Abstract
Reading Agamben’s interpretation of set theory together with Howard Jacobson’s The Act of Love, Davies argues that the protagonist’s desire to be cuckolded by his wife results in the creation of a sexual set, of which he is an exceptional element. Consequently, this exceptional member experiences spatiotemporal indeterminability and the indistinction between law and transgression, as well as forms of abandonment. Through an analysis of textual relations via set theory, Davies also argues that the narrator controls the reader as if the narrator were a sovereign power, and that both reader and narrator have exceptional relations to the text, occupying threshold positions. Davies closes the chapter by arguing that the exclusively included position of the reader in relation to the text constitutes reading itself as an exceptional form of interaction.
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Notes
- 1.
To comprehend Agamben’s use of set theory in terms of its mathematics, it must first be understood that a mathematical theory is comprised of collections of objects (such as numbers) and operations or relations (such as +, −, < or >). Furthermore, it is necessary to understand that in set theory there is nothing beyond sets: whereas geometry can be reduced to points or sides, for example, set theory’s base element, so to speak, is the set. Moreover, a collection of objects is itself a set. Now, let us first deal with Agamben’s second proposition, which appears to be the more straightforward of his two claims—that a term can be included in a set without being a member of it. If we have a set of natural numbers, which we call N, we can create within this set a subset of all the even numbers, which we shall call E. Whilst all the elements of E—all the even numbers—are included in N, E itself—the set of all even numbers—is not a member of N, as nowhere in N shall we find set E. Therefore, we have an example of inclusion without membership, and we can express this as follows:
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N = {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, …}
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E = {0, 2, 4, 6, 8, …}
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E ⊂ N
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E ∉ N
To understand Agamben’s first claim—that a term can be a member of a set without being included in it—let us think of an additional set, set O, which is the set of all odd numbers. Now, let us create set X. Set X is a finite set made up of two elements, E and O. Therefore, E and O are the two members of set X. However, E and O are sets themselves. Their members are all the even and all the odd numbers. Therefore, the members of E and O cannot be included in X, which is a finite set. Thus, E and O are members of set X without being included in X. We can express this as follows:
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O = {0, 1, 3, 5, 7, …}
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X = {E, O}
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E, O ∈ X
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E, O ⊄ X
Agamben’s analysis of set theory is largely an interpretation of Alain Badiou’s Being and Event (1988). To compare the two, see Agamben (1998, pp. 24–5) and Badiou (2007, in particular, pp. 81–111).
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- 2.
Writing about the relationship between sex and forgetting in Blind Date (2003), Anne Dufourmantelle argues that sex is always and repeatedly a first time, proposing:
Sex is forgetting itself. It is a magnificent, essential power to forget…. Forgetting that it has already taken place and will take place again and always, sex functions as a constantly reiterated first time, a forgetting of that to which desire is subjected (its internal, fantasmatic, neurotic, constraints), a forgetting of the body—yes, really, for the body is present, it is no longer anything but presence, but not as body, it makes itself present as the source of desire and pleasure, as a landscape, an image, a zone of attraction and repulsion giving rise to calm or to violence. (2007, pp. 99–100)
- 3.
Asked to explain the concluding line of Douglas’s ‘Two Loves’ during one of his 1895 trials, Oscar Wilde famously replied:
‘The Love that dare not speak its name’ in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo…. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it. (‘Testimony of Oscar Wilde’)
- 4.
In his afterword to Jules et Jim, François Truffaut, the director whose film version would make the novel famous, deftly identifies the intricate relations at play between the three protagonists. Discussing his first encounter with the novel in 1955, Truffaut recollects:
When I read Jules et Jim, I had the feeling that I had before me an example of something the cinema had never managed to achieve: to show two men who love the same woman, in such a way that ‘the public’ are unable to make an emotional choice between the characters, because they are made to love all three of them equally. It is that element, that anti-selectivity, which struck me most forcibly in this story which the editor [of Arts-Spectacles] presented as ‘a triangle of pure love’. (Truffaut 2011, p. 218)
- 5.
