The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (Terra Ignota): 1

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Canby, Vincent. 1991. “Lily Tomlin, Translated From Stage To Screen.” The New York Times, September 27. http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9401EFD7123AF934A1575AC0A967958260. Haraway, Donna J. 2014. “ SF: String Figures, Multispecies Muddles, Staying with the Trouble.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1uTVnhIHS8. She explains that in perpetuating the tradition of telling stories in a linear way we miss out so much ‘stuff’, parts of the story that don’t fit the ordained narrative perhaps or aspects of ourselves or experiences that aren’t seen as relevant to the story we are writing. 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.)

Le Guin’s carrier bag is, in addition to a story about early humans, a method for storytelling itself, meaning it’s also a method of history. But unlike the spear (which follows a linear trajectory towards its target), and unlike the kind of linear way we’ve come to think of time and history in the West, the carrier bag is a big jumbled mess of stuff. One thing is entangled with another, and with another. Le Guin once described temporality in her Hainish Universe (a confederacy of human planets that feature in a number of her books) in the most delightfully psychedelic terms: “Any timeline for the books of Hainish descent would resemble the web of a spider on LSD.” Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental Futures). Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books. Bowers, Chet A. 2015. An Ecological and Cultural Critique of the Common Core Curriculum. Vol. 471, Counterpoints: Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing.I am an academic and a writer of fiction and the more I write in both forms the more I realise the similarities between the two. I firmly believe that writing a thesis in the humanities or social sciences is an enormously creative act and that a thesis is, at heart, a story. After all, no two people would ever write a thesis in the same way even if they read all the same books, had exactly the same data, used the same theoretical framework and had the same supervisors. Paul, Anne Murphy. 2012. “Your Brain on Fiction.” The New York Times. Accessed March 20, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscience-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html. Reid, William A. 1981. “The Deliberative Approach to the Study of the Curriculum and Its Relation to Critical Pluralism.” In Rethinking Curriculum Studies: A Radical Approach, edited by Martin Lawn and Len Barton. New York, NY: Routledge. Taguchi, Hillevi Lenz. 2012. “A Diffractive and Deleuzian Approach to Analysing Interview Data.” Feminist Theory 13(3): 265–281. doi: 10.1177/1464700112456001. Berman, Morris. 2000. Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

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. Desde las cavernas venimos contando el relato del Héroe, de ese cazador de mamuts y de todas las emocionantes historias que traía para compartir en cada regreso. “Antes de que te des cuenta, los hombres y las mujeres en el campo de avena salvaje y sus hijos e hijas y las habilidades de quienes construyen y los pensamientos de quienes piensan y las canciones de quienes cantan forman parte de aquel relato, fueron puestos al servicio del cuento del Héroe. Pero este no es su relato. Es el de él” (29). Y pienso, de qué forma la civilización, cultura, sociedad que armamos gira en torno a este héroe y sus hazañas, y con ello a su capacidad por encima del resto. Harta de las idolatrías.

Braidotti, Rosi. 2014. “Writing as a Nomadic Subject.” Comparative Critical Studies 11(2–3): 163–184. doi: 10.3366/ccs.2014.0122. Questioning the spear’s phallic, murderous logic, instead Le Guin tells the story of the carrier bag, the sling, the shell, or the gourd. Wagner, Jane. 2012. The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers Inc. Original edition, Original screenplay published in 1986. The students who signed up were asked to find 3 objects which were somehow related to their research or to the experience of doing their doctorate, put them in a bag and bring them to the online pop-up session. These objects could be linked in practical ways (eg a coffee cup used every day), academically (a favourite book) or for more esoteric reasons related to reflections, memories, dreams, conversations or experiences that were meaningful to them even if tangential to the actual business of writing a doctorate. Este libro habla de los relatos no contados. De otra forma de contar relatos. Y no puedo evitar traer a cuenta algo que me pasa en relación al tema. Considero que no soy buena contando anécdotas, cuando era chica escuchaba a mi hermana contar a nuestros padres algo que ambas habíamos vívido y me sorprendía viviendo una nueva historia. ¿Eso pasó?, me preguntaba dudando de mi memoria. De adulta me sigue pasando lo mismo y muchas veces paso la palabra para que otro cuente la anécdota compartida porque, de seguro, va a ser más emocionante que si la cuento yo. Quizás sea eso lo que despertó mi interés por las historias que se cuentan, por el tratar de analizarlas, encontrar el mecanismo detrás. Y de eso va este libro, de encontrar la base del mecanismo de contar historias y proponer uno alternativo. “(…) busco la naturaleza, el sujeto, las palabras del otro relato, la historia no contada, la historia de la vida (36)”.

The only problem is that a carrier bag story isn’t, at first glance, very exciting. “It is hard to tell”, writes Le Guin, “a really gripping tale of how I wrested a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, 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 watched newts for a while, and then I found another patch of oats…” Richardson, Laurel. 2001. “Getting Personal: Writing-Stories.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 14(1): 33–38. doi: 10.1080/09518390010007647. Le Guin, Ursula K. 1989. Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. 1st ed. New York, NY: Grove Press. Bommer, Lawrence. 1992. “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.” Review of May 14, 2015. Chicago Reader. December 17. http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/the-search-for-signs-of-intelligent-life-in-the-universe/Content?oid=881080 Ursula 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.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. Gough, Noel. 2010. “Performing Imaginative Inquiry: Narrative Experiments and Rhizosemiotic Play.” In Imagination in Educational Theory and Practice: A Many-sided Vision, edited by Thomas William Nielsen, Rob Fitzgerald, and Mark Fettes, 42–60. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Haraway, Donna J. 2008a. “Otherworldly Conversations, Terran Topics, Local Terms.” In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan J. Hekman, 157–187. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

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.

Haraway, Donna J. 1997. “enlightenment@science_wars.com: A Personal Reflection on Love and War.” Social Text 15(1): 123–129. doi: 10.2307/466820. 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." Bailey, John. 1991. The Search for Signs of Inteligent Life in the Universe. Los Angeles, CA: Orion Classics. Næss, Arne. 2005. “Creativity and Gestalt Thinking.” In The Selected Works of Arne Næss, edited by Harold Glasser and Alan R. Drengson. The Netherlands: Springer.