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The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, visionary author Ursula K. Le Guin retells the story of human origin by redefining technology as a cultural carrier bag rather than a weapon of domination.
Hacking the linear, progressive mode of the Techno-Heroic, the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution proposes: 'before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.' Prior to the preeminence of sticks, swords and the Hero's long, hard, killing tools, our ancestors' greatest invention was the container: the basket of wild oats, the medicine bundle, the net made of your own hair, the home, the shrine, the place that contains whatever is sacred. The recipient, the holder, the story. The bag of stars.
This influential essay opens a portal to terra ignota: unknown lands where the possibilities of human experience and knowledge can be discovered anew.
With a new introduction by Donna Haraway, the eminent cyberfeminist, author of the revolutionary A Cyborg Manifesto and most recently, Staying with the Trouble and Manifestly Haraway. With images by Lee Bul, a leading South Korean feminist artist who had a retrospective at London's Hayward Gallery in 2018.
Hacking the linear, progressive mode of the Techno-Heroic, the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution proposes: 'before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.' Prior to the preeminence of sticks, swords and the Hero's long, hard, killing tools, our ancestors' greatest invention was the container: the basket of wild oats, the medicine bundle, the net made of your own hair, the home, the shrine, the place that contains whatever is sacred. The recipient, the holder, the story. The bag of stars.
This influential essay opens a portal to terra ignota: unknown lands where the possibilities of human experience and knowledge can be discovered anew.
With a new introduction by Donna Haraway, the eminent cyberfeminist, author of the revolutionary A Cyborg Manifesto and most recently, Staying with the Trouble and Manifestly Haraway. With images by Lee Bul, a leading South Korean feminist artist who had a retrospective at London's Hayward Gallery in 2018.
5 pages, ebook
First published January 1, 1986
About the author
Ursula K. Le Guin
977 books25.8k followersUrsula K. Le Guin published twenty-two novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many awards: Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud, etc. Her recent publications include the novel Lavinia, an essay collection, Cheek by Jowl, and The Wild Girls. She lived in Portland, Oregon.
She was known for her treatment of gender (The Left Hand of Darkness, The Matter of Seggri), political systems (The Telling, The Dispossessed) and difference/otherness in any other form. Her interest in non-Western philosophies was reflected in works such as "Solitude" and The Telling but even more interesting are her imagined societies, often mixing traits extracted from her profound knowledge of anthropology acquired from growing up with her father, the famous anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber. The Hainish Cycle reflects the anthropologist's experience of immersing themselves in new strange cultures since most of their main characters and narrators (Le Guin favoured the first-person narration) are envoys from a humanitarian organization, the Ekumen, sent to investigate or ally themselves with the people of a different world and learn their ways.
She was known for her treatment of gender (The Left Hand of Darkness, The Matter of Seggri), political systems (The Telling, The Dispossessed) and difference/otherness in any other form. Her interest in non-Western philosophies was reflected in works such as "Solitude" and The Telling but even more interesting are her imagined societies, often mixing traits extracted from her profound knowledge of anthropology acquired from growing up with her father, the famous anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber. The Hainish Cycle reflects the anthropologist's experience of immersing themselves in new strange cultures since most of their main characters and narrators (Le Guin favoured the first-person narration) are envoys from a humanitarian organization, the Ekumen, sent to investigate or ally themselves with the people of a different world and learn their ways.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 271 reviews
February 24, 2020
Ursula K Le Guin - makes you wonder why there are any other writers at all? Should they all just go home?,
April 17, 2020
It never occurred to me to think that the so-called Hero's Journey, with its Conflict and clear Villain, is just one more vestige of that very old story our culture decided it prefers most: Early man using a bone to kill, then raising it in adrenaline-spiked ecstasy; the bone becoming a rocket; and close-up to the baby, a boy of course, born in a Space now penetrated, colonised, dead to all but our purposes, like everything else. In that conception of reality, the Weapon is always our first cultural tool—the force that imposes to assert dominance.
The carrier bag theory of evolution, if I understand it (and I certainly don't well, not yet), posits that the first cultural tool was actually some kind of sack or sling—a vessel. What good does it do to dig up spuds if you can't contain the rest to take home? Ursula Le Guin doesn't much seem to care which tool came first, but it's satisfying enough to imagine that, way back in the time of Firsts, there was the tool that forces energy outward and the one that brings energy home, that contains it so that we may feed ourselves and others.