In her interview with Howard Jacobson in The Observer, Polly Vernon points more generally to jealousy’s inherent self-reflexivity, defining it as ‘the constant awareness that other people fancy the person you love, that other people would take them from you, if they had half a chance’ (Jacobson and Vernon 2008, para. 50).
- 6.
In an analysis of desire and speech, Dufourmantelle claims that sex is always characterised by a form of nonrelational relationality. She writes: ‘words tear and devour, gestures grasp, but the other is always not there, the connections are missed, always, the encounter is left hanging, eternally deferred. It is the destiny of sex to miss the other, precisely in the place where it rejoins the other’ (2007, p. 82). In the 2007 special edition of GLQ on queer temporalities, Elizabeth Freeman specifically emphasises the role of time in queer reworkings of relationality, proposing: ‘the rubric of time at least seems to offer the possibility of unmaking the forms of relationality we think we know’ (p. 188). For these queer reworkings of relationality, see Carolyn Dinshaw, Lee Edelman, et al., ‘Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion’ (2007).
- 7.
The female equivalent of ‘cuckold’ is ‘cuckquean’, the earliest use of which The Oxford English Dictionary dates as 1546 (spelled ‘cookqueyn’). The term is now considered obsolete.
- 8.
For a rigorous and sustained analysis of oikos and the concept of economy, see Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (2011 [2007]). For a consideration of oikos and economy in terms of their relation to place, see Derrida and Christie V. McDonald, ‘Choreographies’ (1982, pp. 68–9).
- 9.
In ‘Wine, Women, and Soho’ (2002), Jacobson offers a further meditation on twilight in relation to his 2002 novel Who’s Sorry Now. He writes, for instance: ‘twilight is thus the pivotal moment, the equinoctial point between doing something sensible, that is to say doing nothing, and doing something foolish’ (para. 10).
- 10.
In his review of On Chesil Beach, ‘Edward’s End’ (2007), Jonathan Lethem sees a similar admixture of speed and slowness at work in McEwan’s fiction, arguing:
Our appetite for Ian McEwan’s form of mastery is a measure of our pleasure in fiction’s parallax impact on our reading brains: his narratives hurry us feverishly forward, desperate for the revelation of (imaginary) secrets, and yet his sentences stop us cold to savor the air of another human being’s (imaginary) consciousness. McEwan’s books have the air of thrillers even when, as in ‘On Chesil Beach,’ he seems to have systematically replaced mortal stakes—death and its attendant horrors—with risks of embarrassment, chagrin and regret. (para. 2)
- 11.
Felix is alluding to James’s essay ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884), in which the novelist writes: ‘therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, “Write from experience and experience only,” I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!”’ (1957, pp. 32–3).
- 12.
In his 2009 Guardian article ‘Howard Jacobson’s Top 10 Novels of Sexual Jealousy’, Jacobson sees the image of thresholds and borders as characteristic of jealousy itself, writing: ‘I love the dark, interior stickiness of the subject, where torment knows it should not be left to itself, but wants it no other way, and the victim forever haunts the border between the things he fears and the thing he longs for. This is the subject of The Act of Love’ (para. 3).
- 13.
It may be of interest to the reader to note Jacobson’s praise of Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband (1870), which he claims is ‘Pinteresque in that you never know who’s doing what to whom and which character is causing the other the greater sexual discomfort’ (2009, para. 11). Early reviewers of The Act of Love discuss the narrative’s depiction of shifting, ambiguous and seemingly contradictory relations in terms of: ‘how to be both voyeur and actor’ (Tim Adams, ‘Take My Wife… and I Wish Somebody Would’, 2008, para. 5); sadism and masochism (Sarah Churchwell, ‘Jealous Guy’, 2008); ‘complicity and pleasure in one’s lover’s act of betrayal’ (Gerald Jacobs, review 2008, para. 8); and the story of King Candaules (Nick Rennison, review 2008, para. 5).
- 14.
For the sake of brevity, I shall express abandonment’s duality—to be set free from the legal sphere by the law but also to be exposed to the law, to those legal subjects who can kill the homo sacer—through the shorthand ‘by and to’.
