Marathe and Steeply compare fatal-beauty myths (p. 529)
‘No,’ Steeply said, ‘but your own francophone myth of your Odalisk of Theresa.’ ‘L’Odalisque de Sainte Thérèse.’ Marathe rarely yielded to the temptation to correct Steeply, whose horrid pronunciation and the syntax as well Marathe could never determine for sure either was or was not an intentional irritant, intended to discomfit Marathe.
Context
Dawn on the outcropping; Steeply mangles the Odalisque's title. Marathe — who almost never corrects — corrects, and the narration makes the policing itself the subject: he can't determine whether Steeply's "horrid pronunciation and the syntax as well" is genuine incompetence or an engineered irritant. Note that the sentence reporting this is itself syntactically Québecois-tangled: the narration around Marathe speaks his interlanguage. Carlisle's reading, recorded not adopted: the correction is an event — a temptation yielded to, inside a section that is all about temptation. Pairs with Poutrincourt's non-comment at p. 675, below.