Do you think that if you properly applied speech marks—or other speech-action delineation punctuation—to Towles or Pynchon or Vollman's work, that they would be any less enjoyable or artistic? If Cormac McCarthy started using punctuation properly, does that make the following paragraph from Blood Meridian worse?:
Does that really bring much more to the table than:
To add to the above, when looking for an excerpt I actually got the speech marks in the wrong places the first time because that paragraph is just hostile with regard to clarity.
Take a favourite of mine, Titus Groan, which, whilst punctuated to in a traditional manner, most would be hard pressed to consider it a conventional book:
The former is an objectively better format for readability. There is zero ambiguity that "Day in" is Rottcodd speaking, and not narrative text. That is an objective advantage that the format has over the latter. There is no way to argue against that. Subjectively, you can make arguments about the latter having a certain feel for certain people, but objectively it brings nothing to the table but ambiguity. Maybe the writer wants that, however, most of the writers above aren't trying to be ambiguous.
As for Joyce, let's take an example from Ulysses:
What are the advantages of that compared to:
You can argue that it doesn't make that much difference, however, the latter also allows you to write:
Or even, blasphemously to some:
Which obviously changes the meaning of the entire segment, but it gives you that flexibility in prose to bring entirely new kinds of flow or context in ways that are instantly understood by most without any extra processing. That flexibility is an objective advantage of speech marks. They don't have to be inverted commas either, many languages use guillemets « » which are just as good in my eyes because they do the job they're there to do. I'm no purist by any means.
I would also argue that Joyce's work is closer to poetry than prose, with all the baggage and benefits that come with that. I'm never going to use Joyce as an example of how to write a good story, because he doesn't write well, he writes cleverly, which is a very different thing. Honestly, I much prefer his love letters to Nora, they're the only things he wrote with the reader in mind.
Unironically his best work.
