Bernikow, Cosmopolitan
I don't put much store by blurbs, but fair enough, I liked the book too. However: Chagall? No. Ravel? No (maybe Satie at his more ironic). And dear Louise, please tell me what it means to be “too wrung out to go on”? “Go ahead, whisper it in my little ear...”
The temptation is to start out a post about something like this with a disclaimer going something like this: “Well, I'm writing about this stuff 'cause you know you can be intellectual about this stuff, everybody knows that who's heard of the Marquis de Sade, so just back off, guys, it's not like I read this stuff a lot, or like I even enjoy it, duh...”
Well, I'm not going to patronize you (whoever “you” are). The fact is that while I don't read erotic fiction as much as I do, say, detective fiction, I've certainly read some books that belong to this much-neglected (or much-pretended-to-be-neglected) genre. I'd say that, as in most genres, about half of them were probably not worth reading all the way through except for the their forensic value. Probably six, seven, eight of them were interesting enough for me to remember in some detail, and two or three are works of high literary caliber.
I first became interested in these books about the middle of high school. I didn't have much money, really no money except what my parents gave me or I could scrounge from the change lying around the house. Also, my parents were careful not to permit us to have access to the Internet in any part of the house that wasn't public—or, I might be tempted to say, “explicit”.
Also, I couldn't have brought myself to buy a porn magazine if you'd convinced me I could exchange it immediately for the complete later works of Wittgenstein. Well, maybe, but just. (By the way, reading his war diaries reveals that he understood this kind of thing very well.) Furthermore, I kept seeing this section at Half Price Books, ensconced in as unobtrusive a place as they could find, quietly facing a wall of Fiction & Literature (whatever the hell that means) between Poetry and African-American Literature.
This location was obviously very convenient, permitting the embarrassed shopper to glance down the spines of the small but concentrated Erotica section, or even to pull out a title and flip through it (always being careful to keep the covers angled at least a little bit down towards the floor and one's, er, erogenous situation under control), while pretending to be either the Romantic, sensitive, Byronic type or the open-minded, culturally heterogenous, Liberal (in the American sense) type who's read For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf and now thinks that it was so great that a big studio finally made a movie that was so socially relevant and...
Anyway, it was just too much temptation, literally and literarily. I managed to steal a number of volumes from there during the next couple of years, and at first I only appreciated them for their “coarser” elements. But the truth was, I wasn't blind—not even in, um, ecstasy—to the quality or lack of it in these books. For example, I once (more or less by accident) stole a volume of poems by Pierre Louÿs.
Now, that's not a book that was written just to help facilitate late-19th century masturbation sessions. And today I know, thanks to all those wonderful books that help you learn how to sound smart when talking about literature, that his work represents a real achievement in the Parnassian school, being one of the very, very few read outside of France to this day, and a real forerunner of Mallarmé, whom I like but not as much as I probably would if I were better at reading French.
But that's not really what I set out to discuss in this post. I just felt like I should go out there and let everyone know that, yes, real people do read this stuff, and that it's actually literature, as opposed to pornography—not that I'm sure what literature means—and clearly more affecting and effective than most.
Vox is a good read. A high-velocity read, which is what I say when I mean that a book is a “quick read” but want to sound more intelligent. A book that propels you through its pages. This is all the more remarkable because no one aspect of the book is all that compelling.
The style is virtually nonexistent, which is appropriate since the whole thing is virtually nothing but dialogue, with the traditional “he said” and “there was a pause” stuff—which, very correctly, Umberto Eco tells us remain wary of nonetheless. But the characters aren't that affecting either, neither likable nor unusual enough or well-drawn enough to be all that persuasive.
But then again, that may be one of the keys to this book's success, which it was financially and remains artistically. Baker (I've never read a single other word by this guy, though he's been pretty prolific) makes/lets these people talk and talk and talk, and because they're talking about sex we keep wanting to read what they're saying. And then a weird thing happens: we begin to care about them. Because along with all the details of their fantasies and unorthodox encounters, we learn a lot about “who they are” and “what matters to them” even though they don't say these things straight out.
Actually, what I just said is very wrong in at least one regard: I said “along with” when I probably should have said “through”. Details about people's sex lives or fantasies are absolutely part of “who people are” and “what matters to them.” People tend to downplay this, perhaps out of some vestigial Romantic, transcendent idealization of love, life, and our bodies.
This book argues, without arguing, something very, very important: that real intimacy can be achieved by embracing and exposing our darkest regions. And I suspect that real intimacy (and here I'm not only speaking of sexual relationships) is not possible without this.
A few remarks on the formal aspects of Vox, always so important in the process of redeeming a work of erotic fiction: the long dialogue form (when non-demonstrative and non-philosophical) lends, as I said earlier, a certain velocity to a work of fiction, actuating as it does the unity of time. An interesting question is raised here: is it possible that there is also active the unity of place?
Aristotle formulated his rules in an era when “place” and “communication” (at least in the direct, person-to-person sense) were closely tied. Yelling across a valley was about as far as you get and still send a coherent message; this sort of case would certainly have maintained the unity of place in classical theatre.
There is also, despite the digressive nature of the dialogue, very much a unity of action, as anyone who is familiar with the purposes of such phone calls can imagine. Funny, but I think not many people would consider this a “neo-classical” piece of writing, but in a certain sense it's exemplary. (Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist is another interesting example in this regard.)
Also, and I might be flying way off into left field here, but is it possible that in a world were individuals are constantly bombarded with advertising both consciously and unconsciously, that a book like Vox is the only way to maintain or experience any honestly unfractured account of human experience? I don't know, but I think Ballard would have admired this book at least in it's formal aspect.
Another thing to think about: this book was first published in 1992. It's so old that Monica Lewinsky is supposed to have given (along with several other things) a copy of Vox to President Clinton during their (supposedly oral-sex-only?) affair.
So what would a novel dealing with similar issues of sexuality and properly engaged in the “moment” of its creation look like today? I shudder (or perhaps on the literary traditionalist in many shudders) at the thought of a novel written in the form of a conversation copy-and-pasted from a cyber sex chat room.
And even that's “old hat” (kind of like the phrase itself? there has to be a word for expressions that embody themselves, like “sesquipedalianism”—please let me know if you know what it is): we've got “sexting”, and I have no idea what else is waiting in the wings for our poor, overfed libidos.
Another artifact of its age is the way the characters express themselves: I really didn't buy a lot of the way they talked, and I actually have to take back what I said about it being an artifact of 1992. I just think Baker has a much better ear (if that's what you use) for ideas than he does for dialogue. I'd give you an example, but I'm tired and there's a dozen or three on nearly every page. Of course I'm exaggerating, but that's how is sometimes feels.
Although I really liked the book, I think it's doubtful that this book, or any book, has “firmly” placed Nicholson Baker “in the first rank of major American novelists,” even just among the living. But maybe I'm wrong. Writers like Nicholson Baker should write a lot more books, because you never know when you're going to write your masterpiece, and in fact you may not ever know, because it may not be recognized until long after your death. But that's no reason not to write it.
Okay, one more thing: there's a long-standing problem, as Foucault points out somewhere, in the West in general and certainly in its literature of not being able to talk about desire very well. It seems to make people uncomfortable, and I think that's why erotic literature remains so maligned and also of a fairly low quality, or at least with fairly low aims.
So I just want to say that there are some very different strains in erotic fiction, and people should pay attention to these: one is the novel whose focus or driving force is power, domination, and discovery—the Marquis de Sade, Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch, Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski (maybe); the other is about pleasure, desire and what we modern people would describe, if we were forced to label it as something, love—Sappho, Ovid, Louÿs, John Cleland, Anaïs Nin.
By the way, I'd contend that Anne Desclos/Pauline Réage's Story of O very much belongs to the latter tendency: despite its sadomasochistic trappings, it is very much a love story.
Also, it's probably no accident that this second camp was staked out by truly classical writers and bolstered by writers of a very neo-classical mindset. As for the “Divine Marquis”, he remains a man astride fate, partly inside and partly outside the past, his time and even our own. Who knows when his ideas will truly, succinctly converge with history, like a scalpel finding a tortuous but perfect path through soft flesh between bone, cartilage and tendon—we have, perhaps, come close, but I pale at imagining what that future day would look like.
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