Honing in on the prose, his style is most prominent in passages that profile individual men entering the scene:
"Mr McCoy had been at one time a tenor of some reputation. His wife, who had been a soprano, still taught young children to play piano at low terms. His line of life had not been the shortest distance between two points and for short periods he had been driven to live by his wits. He had been a clerk in the Midland Railway, a canvasser for advertisements in The Irish Times and The Freeman's Journal, and a town traveller for a coal firm on commission, and he had recently become secretary to the City Coroner. His new office made him professionally interested in Mr. Kernan's case."
This passage is marked by shorter opening and closing sentences with lengthy ones sandwiched between them. The first sentence is simple, straightforward, and concise. The second, taking the time to sort out that his wife is also a singer of sorts, isolates the soprano between commas, making it an internal series of modifiers (or in this case, just one modifier). The third sentence, as the crux of the paragraph, starts to exude a more particular style characterized by a negative qualifier, and a sort of chiasmus in "shortest distance between two points and for short periods..." offering logical balance to the sentence. The following sentences are typically conventional and balanced with neatly placed conjunctions.
Joyce has a very pragmatic way of narrating, in that paragraphs start plainly, then progress towards an arousing sentence or two, and eventually close with another plain sentence. When it comes to profiling characters, he lists (with conjunctions) each man's duties and qualifications, attempting to render him useful in enlightening Mr. Kernan.
Your comments point up to me Joyce's negative way of storytelling. Except when telling facts about folks, he says what people are not. And "his new office made him interested"... even people's interests are a function of their environment or circumstances, somehow. Bellow, you say, makes lists that don't feel like lists, maybe because they are mismatched lists, like a closet full of items. And while Joyce's style is indeed pragmatic in the sense that he seems a bit like a police sketch artist, Bellow's "form follows function" - that's a good description. Bellow wants to tell an inner-outer story. Nabokov wants to make us think about stories. Joyce wants to get the "story" out of the way so we can see the many aspects of reality. Your treatment, in all these posts, of syndesis is really helpful. It's all in the connections or absence thereof.
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