Ursula K. Le Guin 1986

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World;
Transcribed: by Cody Jones.

In the temperate and tropical regions where it appears that hominids
evolved into human beings, the principal food of the species was vegetable.
Sixty-five to eighty percent of what human beings ate in those regions in
Paleolithic, Neolithic, and prehistoric times was gathered; only in the extreme
Arctic was meat the staple food. The mammoth hunters spectacularly occupy
the cave wall and the mind, but what we actually did to stay alive and fat was
gather seeds, roots, sprouts, shoots, leaves, nuts, berries, fruits, and grains,
adding bugs and mollusks and netting or snaring birds, fish, rats, rabbits, andother tuskless small fry to up the protein. And we didn't even work hard at it-much less hard than peasants slaving in somebody else's field after
agriculture was invented, much less hard than paid workers since civilization
was invented. The average prehistoric person could make a nice living in
about a fifteen-hour work week.
Fifteen hours a week for subsistence leaves a lot of time
for other things. So much time that maybe the restlessones who didn't have a baby around to enliven their life,or skill in making or cooking or singing, or very
interesting thoughts to think, decided to slope off andhunt mammoths. The skillful hunters then would comestaggering back with a load of meat, a lot of ivory, and astory. It wasn't the meat that made the difference. It wasthe story.
It is hard to tell a really gripping tale of how I wrested awild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and thenanother, and then another, and then another, and then I
scratched my gnat bites, and Ool said something funny,and we went to the creek and got a drink and watchednewts for a while, and then I found another patch ofoats.... No, it does not compare, it cannot compete with
how I thrust my spear deep into the titanic hairy flank
white Oob, impaled on one huge sweeping tusk, writhedscreaming, and blood spouted everywhere in crimson
torrents, and Boob was crushed to jelly when themammoth fell on him as I shot my unerring arrowstraight through eye to brain.
That story not only has Action, it has a Hero. Heroes
are powerful. Before you know it, the men and women in
the wild-oat patch and their kids and the skills of themakers and the thoughts of the thoughtful and the songsof the singers are all part of it, have all been pressed into
service in the tale of the Hero. But it isn't their story. It's
his.
When she was planning the book that ended up
as Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf wrote a heading in her
notebook, "Glossary"; she had thought of reinventing
English according to a new plan, in order to tell adifferent story. One of the entries in this glossaryis heroism, defined as "botulism." And hero, in Woolf's
dictionary, is "bottle." The hero as bottle, a stringent
reevaluation. I now propose the bottle as hero.

Not just the bottle of gin or wine, but bottle in its older
sense of container in general, a thing that holds
something else.
If you haven't got something to put it in, food will
escape you--even something as uncombative andunresourceful as an oat. You put as many as you can into
your stomach while they are handy, that being the
primary container; but what about tomorrow morningwhen you wake up and it's cold and raining and wouldn't
it be good to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew onand give little Oom to make her shut up, but how do you
get more than one stomachful and one handful home? So
you get up and go to the damned soggy oat patch in therain, and wouldn't it be a good thing if you had
something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pickthe oats with both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net abag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. Aholder. A recipient.
The first cultural device was probably arecipient .... Many theorizers feel that theearliest cultural inventions must have beena container to hold gathered products andsome kind of sling or net carrier.

SosaysElizabeth
Fisherin Women'sCreation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). But no, this cannot be.
Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I
believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in
the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having
achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky,
and whirling there it became a space ship thrusting its
way into the cosmos to fertilize it and produce at the endof the movie a lovely fetus, a boy of course, driftingaround the Milky Way without (oddly enough) any
womb, any matrix at all? I don't know. I don't even care.

