shaved his upper lip every morning three times with, three times against the grain

[jochen stremmel]

Maybe Elmore Leonard (and the Pynchon of IV) would put Oedipa's
sentence like that: "Mucho shaved his upper lip every morning three
times with, three times against the grain to remove the remotest
breath of a moustache, new blades drawing blood invariably, but he
kept at it anyway."

And with Leonard you can see what a beautiful prose can come out of
the vice inherent in free indirect style (from Tishomingo Blues):

He watched the Aussie fuckin with the poisonous snake, his chin on the
ground talking to it in a nice tone of voice, the snake hissing, the
snake trying to tell the man, get the fuck away from me, fool.
Robert could picture Anne right now looking down at Jerry sleeping
with his mouth open, zoo noises coming from him, Anne wondering if
what she got out of being his wife was worth it.

Martin Amis:

He has discovered a way of slowing down and suspending the English
sentence — or let’s say the American sentence, because Mr. Leonard is
as American as jazz. [...] We are in a kind of marijuana tense,
creamy, wandering, weak-verbed. Such sentences seem to open up a lag
in time, through which Mr. Leonard easily slides, gaining entry to his
players’ hidden minds.

J

2011/12/28 alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>:
> Right, like the Romantics he is so indebted to, and like the certain
> modernists (see Slow Learner Intro pp.6-7: "At its simplest level it
> had to do with language."), Pynchon, despite his weak ear and his
> lyrical lapses, prefers common speech language.  This preference can,
> as James Wood notes, debade the author's own language and make for an
> ugly prose style. It is a problem inherent in free indirect style.
>
> Although Aristotle advises against the use of omission schemes in
> writing, he applauds the use of them in speech because they can be
> used to dramatic effect. Pynchon is fond of ellipsis, that is, the
> omission of words, the meaning of which is provided by the overall
> context of the passage. Although Pynchon often punctuates his ellipses
> with dots, this example does not use or need the dots. The "missing"
> conjunction is yet another rhetorical scheme of omission called,
> asyndeton. Again, it is a technique that Pynchon uses to suggest the
> speech patterns of the characters and establish the tone.  In the
> example, the narrative is free indirect and the language and tone are
> Oed's: "You're too sensitive. Yeah, there was so much else she ought
> to be saying ... "there was your Mucho: thin-skinned."
>
>> this does replicate the way I would say it out loud:
>>
>> I shave every day, new blades I invariably draw blood.
>>
>>
>> It's like if you're talking to somebody and you've already got them
>> envisioning you shaving, you don't need to say "when I use" ---
>> instead, into the ongoing shaving thought-form, you simply add the
>> temporary variable "new blades"
>>
>> I know this passage is narration, rather than Mucho speaking, but this
>> technique gives a closer, more colloquial feeling as if Mucho or maybe
>> Oedipa (having witnessed it) is telling me about it.