James Joye’s prose in Dubliners is economical and crisp, but never sterile. He constellates longer stretches of matter-of-fact writing with more vivid descriptions. Take this passage from “After the Race”:
Jimmy set out to translate into days’ work that lordly car in which he sat. How smoothly it ran along the country roads! The journey laid a magical finger on the genuine pulse of life and gallantly the machinery of human nerves strove to answer the bounding courses of the swift blue animal.
Likewise, Isaac Babel often sparkles his otherwise thrifty prose with slivers of poetry. A few passages from his “In the Basement” (Peter Constantine‘s translation):
Evening fell. A bat rustled by. The sea rolled blacker against the red cliff. My twelve-year-old heart surged with the cheer and ease of others’ wealth.
Night pressed down on poplars, stars pressed down on stooping branches.
I cried for the first time that day, and the world of tears was so immense and beautiful that everything except my tears disappeared from before my eyes.
Taken out of context, these passages can seem gaudy or kitsch. But both Isaac and Joyce spare their fireworks for when they are truly needed. It’s a technique discussed by J. D. Salinger in Seymour, an Introduction:
That is, each of the poems is as unsonorous, as quiet, as he believed a poem should be, but there are intermittent short blasts of euphony (for want of a less atrocious word for it), which have the effect on me personally of someone—surely no one completely sober—opening my door, blowing three or four or five unquestionably sweet and expert notes on a cornet into the room, then disappearing. (I’ve never known a poet to give the impression of playing a cornet in the middle of a poem before, let alone playing one beautifully, and I’d just as soon say next to nothing about it. In fact, nothing.)