DELTA GAMMA IM ON A BOAT FULL

People’s histories are carrier bag stories. By contrast, Rachel Carson’s Silent Springis more carrier bag. Whig history is a hero’s journey. For instance, Daniel Yergin’s The Quest, which I just finished, is the non-fictional story of the search for sustainable energy futures told in the form of an epic hero’s journey. The theory actually works well beyond fiction to non-fiction and grand-civilizational narratives. In her polemical view of male narrative, the hero’s journey is something like the campfire bro-brag solemnly mythologized into the paleolithic hunting tale with its cave paintings, and eventually scaled in our time to the cosmic dickishness of (say) the militaristic space operas of Orson Scott Card. LeGuin reads a specific politics into her carrier-bag theory, declaring the novel to be a fundamentally feminine form. If Tolkien had been LeGuin, I suspect The Hobbit: there and back again would have been Here, in the Shire. So carrier bag theory emphasizes contexts over events, evolving relationships over evolving individuals, continuous evolution over disruptive creative destruction, a communal point of view over an individual point of view. The act of centering a single journeying human, endowed with a special nobility of the spirit, is too essentially male for LeGuin. Unlike Haley Thurston’s Heroine’s Journey or even Sonya Mann’s Antiheroine Unveiled, which attempt to understand female-centric stories starting from the hero’s journey framework, carrier bag theory dispenses with the journey motif and heroism as the focal trait altogether. Sarah Constantin has an excellent post on Hoe Cultures (as opposed to plow cultures) that adds a good deal more color to the kinds of societies that might naturally have a carrier-bag approach to narrative. The argument that primitive containers - bags, baskets, pots - were as important in shaping human prehistory as fire, stone tools and weapons, or the wheel, seems strong.

They are especially good as a mental model of blogging.Ĭarrier bag theory has more anthropological depth than I gave it credit for at first. Xenophobes do not generally go voyaging.īoat stories, like hero’s journeys and carrier-bag stories, are a good way to understand the human condition. It is socially open enough to accommodate encounters with strangers, and is in fact eager to accommodate them. It is a territory but it is not territorial.

But it isn’t an insular home, even though it has a boundary. A boat story is a journey, but one on which you bring home, and perhaps even Mom, along with you. A boat is a home, but a home away from home. It incorporates the conscientiousness and stewardship of settled life, and the openness to experience of nomadic life. It at once stands for the secure attachment to home and a venturesome disposition towards the unknown.

DELTA GAMMA IM ON A BOAT FULL

The mode of sustenance it enables - fishing, especially with a net, a bag full of holes - is somewhere between gathering and hunting ways of feeding somewhere between female and male ways of being. A boat is at once a motif of containment and journeying. Thinking about the two opposed theories, it struck me that between the carrier bag story and the hero’s journey, there is a third kind of story that is superior to both: the boat story. Panels from Asterix and the Great Crossing, a boat story.

Delta gamma im on a boat