Ulysses
One Dublin day, and a man circling a home he cannot enter. Lacan spent a year of seminar on what held Joyce together.
History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
A single day in Dublin, the sixteenth of June 1904, followed hour by hour as Leopold Bloom moves through the city and Stephen Dedalus crosses his path. The narration changes shape from episode to episode, from plain interior monologue to catechism, newspaper headline, and parody, so the reader meets thought as it forms rather than as it is reported afterward. Bloom carries an ordinary grief and an uneasy marriage, and the writing stays close to the grain of both.
For psychoanalytic thinking the novel became a working case. Lacan gave Seminar XXIII, Le sinthome, to Joyce, taking the writing itself as the term he named the sinthome. For a clinician the interest runs two ways: the sustained rendering of the associative mind, its drift and its returns, and the picture of a self held in place by the act of making rather than by the usual supports.
About the author
James Joyce
James Joyce was an Irish writer whose fiction reshaped the modern novel. Born in Dublin, he spent most of his adult life abroad, in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, and drew continually on the city he had left. He is known for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, and for his use of interior monologue and restless stylistic invention. Jacques Lacan devoted his 1975 to 1976 seminar, Le sinthome, to Joyce and the concept of the sinthome.
Details
- 1922