When we tightened the wordy sentence from David Foster Wallace's The Pale King in class a couple of weeks ago, his use of the word "outside" left me wondering about the context of the sentence and if "outside" was a transition (I was also curious because I'm reading a collection of Wallace's essays for my book report). I searched Google Books for the sentence - here's the whole paragraph, part of a chapter that takes place in a bar called Meibeyer's:
Drinion rotates his upper body slightly in his chair to see just where Keith Subusawa is at the bar. Rand is 90 percent sure that the movement isn't any sort of performance or anything that is meant to communicate something nonverbally to her. Outside in the sky to the northwest are great sheer walls of rim-lit sunset clouds in whose interior there is sometimes muttering and light. None of the people in Meibeyer's can see these clouds, although you can always tell physically that rain's on the way if you pay attention to certain subliminal physical signals like sinuses, bunions, a particular kind of incipient headache, a slight felt change in the quality of the cold of the air-conditioning.
I haven't read the whole chapter, but the way Wallace words the sentence makes more sense to me now, as an example of form reflecting subject matter. The characters are IRS office workers (the whole book is about boredom and centers on a tax-return processing center), and there is something precise and technical ("90 percent sure") about the way they are interacting and perceiving things that is mirrored in the specification of "Outside in the sky to the northwest." It's like they need a disclaimer that the sky is outside, and must be fed each detail in separate prepositional phrases (much like the tax code, I can attest from having just struggled through Publication 590). The "in whose interior there is sometimes muttering and light" reads like a technical specification of a thunderstorm for people (like office workers who hang out in windowless bars after work) who haven't been outside to witness one in a long time. It's like a lyrical piece of tax code describing how the sky works.
(But who knows, I may be projecting - while I don't spend a lot of time in dingy bars, I do have experience consuming all my weekday day-lit hours working in offices where lots of dull technical work is done and every rule must be unambiguously stipulated, and the only way to ascertain what is happening outside is to visit weather.com. And I am still recovering from a mighty struggle with my taxes.)
"It's like a lyrical piece of tax code describing how the sky works."
ReplyDeleteExcellent! Kudos to Nora for digging into the context and analyzing this. Wallace himself would have been delighted.
This is exactly what I meant when I talked about how the rhythm, syntax, word choice and sounds within a sentence can convey meaning beyond the literal content of the words. There is an infinite variety of ways to do this, and Wallace was brilliant at it.