I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard
all about all the sticks spears and swords, the things tobash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but wehave not heard about the thing to put things in, thecontainer for the thing contained. That is a new story.
That is news.
And yet old. Before--once you think about it, surely
long before--the weapon, a late, luxurious, superfluous
tool; long before the useful knife and ax; right along with
the indispensable whacker, grinder, and digger-- forwhat's the use of digging up a lot of potatoes if you havenothing to lug ones you can't eat home in--with or before
the tool that forces energy outward, we made the toolthat brings energy home. It makes sense to me. I am an
adherent of what Fisher calls the Carrier Bag Theory ofhuman evolution.
This theory not only explains large areas of theoreticalobscurity and avoids large areas of theoretical nonsense(inhabited largely by tigers, foxes, other highly territorialmammals); it also grounds me, personally, in humanculture in a way I never felt grounded before. So long asculture was explained as originating from andelaborating upon the use of long, hard objects for
sticking, bashing, and killing, I never thought that I had,or wanted, any particular share in it. ("What Freudmistook for her lack of civilization is woman's lackof loyalty to civilization," Lillian Smith observed.) The
society, the civilization they were talking about, these
theoreticians, was evidently theirs; they owned it, they
liked it; they were human, fully human, bashing,sticking, thrusting, killing. Wanting to be human too, I
sought for evidence that I was; but if that's what it took,
to make a weapon and kill with it, then evidently I waseither extremely defective as a human being, or not
human at all.
That's right, they said. What you are is a woman.
Possibly not human at all, certainly defective. Now bequiet while we go on telling the Story of the Ascent of
Man the Hero.
Go on, say I, wandering off towards the wild oats, withOo Oo in the sling and little Oom carrying the basket.
You just go on telling how the mammoth fell on Booband how Cain fell on Abel and how the bomb fell on
Nagasaki and how the burning jelly fell on the villagers
and how the missiles will fall on the Evil Empire, and allthe other steps in the Ascent of Man.
If it is a human thing to do to put something you want,because it's useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or abasket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven ofyour own hair, or what have you, and then take it homewith you, home being another, larger kind of pouch orbag, a container for people, and then later on you take itout and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in asolider container or put it in the medicine bundle or theshrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that
contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably
do much the same again--if to do that is human, if that's
what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully,
freely, gladly, for the first time.
Not, let it be said at once, an unaggressive oruncombative human being. I am an aging, angry woman
laying mightily about me with my handbag, fighting
hoodlums off. However I don't, nor does anybody else,
consider myself heroic for doing so. It's just one of thosedamned things you have to do in order to be able to go
on gathering wild oats and telling stories.
It is the story that makes the difference. It is the story
that hid my humanity from me, the story the mammoth
hunters told about bashing, thrusting, raping, killing,about the Hero. The wonderful, poisonous story ofBotulism. The killer story.
It sometimes seems that that story is approaching itsend. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all, someof us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think
we'd better start telling another one, which maybe people
can go on with when the old one's finished. Maybe. The
trouble is, we've all let ourselves become part of the killer
story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it
is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature,subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life
story.
It's unfamiliar, it doesn't come easily, thoughtlessly tothe lips as the killer story does; but still, "untold" was anexaggeration. People have been telling the life story forages, in all sorts of words and ways. Myths of creationand transformation, trickster stories, folktales, jokes,novels...
The novel is a fundamentally unheroic kind of story. Of
course the Hero has frequently taken it over, that being
his imperial nature and uncontrollable impulse, to takeeverything over and run it while making stern decrees
and laws to control his uncontrollable impulse to kill it.
So the Hero has decreed through his mouthpieces theLawgivers, first, that the proper shape of the narrative isthat of the arrow or spear, starting here and goingstraight there and THOK! hitting its mark (which dropsdead); second, that the central concern of narrative,including the novel, is conflict; and third, that the story
isn't any good if he isn't in it.
I differ with all of this. I would go so far as to say thatthe natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might bethat of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words holdthings. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine
bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation
to one another and to us.
One relationship among elements in the novel may
well be that of conflict, but the reduction of narrative toconflict is absurd. (I have read a how-to-write manualthat said, "A story should be seen as a battle," and went
on about strategies, attacks, victory, etc.) Conflict,
competition, stress, struggle, etc., within the narrative
conceived as carrier bag/belly/box/house/medicine
bundle, may be seen as necessary elements of a whole
which itself cannot be characterized either as conflict oras harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor
stasis but continuing process.
Finally, it's clear that the Hero does not look well inthis bag. He needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle.
You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, like apotato.
That is why I like novels: instead of heroes they havepeople in them.
So, when I came to write science-fiction novels, I camelugging this great heavy sack of stuff, my carrier bag fullof wimps and klutzes, and tiny grains of things smaller
than a mustard seed, and intricately woven nets which
when laboriously unknotted are seen to contain one blue
pebble, an imperturbably functioning chronometertelling the time on another world, and a mouse's skull;
full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses,of transformations and translations, and far more tricks
than conflicts, far fewer triumphs than snares anddelusions; full of space ships that get stuck, missions that
fail, and people who don't understand. I said it was hard
to make a gripping tale of how we wrested the wild oatsfrom their husks, I didn't say it was impossible. Who eversaid writing a novel was easy?
If science fiction is the mythology of moderntechnology, then its myth is tragic. "Technology," or"modern science" (using the words as they are usuallyused, in an unexamined shorthand standing for the"hard" sciences and high technology founded upon
continuous economic growth), is a heroic undertaking,
Herculean, Promethean, conceived as triumph, hence
ultimately as tragedy. The fiction embodying this myth
will be, and has been, triumphant (Man conquers earth,space, aliens, death, the future, etc.) and tragic(apocalypse, holocaust, then or now).
If, however, one avoids the linear, progressive, Time's(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic, andredefines technology and science as primarily cultural
carrier bag rather than weapon of domination, one
pleasant side effect is that science fiction can be seen as afar less rigid, narrow field, not necessarily Promethean or
apocalyptic at all, and in fact less a mythological genre
than a realistic one.
It is a strange realism, but it is a strange reality.
Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious
fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe
what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel,how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, thisbelly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tombof things that were, this unending story. In it, as in all
fiction, there is room enough to keep even Man where hebelongs, in his place in the scheme of things; there istime enough to gather plenty of wild oats and sow themtoo, and sing to little Oom, and listen to Ool's joke, andwatch newts, and still the story isn't over. Still there areseeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars.