Where is the grammatical error in Norman Mailer’s famous sentence?
Norman Mailer’s ‘The Hate of Harlot’s Grit’ was initially marked as being made with a grammatical error. “On a late winter evening in
1983, while driving through the fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago. What
is a “mistake”.?
What is the main reason behind being interviewed in the show?
Can you simplify that sentence into: when driving,
recollections began to drift.
I don’t remember any driver’s licenses in Maine. These things would probably be valid in the US. Presumably, he meant something like
While I was driving, recollections began to drift.
If I really mean that I think it is untrue (in all
aspects) What is a good sentence that said: “Twelve changes!”
If, as a prescriptivist, you disregard the elision of the words I was as the source of the technical error, then the apparent error reduces to the conjunction of two independent clauses with an ambiguous subordinate clause.
What is the subordinate clause (in simplified form) while driving? The first independent clause has no subject other than recollections, which cannot be directly reconciled with the pronoun subject I of the second independent clause, so it is ambiguous as to who or what is driving (Recollections may drift, but as Cascabel commented, they don’t drive), I’ll illustrate
by simplifying the sentence first without the subordinate clause: Recollections drifted
into the mist, and I thought about the Indians.
On the other hand, with the subordinate clause, it becomes something like this, where the ambiguity can be seen:
While driving, recollections drifted into the mist, and I thought of the Indians.
Since both independent clauses and their subordinate clauses can be ruled through the elided words one cannot avoid the ambiguity in another. While driving, recollections
drifted into the mist, and I thought of the Indians.
Is omitting subordinate clauses an inference for a subordinate clause? In this case, having two independent clauses with irreconcilable subjects might offend someone driven by prescriptive grammar. What are literary licenses in popular literature, where there are often mistakes that can
be made?
