Stuttering and other forms of breakdown in the smooth flow of speech occur in Joyce's work at crucial moments, notably moments of confession under the pressure of interrogation. This essay shows how Joyce uses stuttering and other “errors” in correct pronunciation to develop a new literary language that finds its fully achieved form in Finnegans Wake. It explores the links between Joyce's writing and contemporary psychoanalytical ideas of the “subject” as something which emerges out of the tension between the human as animal body and language as symbolic order. As if seeking to heal the rupture between the symbolic and the real, Joyce insists on the nature of the word as speech, on speech as bodily production, and on the body as capable of transforming language according to its own instincts. In Joyce, stuttering is more than a speech defect; it is the “symptom” of a new poetics of narrative fiction.