Dubliners: On the Way to Modernist style

On September 10, 1904, readers of the Irish Homestead turning to the weekly story found a short work titled ‘Eveline’, published under the name ‘Stephen Daedalus’ and beginning as follows:

This opening shows Joyce, even at the start of his career, at his characteristic best, achieving immense richness with the utmost economy of means. While the technique here is that of finely honed realism rather than anything we could call modernism, the attention to the verbal surface already suggests a writer who has an unusual capacity to make the most of the words of the English language. (Eugene Jolas was later to report Joyce's boast, ‘I can do anything with language.’) The second sentence, in particular, seems to me to epitomise his extraordinary skill. Eveline does not lean her head, but her head is leaned; she does not actively smell, but an odour is present in her nostrils. The syntax conveys a draining away of agency, her body parts functioning like independent, mechanical objects as her thoughts pursue a track they have pursued many times before.

Above all, it's ‘the odour of dusty cretonne’ that has the distinctive Joycean signature on it. Cretonne is striking in its specificity: it names an eminently practical fabric (the OED calls it ‘stout’) that nevertheless suggests an awareness of fashion, indicative of Eveline's experience at ‘the stores’. The word isn't recorded as an English import until 1887, and its evident Frenchness gives it a slightly exotic air. The adjective dusty, too, is redolent of a housekeeper's pride, already hinting at a weariness with the daily grind of maintaining cleanliness, while providing the reader, whose consciousness of the sense of smell is already alert thanks to the slightly surprising word nostrils, with a vivid sensory image. Whereas the first sentence clearly gives us the words of an observing narrator, and we seem to remain with this narrator for a word like odour, the phrase dusty cretonne begins to reflect Eveline's thought processes, which will soon take over the narrative.