The Synthesis of Sequence

In last chapter’s protocol of meaning experiences, I was concerned with a sequence of text units which I took to hang together by thematic ‘simultaneous’ relationships. Darwin’s text is neither a history nor a story. Therefore it does not invite the reader to position meaning units vis-à-vis particular points of time in the world that the text projects. Such non-narrative prose has attracted labels like ‘thematic’, ‘expository’, ‘descriptive’ and ‘discursive’ in modern academic discourse. Readers experience the way sequence matters in such ‘thematic’ texts differently from the way it matters in narrative. The current chapter makes a start with exploring such differences. It examines the role of the perceived spatial contiguity of text parts, most centrally the contiguity of any two adjacent meaning units (e.g., sentences). In this light, I will address the experiences of reading certain kinds of ‘Introductions’, the format of commentary, the syllogism and the narrative.