How does that perspective change stories, and the entire genre of science fiction?
The carrier bag theory of evolution, if I understand it (and I certainly don't well, not yet), posits that the first cultural tool was actually some kind of sack or sling—a vessel. What good does it do to dig up spuds if you can't contain the rest to take home? Ursula Le Guin doesn't much seem to care which tool came first, but it's satisfying enough to imagine that, way back in the time of Firsts, there was the tool that forces energy outward and the one that brings energy home, that contains it so that we may feed ourselves and others.
How does that perspective change stories, and the entire genre of science fiction?
April 16, 2021
short, sweet and like a firm hug in a kitchen with a whistling kettle
April 1, 2021
Le Guin never fails in writing stories or essays that contain ideas that slap you round the face in the calmest way possibly. She is just the most amazingly thoughtful, grounded sci-fi writer. This little essay just details how much our notions of "heroics" or "heroes" are frankly crap and calls for a rethink of our storytelling priorities.
November 12, 2023
yeah sure i'll put this on my goodreads. why not. anything to encourage people to read it; it's like five minutes long and it's a very thoughtful examination of narrative, specifically the way narrative is shaped by a patriarchal drive toward conflict, violence, and war as the centerpoints of human existence.
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.
it's possible to read this essay in a gender essentialist way (the phallic spear! the phallic club!), but i don't think that's the major drive. le guin's point isn't War Is For Men Gathering Is For Women; her point is that placing all narratives, all human stories, in the language of war is a very narrow definition doing us more harm than good. i also just really like this as a craft thought as much as a human-philosophy thought; her novel Lavinia is a bit of a meandering one, without a rising-action-to-climax-to-falling-action type of plot structure, and it's a much more honest (and, to me, interesting) book for that. (i'm rereading this essay because lavinia had me thinking of it incessantly--something about the way le guin explores at the "woman's side" of the aeneid, a poem that is [among other things] very much about war and imperialism, feels like this essay made manifest. you could illustrate this essay, i think, with the image in that book of ascanius showing other men his father's shield, describing the battles it has seen and the battles it foretells, and lavinia crossing the courtyard as he does so, carrying her child on her shoulder the way aeneas carries that shield.)
anyway. le guin never missed
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.
it's possible to read this essay in a gender essentialist way (the phallic spear! the phallic club!), but i don't think that's the major drive. le guin's point isn't War Is For Men Gathering Is For Women; her point is that placing all narratives, all human stories, in the language of war is a very narrow definition doing us more harm than good. i also just really like this as a craft thought as much as a human-philosophy thought; her novel Lavinia is a bit of a meandering one, without a rising-action-to-climax-to-falling-action type of plot structure, and it's a much more honest (and, to me, interesting) book for that. (i'm rereading this essay because lavinia had me thinking of it incessantly--something about the way le guin explores at the "woman's side" of the aeneid, a poem that is [among other things] very much about war and imperialism, feels like this essay made manifest. you could illustrate this essay, i think, with the image in that book of ascanius showing other men his father's shield, describing the battles it has seen and the battles it foretells, and lavinia crossing the courtyard as he does so, carrying her child on her shoulder the way aeneas carries that shield.)
anyway. le guin never missed
January 16, 2021
"It’s unfamiliar, it doesn’t come easily, thoughtlessly, to the lips as the killer story does; but still, 'untold' was an exaggeration. People have been telling the life story for ages, in all sorts of words and ways. Myths of creation and 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 take everything over and run it while making stern decrees and laws to control his uncontrollable impulse to kill it."
"So, when I came to write science-fiction novels, I came lugging this great heavy sack of stuff, my carrier bag full of 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 and delusions; 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 oats from their husks, I didn’t say it was impossible. Who ever said writing a novel was easy?"
"Finally, it’s clear that the Hero does not look well in this bag. He needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, like a potato."
"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, when I came to write science-fiction novels, I came lugging this great heavy sack of stuff, my carrier bag full of 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 and delusions; 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 oats from their husks, I didn’t say it was impossible. Who ever said writing a novel was easy?"
