(How) Nonfiction Is Made Up

Nonfiction works in linked text because it's explicit. Just like a human sentence has a system of relationships we call syntax, longer discourse has a meaningful set of relationships, a syntagma. Each works in ways that can be shovelled very roughly into two groups.

The example with sentences is simpler.A few English words retain declension clues inherited from the Germanic history of the language. They make this explanation easier. Let's take a simple sentence:

He saw her.

There are two ways one could know that He is subject and her is object. One is by position in the sentence; another is by the form of the pronoun. As English speakers, we analyze what's subject and what's object primarily by word position. So, if one were to say this --

Him saw she.

-- we would (grimacing quizzically) still understand that a male views a female. A speaker of German or Latin faced with a correspondingly changed sentence, however, would assume the reverse: the pronoun case would reliably determine the usage of the pronoun or noun regardless of position in the sentence. So "Him saw she" would indicate that a female viewed a male.

Either way, whatever rule is assumed allows readers and authors to mutually insist that two words combine in one way as opposed to another.

(Even Finnegans Wake works like this, BTW. Apparently we make experiments with syntax, not without.)

Now, because nonfiction is dominantly explicit or constantive, the larger markers we call thesis, topic sentence, transition, and conclusion, along with various other explanations, explicitly label the logical relationships of materials in the discourse. Even nonfiction works that successfully break down the rigor of these distinctions So when Derrida crucifies the division between constative and performative in a criticism of a hapless follower of Austin in, if I recall, Limited Inc, he maintains the fiction of nonfiction performance throughout, and readers may take his words in good faith as an explanation -- at least to the point of assuming some knowledge of which words we're to combine to make meaning.

Because nonfiction is made up of labelled parts that can be disassembled and reassembled according to their labels, nonfiction could easily convert to Websites with relatively small adjustments to form.

Therefore, nonfiction sites -- properly done with a view to the relations between graphic layout and site logic, with clear and consistent navigational elements -- are easy to read.

Fiction seems different, no? For instance, I read Deena Larsen's fiction (not her poems) as both less clear and as too obvious when compared to Kind of Blue. The labels avoided much of the frustrations of Afternoon but still somehow reduced the grace of the written gesture.