ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests two motives for Modernism: the desire to exploit a more diversified market for fiction by establishing stylistic thresholds which test the reader’s powers of inference; and the fascination of the unusually wide range of new subject-matters thrown up by the pace of economic, social and political change. If there is one novel which exemplifies the convergence – the interlocking – of these motives, it is James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In Joyce’s novels, waste product is everywhere, although it will be Leopold Bloom rather than Stephen Dedalus who takes the time to review his ‘well pared’ fingernails. The beginning of ‘Eumaeus’ seems retributively, even mordantly, sober: Preparatory to anything else Mr Bloom brushed off the greater bulk of the shavings and handed Stephen the hat and ashplant and bucked him up generally in orthodox Samaritan fashion, which he very badly needed.
