The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction

In Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986), Le Guin posits the first human tool as the basket, not the spear, thereby recasting the first protagonist as a gatherer, not a hunter. Not only did this address the deeply gendered roles of these two parts, it also changed the singular hero to the plural collective, from he to we. “Before... See more

Anyway, the point is: the hero’s journey and carrier bag are both about narrative models rather than gendered modes of storytelling, and the rise of the novel was a fall of the hero (whether male or female) from epic demigod figure to boy-with-toy. Or girl-with-toy as the case may be.

The hero’s journey is more than male dickishness writ large. To read or write within that pattern is to experience real growth. Equally, carrier-bag storytelling are more than an antithetical feminine aesthetic of novel writing. To read and write within that form is to uncover truths about the human condition. As far as I am concerned though, both ... See more

The spear and the bag. And then there’s the net. A bag with holes. That is carried around on a different kind of bag: a boat. Which is used to gather fish the way women once gathered yams while men sat around repeating their hunting stories from last month. Fish fight back more than yams, but less than dragons. A hero’s journey is sublimated braggi... See more

Tools break and containers change, but the urge to tell stories remains. Containers and content can be used to mutually inform the shape of their counterparts, expressing a tender, anti-heroic, communal, and present side of storytelling in place of our received understanding of historical material as heroic, individual, disconnected, and past. As w... See more