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I am closely reading/editing (for my own benefit) the text of Dubliners, the collection of short stories written by James Joyce.
In some stories, such as The Dead, there are many instances of what you might call run-on sentences, with little or no commas. Here's a shining example (taken from The Dead):
Mary Jane waited on her pupils and saw that they got the best slices and Aunt Kate and Aunt Julia opened and carried across from the piano bottles of stout and ale for the gentlemen and bottles of minerals for the ladies.
This text is taken from Project Gutenberg. It matches a Penguin edition I have, which in turn is taken from a critical edition by Scholes and Litz. (You can also view the first edition here at archive.org.)
To my brain, the text seems to require at least one comma, after the best slices.
Here's a second, more egregious example (also taken from The Dead):
Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her
hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would show
off the light ones.
In my opinion, the above text needs a comma after against the darkness. The reason is that it's ambiguous without it.
My question is this: is this really Joyce's intention, or is it a mistake in the typesetting?
If it is indeed his intention, then what effect is he trying to achieve?
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James Joyce is an author that has an extremely unique grammatical style, so this is just part of his style, not a typesetting mistake. He was a Modernist, meaning that he experimented heavily with structure, dialogue and other traditional pillars of writing, and wasn't afraid to challenge the norms of literature in his time, hence why his writing often comes across as odd and disorganized at first glance. He's a bit of an acquired taste, to say the least! This is why he uses a lot of strange sentence structures and run-on sentences - it's because he is trying to get outside the box, in a sense, and push the boundaries of what writing actually is. (Of course, people heavily differ on whether they actually like his writing, and I absolutely respect you if it's not your thing.)
Other authors that have unique styles like this include Cormac McCarthy, who wrote The Road without quotation marks or apostrophes. This can come across as equally jarring if you're not used to his style of writing.
Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.
You forget some things, dont you?
Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.
Other examples.
I would say it was his quirky style.
Do not know of any official English department position on that usage of commas.
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