"Finally, it’s clear that the Hero does not look well in this bag. He needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, like a potato."
December 4, 2021
One of the best essays I read. I keep coming back to it for its concentrated speculative power that can go in so many directions. Lovely foundation to think and read with.
August 1, 2022
Assim como fala na sinopse deste livro, a grande escritora de ficção científica, Ursula K. LeGuin vem propor em A Teoria da Bolsa de Ficção um contrponto às leituras masculinistas e violentas da produção de ficção (científica ou nã0). É uma teoria que vem contra a Jornada do Herói e também contra as ideias de que diálogos devem ser brigas, socos, beats. Ela vai contra o pensar a trama como o espeto, a espada, o obelisco, as formas fálicas que atravessam, violentam, brutalizam e direcionam para um único caminho de posibilidades. Ela escolhe a direção da forma da bolsa, de um invólucro que contém as coisas, assim como as frases contém palavras e as palavras contém significados. Em um texto curto, a autora expõe uma teoria rica, que pode proporcionar mais desmembramentos por estudiosos da criação literária e temas além. Incrível! Vale aplaudir também a nota da tradutora no final do livro, explicando suas decisões de uso de palavras e significados. Contudo, tenho minhas ressalvas à edição do livro feita pela n-1 editora. Sei que é para ser um livro-objeto, um livro-arte, mas para mim não funcionou. Costurar as páginas da edição como bolsos e colocar imagens dentro pode ser um conceito legal, mas na prática deixa o livro ruim de manusear e esse parece ser um livro que vou voltar mais e mais vezes. Poderia ser um livro pocket com mais páginas e o bolso na capa traseira, por exemplo, em capa dura. Talvez custasse o mesmo - alto - valor deste livro costurado. Também achei enrolada e rocambolesca a introdução do livro que, na minha concepção poderia ter sido descartada porque não esclarece nada sobre o ensaio. De toda forma, recomendo que leiam esse ensaio de LeGuin, mesmo que seja num livro em outro formato.
November 19, 2022
I came here after reading this one quote below and I am still trying to process the essay. Authors really give us strange, unusual perspectives which once we read seem so obvious. This essay is the kind that needs to be read again and again and would probably keep adding meaning to itself and for me as time passes.
The quote:
The quote:
If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it's useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine 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
January 13, 2020
Siden mammutjægerne ridsede deres jagtscener ind i klippehulens væg har historier skullet handle om at dræbe og erobre og om heltene (og dvs. mændene) der gjorde det. Ursula Le Guin påpeger at historiens første redskab sandsynligvis ikke var et slagvåben i abens hånd, men noget at bære de indsamlede bær, nødder og flyvehavre hjem i - en bærepose. Så i stedet for dræberhistorier drømmer hun om skabelses- og forvandlingsmyter, svindlerhistorier, folkeeventyr, vittigheder og romaner. Romaner kan være vævede net med knuder og scifi en realistisk, frem for mytologisk, genre.
Det er et fint lille essay om de metaforer vi bruger og hvordan det former vores fortællinger.
Det er et fint lille essay om de metaforer vi bruger og hvordan det former vores fortællinger.
November 6, 2022
absolutamente loca!!!!!!!!! siento que este ensayo ha cambiado una parte muy profunda e integra a quien soy ahora
October 5, 2022
Es tan pequeño (50pgs.) que lo comento por acá. Me encanta como piensa esta autora y como problematiza en este ensayo la manera en que influye la reproducción continúa de un mismo relato desde el comienzo de los tiempos...
Nos invita a salir de la estructura y de la lógica del héroe como centro de un relato que siempre gira en torno al conflicto y a pensar en darle voz a la historia no contada. Sin dudas un texto para hacer dialogar con otros ✨
Nos invita a salir de la estructura y de la lógica del héroe como centro de un relato que siempre gira en torno al conflicto y a pensar en darle voz a la historia no contada. Sin dudas un texto para hacer dialogar con otros ✨
January 26, 2022
i love her so much
March 17, 2024
I've read this essay a few times already, and each time it fills me with tenderness and hope (mixed with a bit of despair, too). I was utterly delighted it has been published as a tiny little book too, since now I get to carry it around as a physical reminder of what kind of stories I want to tell.
