The Economist May 7th 2022 Culture 81R
eading thissentence, it may occur
to you that something is slightly awry
with it. Or you may not notice anything
wrong at all. The first three words are a
“dangling modifier”. This writing fault
has been deprecated for over a century. It
has made its way into countless usage
guides, perhaps because of its catchy and
evocative name, as something to be
avoided at all costs.
The most common kind of dangling
modifier is a dangling participle, as at the
beginning of this column. Participles are
those verb forms that end in -ingin the
present tense, and usually in -edin the
past tense: playing, played.(Some past
participles, like bornand spoken, are
irregular.) Participles are so named be
cause they “participate” in two parts of
speech. They are verbs in sentences like
She has spoken French for three decades,
but act like adjectives in those like French
is the most spoken language in Belgium.
Participles can be used to add some
contextual or explanatory information to
a sentence: Speaking Spanish, he ordered
three beers. Spoken in Paraguay, Guaraní is
the source of the word “jaguar”.Since
participles are a bit like a verb, readers
seek an appropriate subject to go with
them, typically in the first noun they
find. The problem comes when these
don’t match up. Writing gurus have often
conjured up clumsy examples to high
light the issue: Trembling with fear, the
clock struck twelve. After fighting the
flames for hours, the ship was finally aban-
doned.The clock was not trembling, nor
did the ship fight the flames.
By no means do such abominations
have to be invented. Take “Pulling off his
boxer briefs, his erection springs free.
Holy cow!” The quotation, from E.L.
James’s “50 Shades of Grey”, has a classic
dangling participle, the kind of thing thatmakes critics mock the style of her erotic
novels. (A bit of envy may be mixed in
with the condescension: “50 Shades” was
the bestselling novel of the 2010s.)
Consider, though, that James Donald
son, who provides this example in his
recent doctoral dissertation, also cites 21
dangling modifiers from a rather more
critically admired source: Virginia Woolf.
“Lunching with Lady Bruton, it came back
to her.” “Rubbing the glass of the long
lookingglass and leering sideways at her
swinging figure a sound issued from her
lips.” “Looking up into the sky there was
nothing but blackness there too.”
The idea that an introductory phrase
must always apply to the subject of the
clause that follows is a useful rule, but not
a cardinal one. Speakers often introduce a
remark with some throatclearing about
their own feelings on the statement to
come, as in “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a
damn.” It is but a short step to saying
things like Frankly, he is lying to you—
which under a strict rejection of “dangling
modifiers” would be incoherent, as the
speaker, not the liar, is being frank. Yet these kinds of things crop up all
the time, as when Richard Nixon said
“Speaking as an old friend, there has
been a disturbing tendency in state
ments emanating from Peking to ques
tion the good faith of President Reagan.”
The dangling participle—“Speaking as an
old friend”—has nothing to attach itself
to. But Speaking as...is also a common
introduction, the type that includes
Considering, Assuming, Leaving asideand
so forth. Only occasionally are these
accompanied by an explicit Ior we,
which are nevertheless so strongly im
plied that they hardly need spelling
out—a reason so many dangling modifi
ers go unnoticed. Moreover English
sentences often have a dummy subject,
such as “it” (Considering inflation, it seems
plausible...) or “there are” (Given our
situation, there are three options...). That
makes dangling modifiers all the more
likely to slip past editors.
It is best for writers to avoid, and
those editors to fix, any danglers that
give rise to absurdity, or even just a mo
mentary jolt of confusion. Even if they
bother only a few readers, those readers
are disproportionately likely to think
that the writer does not know how the
parts of a sentence are meant to be com
bined. They are also disproportionately
likely to write letters to the editor.
At the same time, a supposedly unfor
givable error that has featured in dis
tinguished writing for centuries ought
really to be considered a lesser sort of
misdeed, more parking violation than
murder in the second degree. A dangling
participle is not a sin against grammar so
much as a failure to take the reader’s
expectations into account. That is
enough to revise them each time you
spot them—which even skilled readers,
quite often, will not.Frankly speaking, dangling participles are not the end of the worldJohnsonIf you dangle, don’t mangle
connects them all—a chain that is com
pleted, like many of the best fictions, in the
reader’s own mind. The landscape that
develops is uncomfortably similar to the
current digital realm. Bix Bouton, a “tech
demigod on a firstname basis with the
world”, has invented a program called
“Own Your Unconscious” that allows users
to “externalise” their memories and feel
ings into software. He bases this innova
tion partly on the work of an anthropolo
gist investigating trust networks in a
remote Brazilian tribe.
In this entirely mediated future there
are “counters” who quantify individuals’
online activity, and “eluders” who choose
to secede from digital life, leaving behind
dummy identities. Before long, Bouton’s
company offers users the chance to access
other peoples’ memories in exchange for
uploading their own; meanwhile a non
profit outfit has emerged to help the
refuseniks escape. Pinballing between
tales told in tweets, emails, maths formu
las and her own liquid prose, Ms Egan
questions the cost of trading away authen
tic selves for something that appears to be
shinier and more exciting.For all its fluency in the languages of
gaming, addiction and tech, “The Candy
House” is a social novel, a kind of “Middle
march” for the 21st century with an aptly
whirling form. The characters’ stories are
not wrapped up neatly; there are reversals
and redemptions and, above all, an asser
tion that imagination can still trump tech
nology. In the closing scene, Bouton’s son
Gregory, a writer of fiction, realises that he
is surrounded by “a galaxy of human lives
hurtling towardhiscuriosity”. He can feel
the collective,hemarvels, “without any
machinery at all”.n