- 15.
The temporality at play here is further complicated by the use of the preterite tense. Exactly how this tense functions in narrative and what temporal dimension it denotes is beyond the scope of the present study, but the interested reader will find an informative discussion of this problematic in Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse Revisited (1990 [1983], pp. 79–83), Peter Brooks’s Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (2000 [1984]) and Mark Currie’s About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time (2010 [2007]).
- 16.
In Genette’s analysis of narrative discourse, Felix’s narratorial change of person and level would correspond to ‘an enallage of convention as in Caesar’s Commentaries’ (Narrative Discourse 1983, p. 244). For Genette, this type of metaleptic transformation is particularly significant. Indeed, he claims that ‘an even more glaring violation [than a character narrator leaving his story] is the shift in grammatical person to designate the same character’ (p. 246).
- 17.
A similar arrangement is depicted in Lars von Trier’s film Breaking the Waves (1996), which portrays the relationship between Bess (Emily Watson) and Jan (Stellan Skarsgård) in a remote Scottish village. After Jan is paralysed in an oil rig accident, he recollects the couple’s early telephone sex exchanges and tells Bess to have sex with other men:
‘Remember when I phoned you from the rig? We made love without being together.’
‘Do you want me to talk to you like that again? I, I’d love to.’
‘Bess, I want you to find a man, to make love to, and then come back here and tell me about it. It will feel like you and me being together again. Now that, that will keep me alive.’
As the dialogue shows, Jan is attracted to the potential sexual pleasures offered by listening to erotic stories of his wife’s ‘adultery’, whilst also wishing to free Bess from the couple’s sexual paralysis. Responding to Bess’s reluctance, Jan explains: ‘this morning when I, when I told you to, to get a lover, it wasn’t for your sake. It was for my sake. Because I don’t want to die.’
- 18.
Javier Marías’s 2011 novel, The Infatuations, also focuses on a series of intricate tripartite relations as well as the power relations involved in narrative setups. Towards the beginning of the narrative, the character–narrator, María Dolz, expresses her desire to be included in, though also excluded from, Miguel and Luisa Desvern’s life, explaining:
I used to delay slightly getting into work just so as to be able to spend a little time with that couple, and not just with him, you understand, but with them both, it was the sight of them together that calmed and contented me before my working day began…. It comforted me to breathe the same air and to be a part—albeit unnoticed—of their morning landscape, before they went their separate ways. (2013, pp. 4–5)
In this intriguing narrative of desire and murder, María eventually finds herself in a sexual relationship with Javier Díaz-Varela, the man who arranges Miguel’s murder in order to become intimate with his wife Luisa. Within this awkward and threatening setup, María unintentionally finds herself, like Felix with Marisa, at the mercy of Javier in his role as storyteller. In a somewhat generalising way, she tells the reader:
he must have thought that, basically, regardless of what I knew or didn’t know, I was entirely dependent on him now, as one always is on the person doing the telling, for he is the one who decides where to begin and where to end, what to reveal and suggest and keep silent about, when to tell the truth and when to lie or whether to combine the two so that neither is recognizable, or whether to deceive with the truth, as I had initially suspected he was trying to do with me. (p. 256)
With its focus on such intricate relations, The Infatuations also resonates with Gertrude and Claudius and adulterous parallelism (see Chapter 3). Offering another generalisation about life and love, María expresses her belief in the essential interconnectedness and interdependence of simultaneous relationships:
as often occurs when you have two relationships on the go at once, the one cannot survive without the other, however different or even opposed they might be. Lovers often end their adulterous affair when the married party divorces or is widowed, as if they were suddenly terrified of finding themselves face to face or didn’t know how to continue without all the usual impediments, how to live or how to develop what had, until then, been a circumscribed love, comfortably condemned to not manifesting itself in public, possibly never even leaving one room; we often discover that what began purely by chance needs always to cleave to that way of being, with any attempt at change being experienced and rejected by both parties as an imposture or a falsification. (p. 220)
- 19.
