The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction

 Welcome to the Carrier Bag, a podcast about the life, work, and influence of Ursula K. Le Guin. I'm your host, Stentor Danielson (they/them).

For this introductory episode, I want to introduce the goals of this podcast, say a little about myself, and talk about the essay the podcast takes its name from: "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction."

Ursula K. Le Guin was one of the most influential writers of science fiction and fantasy of the second half of the twentieth century. She also wrote a large body of poems, literary essays, children's books, and realist fiction. The core of this podcast will be a series of examinations of each of Le Guin's notable works, moving in generally but not strictly chronological order. Sprinkled in with it will be consideration of other authors inspired or influenced by her work, reader reactions and fan works, and scholarly analyses. Right now this podcast is just me, but if it becomes a big enough enterprise I may also bring on some guests to talk about their responses to Le Guin's work.

Ursula K. Le Guin was born in 1929 in Berkeley, California, the daughter of Alfred and Theodora Kroeber. Her father was one of the most influential American anthropologists of his day, studying indigenous Californian peoples. This included the man known as Ishi, infamously displayed in the Museum of Anthropology in San Francisco, and written about by Le Guin's mother in the bestselling book Ishi in Two Worlds -- though he passed away before Ursula was born. Her relationship to her father's legacy and what she referred to as her "Indian uncles" will be one of the themes we examine on the podcast.

Le Guin was an avid fan of golden age science fiction growing up, but it would be some time before she became a published writer. She went to Radcliffe College where she studied French and Italian, and Columbia University where she earned an MA in French. On a Fullbright fellowship to France, she met and married historian Charles Le Guin. They would eventually move to Portland, Oregon, and have four children. Ursula began carving out time from her duties as a mother to write, and in 1962 she sold her first short story, "April in Paris," to the magazine Fantastic Science Fiction. Four years later her first novel, Rocannon's World, was published by Ace Books as a "double" back-to-back with Avram Davidson's The Kar-Chee Reign.

I won't list off her entire bibliography here -- you can check Wikipedia or her own website for the full list -- but she became incredibly prolific, and was hailed by both fans and critics, becoming one of the most significant authors to cross over from the fantasy and science fiction genre world into mainstream acclaim. Her 2014 address to the National Book Awards calling out toxic dynamics in the publishing industry cemented her position as one of the leading figures of American literature. Over her career she won eight Hugo awards, six Nebulas, and twenty-two Locus awards.

Her literary influences include authors such as Theodore Sturgeon, Victor Hugo, and Philip K. Dick, as well as various bodies of mythology, Taoist philosophy, and the psychology of Carl Jung. Authors who have cited her as an influence include Neil Gaiman, Salman Rushdie, and David Mitchell.

Le Guin passed away in 2018, at the age of 88.

My own relationship with Ursula K. Le Guin began sometime around junior high school, in the early 1990s -- I sadly can't remember precisely when -- when I read the original Earthsea trilogy. I was captivated by the books, and in particular by the map, based on one drawn by Le Guin herself. I covered the walls of my bedroom with maps of fantasy worlds that I drew myself, some of them directly inspired by Earthsea, which broke the mold of Tolkien imitators (though I should note that I loved Tolkien just as much). I continued to sample from her works over the subsequent years, including The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and Lavinia.

My interest in maps led me to pursue a BA in Geography and Anthropology from Colgate University (which, yes, was named in honor of benefactor James B. Colgate, heir to the toothpaste fortune) and a PhD in geography from Clark University. My PhD studies focused on how humans interact with the natural environment, specifically around the issue of wildfire management. Starting in 2009, I took up a job as a professor in the Department of Geography, Geology, and the Environment at Slippery Rock University located north of Pittsburgh, where I still work today. My teaching schedule includes such courses as Cultural Geography, Environmental Justice, Gender and the Environment, and our introductory geoscience and physics course Understanding the Physical World. I have continued my research on wildfire management, but after getting tenure I came back to my longstanding interest in fantasy and science fiction, and began researching and writing about how works in these genres present geographical and environmental issues.

In the fall of 2021, I took a course through Signum University called Ursula K. Le Guin: Worldbuilder, taught by Dr. Kris Swank. In preparation for that class I began a project of reading everything Le Guin had written. In the process, I confirmed why she was one of my absolute favorite authors. Every book or story I read seemed to spawn an idea for a paper or an article. This podcast is in part an effort to corral those thoughts and get them set down, so that I can share them with interested listeners, and keep track of them for later use.

Now, as you can probably tell, I love Ursula K. Le Guin. I think she's a brilliant writer. But I by no means think she's a perfect or flawless writer, and I imagine she would be horrified if anyone put her up on that kind of pedestal. She was, after all, white, middle-class, heterosexual and cisgender, and that lens, with all its biases, is reflected in her writing. Some of her work has really not aged well, and some of it was questionable at the time it was published.

