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

[Paul Mackin]

On 12/30/2011 11:45 AM, alice wellintown wrote:
> The fact that we agree to the meaning of the sentence suggests that
> the sentnece is not competely botched. Inserting "with" (as in
> Joseph's example) to improve an absolute construction is one of the
> standard methods given in Warriner's English Grammar, Longknife and
> Sullivan's Styling Sentences, Sommers and Morenberg's Writer's
> Options. I'm not arguing that Pynchon consulted any of these.
> Irrespective of his knowledge of grammar and style, and the rhetorical
> terms and so on...more likely to be the stuff of the famous or
> infamous Chicago School P mentions in that SL Introduction, Pynchon
> used elipses and absolutes and other ommission schemes quite
> frequently in CL49. His reflections on his slow learning years support
> the argument that Pynchon was influenced by the Beats and others
> voices that he says permitted a certain lattitude and allowed him to
> experiment with an informal and non-standard prose fiction narrative
> style that we recognize as free indirect. Withina few pages we can
> discern from the words, the phrases, the diction, the patterns,
> syntactic and gramatical, when the narrative voice has shifted into
> Oedipa's voice. In the passage we are looking at, Pynchon begins the
> paragraph with "You're too senstive." No markers are needed or used.
> It is clear that this is Oedipa speaking. The next word is *Yeah* and
> the rest of the passage is Pynchon's free indirect narrative with
> Oedipa's style and voice and, this is quite important, tone. It's not
> Pynchon's tone or attitude, but Oedipa's. This sets up ironies and
> creates a distance the implied author needs to keep to make these
> ironies work.
>
  My view would probably be that, for the sake of proper emphasis, "new 
blades" needs to stand by itself rather than become the object of the 
preposition "with." (I realize that the Latin ablative absolute is often 
translated into English using a "with" phrase)

"New blades" emphasizes the compulsive nature of the action.

Also, "with new blades he drew blood  invariably,"  omits, or at least 
obscures, the information that he ALWAYS used new blades.

In other words I think P did fine on this sentence.  The only possible 
change might be to include the present participle (not elide it)  and 
say,  "new blades being the case" but  this would be a mistake.

Anyway  . . . .

P