User:Aitantv/Ursula Le Guin (1988) The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
Le Guin, U (1988) The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. TJ Books Ltd, UK
- "Heroes are powerful" (Le Guin 1988)
+ Le Guin sets out to debunk the importance of the hero. That gathering, as opposed to hunting, was the well spring of life. Hunting perservered not because it preserved villages or groups, but because it brought with it great triumphant stories, with a hero.
- "A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient." (Le Guin 1988)
+ We can think of films as pots, installations as shells, containers of ideas, atmospheres, vibrations, time, stories.
- "we've all heard about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the containers for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news." (Le Guin 1988)
- "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...it 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." (Le Guin 1988)
- "The trouble is, we've all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and 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." (Le Guin 1988)
- "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." (Le Guin 1988)
- "If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic....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)." (Le Guin 1988)
+ SF doesn't have to be mythological or heroic, it can be realistic.
- "Science fiction properly conceieved, 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, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were this unending story. In it, as in all fiction, there is room enough to keep even Man where he belongs, in his place in the scheme of things". (Le Guin, 37, 1988)
- "" (Le Guin 1988)
- "" (Le Guin 1988)
- "" (Le Guin 1988)
- "" (Le Guin 1988)
- "" (Le Guin 1988)
- "" (Le Guin 1988)
- "" (Le Guin 1988)
- "" (Le Guin 1988)
- "" (Le Guin 1988)
- "" (Le Guin 1988)
- "" (Le Guin 1988)
- "" (Le Guin 1988)