Stephen Dedalus Gets Changed

Abstract

Lacan’s concept of the Real works in the twenty-third seminar to describe how writing operates in Joyce’s fiction to embody the changing of people’s minds as they enact freedom and creativity. Here Lacan’s late turn toward the Real leads him to emphasize its positive potential, though it does not lose its frightening incomprehensibility. Le sinthome says that we enter the Real “through little bits of writing” (“par des petits bouts d’écriture,” 68). Here writing as a concrete object is the basis of a sense of changing reality. Later, Lacan says that in these lectures he wants to give us “a bit of the real” (119). Lacan’s Real is outside language, so it is “always a bit” (“toujours un bout” 123), a separated point before language reknits itself. Therefore the “little moments of historical emergence” (“petites émergences historiques” 123) that he speaks of here appear as details that make no sense. Likewise the focal points of Joyce’s writing are words whose meaning cannot be specified. An innovation of Lacan’s is to see language as creating reality not by representing it directly as something established, but by projecting words as unclear bits; the Real works to supplement reality by calling into question these mysterious signifiers. The prime example of a little bit of the Real that Lacan cites—the apple that puzzled Newton by falling (123)—is an excrescence, cast off from the whole: the whole of the tree and the whole of causality.