In Homo Sacer, Agamben conceptualises a different type of linguistic state of exception, proposing:
Language’s sovereign claim thus consists in the attempt to make sense coincide with denotation, to stabilize a zone of indistinction between the two in which language can maintain itself in relation to its denotata by abandoning them and withdrawing from them into a pure langue (the linguistic ‘state of exception’). This is what deconstruction does, positing undecidables that are infinitely in excess of every possibility of signification. (1998, p. 25)
- 20.
Interestingly, in Narrative Discourse Genette relates the concept of readerly inclusion specifically to metalepsis, arguing: ‘the most troubling thing about metalepsis indeed lies in this unacceptable and insistent hypothesis, that the extradiegetic is perhaps always diegetic, and the narrator and his narratees—you and I—perhaps belong to some narrative’ (1983, p. 236).
- 21.
The text–reader relation is particularly complex, as there are at the very least four textual spatiotemporalities, which are those of the diegesis, the narrative, the narration, and reading. See Genette (1983 and 1990) for a comprehensive account of narrative time and space.
- 22.
Despite the fact that Felix presents his theory in terms of husbands, male writers, and a male god who are cuckolded by women, there is of course no reason why the configuration cannot be reversed, so that women writers and wives arrange their men’s (in)fidelities. In terms of literature, one may, for instance, think of Anne Brontë’s Huntingdon in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848).
- 23.
Significantly, in ‘The Law of Genre’ (1980) Derrida turns to set theory to analyse the complexity of genre. Most notably, he uses the terminology of set theory to articulate the ‘law of the law of genre’ (1992b, p. 227), writing: ‘in the code of set theories, if I may use it at least figuratively, I would speak of a sort of participation without belonging—a taking part in without being part of, without having membership of a set. The trait that marks membership inevitably divides, the boundary of the set comes to form, by invagination, an internal pocket larger than the whole’ (pp. 227–8). Whereas Felix identifies a certain generic indetermination at play in sexual literature, then, Derrida’s theory of contamination and impurity rests on the way genre ‘traits’ lead to inclusive exclusions or exclusive inclusions. The label ‘novel’, for instance, ‘is not novelistic; it does not, in whole or in part, take part in the corpus whose denomination it nonetheless imparts’ (p. 230). The label ‘novel’ has, as we may put it, an exceptional relation to that which it describes.
- 24.
In his essay ‘The Author as Gesture’ (2005), Agamben offers his own intricate consideration of the relations between author, text, and reader. With his focus very much on authors (as opposed to narrators), Agamben articulates the relationship between author, text, and reader not via set theory but in terms of absence/presence, the gesture—‘what remains unexpressed in each expressive act’ (2007b, p. 66)—and withdrawal. Towards the end of the essay, he offers the following summary conclusion to his argument:
The place of the poem—or, rather, its taking place—is therefore neither in the text nor in the author (nor in the reader): it is in the gesture through which the author and reader put themselves into play in the text and, at the same time, are infinitely withdrawn from it. The author is only the witness or guarantor of his own absence in the work in which he is put into play, and the reader can only provide this testimony once again, making himself in turn the guarantor of the inexhaustible game in which he plays at missing himself.… the author and the reader enter into a relationship with the work only on the condition that they remain unexpressed in it. And yet the text has no other light than the opaque one that radiates from the testimony of this absence. (pp. 71–2)
Fascinatingly, the narrator of A.L. Kennedy’s short story ‘The Administration of Justice’ (1997) brings together the space of writing and the lover’s bed in a way that can be seen to resonate with—or offer at least a partial literary analogy of—Agamben’s gestural theory of authorship and textual relations. Bringing to the fore ideas of shape, absence, presence, withdrawal, and intimacy, the narrator offers the following invitation: ‘you can look at the words on this paper and, because they are the ones I am used to choosing, they will show you the shape of me. I am here to be read in the way you might read the impression of my weight in a bed after a still night, a restless night, a night not alone’ (2005, p. 74–5).
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Davies, B. (2016). Sexual Sets: The Act of Love . In: Sex, Time, and Space in Contemporary Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48589-2_4
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