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Also, the use of "said" allows for subtlety of dialog that would be lost with more trite words such as "exclaimed" or "retorted".

Joyce takes it to an extreme: only a dash separates dialog from narration.

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I think that's an Irish writing style and not particular to Joyce. I know I've seen Roddy Doyle books use it, at least. Could have been copying Joyce's style, mind you, but I doubt it.

Joyce invented the style. It has since been used by many other authors. Now that I think about it, it was a kind of refactoring or re-encoding: making a shorter symbol for a sequence that's frequently repeated.

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