The matador is gored; the shark breaks surface and wreaks havoc; a real of the type that I suggest we should embrace and celebrate punctures the screen or strip of film, destroying it: a real that happens, or forever threatens to do so, not as a result of the artist “getting it right” or overcoming inauthenticity, but rather as a radical and disastrous eruption within the always-and-irremediably inauthentic; a traumatic real; a real that’s linked to repetition; a real whose framework of comprehension is ultimately neither literary nor philosophical but psychoanalytic: the real that Lacan defines as “that which always returns to the same place” and as “that which is unassimilable by any system of representation.” The challenge, for the writer, would never be one of depicting this real realistically, or even “well”; but of approaching it in the full knowledge that, like some roving black hole, it represents (although that’s not the right word anymore) the point at which the writing’s entire project crumples and implodes. — Tom McCarthy - 'Get Real, or What Jellyfish Have to Tell Us About Literature'