November 18, 2021
oh wow wow this was so good, I've never read any of le guin's work and I've been meaning to get into it so I've been collecting recs from friends to see where I should start. I heard someone saying this essay was sort of a nice introduction to how she approaches writing so I decided this would be the first thing I'd check out and wow... yes ... very excited to actually check out her novels :')
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September 26, 2022"If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine 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."
loved this so much. (
December 25, 2019
Hvis du kun skal læse ét feministisk essay i din juleferie, og hvis du ikke orker at læse mere end 14 sider, så lad det blive disse 14 sider.
Læs min anmeldelse på K’s bognoter: https://bognoter.dk/2019/12/25/ursula...
Læs min anmeldelse på K’s bognoter: https://bognoter.dk/2019/12/25/ursula...
September 30, 2023
“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.”
November 14, 2022
Bloomin' Readathon, ladybug space: a book with a simple cover but you know its pages will destroy you
I first read this essay a couple of years ago, one night while scrolling Tumblr. In the moment, it was a truly perspective-changing, earth-shattering experience. I felt my view of the world and of stories change completely in the course of a few pages. So of course I thought of finally reading this printed version for the readathon.
It’s true that it didn’t hit me as much this second time, but it doesn’t really matter to me: just to keep alive the ideas Le Guin displays here is enough. I would recommend anyone to at least find it online and reading it: if you like History, or Stories, this is for you. It’s the only Le Guin I’ve read and needless to say I’m beyond excited to read any of her novels as soon as I can.
I first read this essay a couple of years ago, one night while scrolling Tumblr. In the moment, it was a truly perspective-changing, earth-shattering experience. I felt my view of the world and of stories change completely in the course of a few pages. So of course I thought of finally reading this printed version for the readathon.
It’s true that it didn’t hit me as much this second time, but it doesn’t really matter to me: just to keep alive the ideas Le Guin displays here is enough. I would recommend anyone to at least find it online and reading it: if you like History, or Stories, this is for you. It’s the only Le Guin I’ve read and needless to say I’m beyond excited to read any of her novels as soon as I can.
February 20, 2023
Short, but extremely poignant and pregnant with meaning and opportunities for writing different types of novels and experimenting to a larger extent with this genre. I should read more of Le Guin on writing.
September 26, 2023
first thing i had to read for intro to creative writing. i really like the idea of this - that a story doesn’t have to have a crazy plot and a hero but i feel like a lot of people have said this and do this so it’s not a crazy idea
April 17, 2023
The novel (and thus humanity) as a carrier, rather than a sword. Privileging what brings us together - finding beautiful, useful things - and renouncing 'linear, progressive, Time's-
(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic'.
(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic'.
June 19, 2021
Well, Le Guins essay is one of the foundational texts of a (science) fiction of entanglement, so it’s especially illuminating that this beautiful edition comes with a foreword by Donna Haraway besides having eerily entangled drawings by Lee Bul. It’s really a lovely little book, Le Guins Essay should really be required reading for everyone writing and reading fiction.
November 3, 2022
Fantastic! I wish I had read this before grad school so I could have taught it in every single one of my writing classes. This essay makes me want to teach more classes just so that I can talk about it with students. (PS if any of my friends see this, you too should read it and I would love to also talk about it with you lol)
November 8, 2022
Es un pequeño ensayo que contiene una gran verdad; el relato del héroe y su conflicto no es el único relato posible. Que la sociedad toda lo crea así no significa que no hayan otras historias que contar. No todas ellas deban seguir siempre el mismo esquema. Y a pesar de eso, vivimos convencidos que nuestras historias cotidianas no tienen valor por no tener un héroe en ellas.
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December 30, 2022Not entirely sure I find all of the anthropological context convincing, but the idea of the novel as a shapeless container of many things that resists being bent into a single shape is a resonant one. Not that different to how someone like Mikhail Bakhtin saw the novel, to take one example.
March 24, 2020
Ambient 1: Music for Airports
January 31, 2021
OKay, I see how it is, I'm giving my entire heart to Ursula K. Le Guin, understood.
October 13, 2021
A far more interesting frame to start conversations about storytelling, universalism, pacing, focus, and plot than we usually get -- largely because it begins with some actual curiousity.
May 21, 2022
increíble increíble increíble
Displaying 1 - 30 of 271 reviews