JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #85
February 3, 2022
Recently in the workshop we were discussing participial adjuncts and their effect in prose. Consider the sentence walking through the door, I saw him in the kitchen. Here, walking through the door is an adjunct to the sentence I saw him (in the kitchen is also an adjunct, but not a participle). This basic construction--Verb-ing, Subject Verb--is the source of the so-called "dangling participle," which occurs when the agent of the participle (Verb-ing) is absent: e.g., blinking on my screen, I stared at the computer. In the case of our first example, walking through the door, I saw him in the kitchen, we do not have a dangling participle, because the agent of walking is I, which is the subject of the primary VP.
One of the things we noticed about this construction is that beginning with a verb (in participial form) delays our understanding of agency. We have to wait to find out who it is that is acting. Who is walking through the door? The activity must remain incomplete in the mind of the reader until the appropriate semantic roles are provided. Other intervening phrases can delay the fullness of the picture further: walking through the door, which swung heavily and banged against the fridge with a resounding thud, I saw him in the kitchen. In our discussion, we were careful not to declare that this construction is wrong in any intrinsic way; rather, we noted that the delaying effect was present, and it was up to the writer to take account of that when composing, when determining whether that construction was appropriate for a scene or idea they wanted to convey.
Another feature of the participial adjunct that I failed to bring up in our discussion is that the participle generally depicts an action with imperfect aspect. In other words, the activity being described is incomplete. In our example, the narrator suggests they are in the middle of walking when they saw him in the kitchen. This semantic feature can sometimes create questionable depictions: consider rushing across the room, I opened the door. The rushing here is suggested to be continuous, and the action of opening is semantically construed to be occurring in the midst of the rushing; which is unlikely: one must generally complete the activity of rushing across a room before one can open a door on the far side. Compare with I rushed across the room and opened the door, in which both verbs are presented in perfect aspect, indicating completed actions.
Anyway, these are a few of the things I think about when I write. There’s a lot of Linguistics in my comparative/interdisciplinary PhD, so it comes up a lot.
In response to a question, I added:
I mean that concerns about syntax and semantics etc. come to mind for me when I write prose because of my study of linguistics. Specifically, I often think too much about verb aspect (which is the forgotten sibling of tense), which we might say can be used to express a point of view on an activity: from the outside of a completed action or from the inside of an ongoing/incomplete action. There's quite a bit more complication than that, but that's one basic parameter.
One example of when you might prefer the imperfect of a participial adjunct is when a momentaneous event occurs during an ongoing, continuous event: dashing across the freeway, I tripped on a pothole. (notice that the reframing offered by I dashed across the freeway and tripped on a pothole seems to put the tripping after the dashing. ("and" also lends to this serialization.))
Overall, such concerns are mere observations about how minor adjustments in tense or aspect can tweak how we intend a reader to construe the events we depict in our writing. There is no wrong or right way, nothing to avoid, no prescriptions or proscriptions that arise therefrom.
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