Let’s Get Lost: Exploration in Homer and Joyce

Abstract

The idea of exploring through language is established in Portrait as Stephen keeps using words in new ways to discover new aspects of himself and the world. In continually revising himself as a signifier, he is impelled to head in a new direction at the end of each chapter, not knowing where he is going. At this point he is looking awry or askance at the world he has known, but Žižek holds that only by such deviation can one find the object of desire—“outside this distortion, ‘in itself,’ it does not exist” (Looking 12). Only through desire for what is forbidden can one reach a new reality.¹ Joyce took inspiration from one of the first leavetakers to look awry and depart into radically unknown realities, Homer’s Odysseus.