I’d heard a little about The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction and thought the approach suited the novel I’m currently writing, which is structured around scenes throughout a character’s life that adds up to a pattern of who they are and the society they live in. However, I thought I’d get a copy of the essay so I could really study the nitty-gritty details of the theory.
I was pretty surprised when the book came and it was so small. It’s not a long essay, even by essay standards. What’s more, it’s not an essay of nitty-grittys or detail, it’s principally vibes based. This does mean that as a purchase, this book was a little disappointing but as a way of directing my thinking, it’s very good.
My copy starts with an essay by Doona Haraway, who seems to take the carrier bag element a little literally. There’s a photograph of three of her bags, with descriptions of their provenance and what the bags mean to her. She seemed to be writing a fictional theory of carrier bags more than introducing The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.
Le Guin begins by putting forward a picture of a hunter-gatherer society, one which does a lot more gathering than hunting. They also have a lot of free time to lark about and tell stories. She has fun with ‘cavemen’ type names for her characters, chatty little Oom, baby Oo Oo, Ool with the good sense of humour (Ool the droll?). She says that there aren’t all that many great stories about shelling wheat but when groups of hunters came back, they had dramatic stories of impalement and action, and what’s more they had a hero.
Heroes take over stories, they start demanding that stories are all about them. What’s more hero stories are stories of death, violence and often include pointy objects. She calls it the killer story, the linear story. A story needs to go like an arrow, in a straight line. It needs clear us and them. If it’s a heroic story they die, if it’s a tragedy we do. It’s a story as rigid as a spear.
Le Guin suggests a different kind of story, one from an older technology, the bag. It’s a story that involves gathering, saving, keeping. It’s a story of co-operation and protection rather than death. She says that a novel is an inherently unheroic sort of story, a bag that holds words. “A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.”
It was this conception of the novel that appealed to me. As I’ve been writing, I occasionally glance at some Youtube ‘writing content’. To often they cite books that don’t particularly appeal to me or talk about books in mechanistic ways, like a book is a set of parts you click together. I like the notion of a novel as something more personal, a collection of the things that hang together, with the story being told in their relationship. This book didn’t help me much with practical suggestions of how to do that, but to do that would have betrayed the point of it. The idea is to search through the bushes and gather, to get a feeling for the right things, to polish the shells and shell the grain. A how-to guide would be back to that mechanistic, pointy tool approach.
Le Guin genders her story types. She presents the hero/killing/spear story as male and the carrier bag one as female. However, there’s been a lot of research on these early cultures since LeGuin wrote this essay in 1988. Impressive and complex structures like Göbekli Tepe were created by hunter-gatherers. What’s more, skeletal remains are as likely to show women being injured in ways that suggest hunting as it was men. The suggestion now, is that both men and women gathered most of the time, and then all the young, fit members would gather together for a hunt.
She says how her lack of connection to the hero’s story made her feel not a part of culture or civilisation, not fully human. That in discovering this feminine form of story, one of gathering, collecting and protecting, she feels fully human for the first time. I think both kinds of stories are human, but I know the kind I feel speaks more to me.
What’s more, she talks about how this story type need not be empty of conflict or action, only that those elements are simply parts of the whole story, items in the carrier bag.
It wasn’t a long essay, but it is a full one and one that’s got me thinking.
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