Abstract: Ali Smith’s Autumn, the first of her Seasonal Quartet of novels, examines temporality and processes of transformation, as well as Britain’s post-Brexit political transformation. This article examines the novel using the ideas of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis, specifically Lacan’s concepts of the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary, to elucidate Smith’s exploration of subjectivity, memory, and processes of subject formation. Autumn interweaves individual experience with contemporary political conditions and disrupts temporal linearity. This technique demonstrates Lacan’s idea of nachträglichkeit, or how our pasts are always being retroactively reinterpreted in relation to the present. The novel’s fragmented structure creates a sense of temporal dislocation, thereby demonstrating the destabilisation of the Symbolic Order, the framework through which meaning is structured, in post-Brexit Britain, where collective and individual identities are destabilised. Lacan’s thoughts on how societies change are useful in seeing Brexit as a breaking of the Symbolic Order, and in understanding the disturbing effect of the Real. Elizabeth’s life and her connection to Daniel in Autumn illustrate the fluidity of identity, the inevitability of transformation, and the difficulty of maintaining coherent subjectivity in a world that’s been broken.

Keywords: Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Temporal Dislocation, Identity Transformation, Post-Brexit Britain, Symbolic Order and the Real.