What I love about Le Guin is that her work is always useful to think with, even when she got things wrong. Her strike-outs are as provocative and as productive as her home runs. And she recognized her own flaws and limits, often coming back years later to reconsider themes and stories with a more sensitive and better-informed eye. She's an author worth a deep dive, and one who I can personally relate to well enough that I feel confident being the person taking you on this deep dive.

With that, we come to the essay that gives this podcast its name, "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction." This is a short essay written in 1986 for the collection Women of Vision: Essays by Women Writing Science Fiction, edited by Denise Dupont, and later published in a collection of Le Guin's writings titled Dancing at the Edge of the World in 1989.

The premise of this essay draws on a change that occurred in the later half of the twentieth century in how anthropologists and archaeologists thought about the origins of what makes us human -- that is, how did Homo sapiens develop the culture that makes us so different even from our closest ape relatives?

The traditional story is called the Man the Hunter thesis. According to the Man the Hunter thesis, our big brains needed lots of the high-quality protein that could be obtained from big game hunting. But people don't have sharp claws or great strength. So instead we developed tools like stone-tipped spears to kill game with, and language for groups of hunters to coordinate their attacks, and social relationships to share the meat with the whole village.

Counter to this, we have what's sometimes called the Woman the Gatherer thesis. This thesis argues that the most important, fundamental technology developed by our earliest ancestors was actually the bag. With a bag or another sort of container, a person can gather more food than can be carried in our two hands unaided. A person can also carry a child, keeping the baby secure while freeing up both hands for other work. One of the earliest plants we know to have been domesticated is the bottle gourd -- which can't be eaten, but does make a nice canteen for carrying water.

Among proponents of the Woman the Gatherer thesis, the popularity of the Man the Hunter thesis is the result of two biases. First, stone spearheads are preserved in the archaeological record much better than bags made of biodegradable string or leather. And second, sexism made the story of men killing animals with phallic weapons more appealing than a story of women gathering roots in a womb-like bag to take home.

I should note here that the assumption of a sharp gendered divide between male hunters and female gatherers is not well supported by anthropological or archaeological evidence. Certainly caring for a nursing child can inhibit women's participation in big game hunting. But it is quite common for women to hunt smaller game or participate in community-wide hunting activities like driving a herd of buffalo off a cliff. And men in most hunter-gatherer societies regularly gather plant foods as well. And of course it's common for non-Western societies to recognize genders beyond male and female, that wouldn't fit this neat dichotomy.

The diversity of existing hunter-gatherer societies should be a caution to us about buying into universalizing origin stories, even feminist ones, that try to say a single thing about people living across the course of a hundred thousand years. Le Guin falls into this trap somewhat, using names for her hypothetical ancient people like "Ook" and "Boob" that sound straight out of the caveman strips from Gary Larson's Far Side. It's quite unlike the sensitivity to cultural context present in the naming of characters in her novels and short stories.

Le Guin ties the Woman the Gatherer thesis to ideas about stories. She argues that Man the Hunter inclines people toward stories of individual heroism. This kind of story tends to dominate literature, and especially the speculative fiction genre in its earlier years. But Le Guin seeks a conception of story rooted in Woman the Gatherer, where storytelling is modeled on the technology of the bag rather than the spear. She writes:

"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 take everything 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 the Lawgivers, first, that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight 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 that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. 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 to conflict is absurd. [...] 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 or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process."

Le Guin's body of work is a proof of concept of the carrier bag theory of fiction. It took her some time to throw off the heroic model, so we'll see it crop up in her earlier work. But as she gained confidence and experience as a writer, she more and more framed her stories as carrier bags. She can write brilliant characters, but they don't exist to gain glory and save the world, but to explore the world and bring together all the pieces that make it interesting and valuable. She wrote the carrier bag essay around the same time she was working on Always Coming Home, a fictional ethnography of a far-future Californian people. This book is not a hero's journey but a carrier bag for thoughts about how people might overcome the social and ecological crises of the present and learn to live well with the land.

One of my favorite of Le Guin's books is The Dispossessed, a novel about an experiment in creating an anarchist utopia. When I recently came to re-read it after several years, I realized that I could remember almost nothing about the protagonist, Shevek. What I remembered, and what captivated me, was what Shevek showed about the worlds of Anarres and Urras. As I reread the book, I saw how Shevek is a well-realized and complex character precisely because of how well he works as a carrier bag for the "ambiguous utopia" that he inhabits.

This podcast is meant to be my own carrier bag, collecting my thoughts and observations about Le Guin, her work, and her influence. I hope you'll join me around the campfire to see what I've collected and share your own finds. Next time we'll look at her first two publications, the poem "Folk Song from the Montayna Province" and the short story "An die Musik."