cunning structure may, for example, help you to simultaneously project
contrasting aspects of a political issue, or contradictory psychological states.
Obviously there are many different ways of making structures. You
might map out a plan quite carefully before you start to write, and this
skeleton design might help you to generate ideas. More commonly, as a
piece of writing develops, a particular type of textual patterning and
organisation starts to emerge. Decisions about structure are ideological as
well as formal, not only because the shape of the text affects the content,
but also because some types of structure are more conservative than
others. While conservative structures are more closed , adventurous ones
tend more towards openness. They broaden the scope of the writing and
maximise the plurality and complexity of the meaning: its psychological
and political import. The structural principles discussed in this chapter
can lead to open forms of writing if used effectively.
An interest in, even reverence for, structure was central to the movement
known as structuralism. This was a revolutionary, putatively scientific
methodology for analysing texts, which became very influential in the 70s
and early 80s. One of the central tenets of structuralism is that any literary
text is made up of smaller units (that is, every macrostructure is made up
of micro-elements) and that these acquire shape and meaning through
their relationship to each other, the way they are arranged in the text. Struc-
turalist analysis (see Hawkes 1977; Eagleton 1996) tends to highlight the
relationship between different elements of the text, for example in repeti-
tions, variations, oppositions, symmetries and parallelisms. It is this kind of
relationship between constituent parts of the text that we will be exploring
in this chapter in terms of creative practice. However, we will also be
keeping a firm eye on the semantic and cultural consequences of such
structural decisions: these were often underplayed in structuralist analysis.
In the first half of this chapter we will work out with a few different
types of structuring principle: the eventual aim is that you will start to
invent your own. In the second half of the chapter we will explore the
adaptation of culturally significant, non-literary forms—such as adver-
tisements, lists or recipes—to literary texts.
exercises
- Create a text based on one or more of the following structural
principles:
a) linearity
b) repetition
Working out with structures 49