Heroics
I recently read Ursula Le Guin’s essay, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Le Guin says that the corpus of popular culture has been dominated by the archetypal hero. The hero vanquishes the villain, duels with destiny, and forges his future. But she argues that the first real device for a story is the carrier. A carrier can be a home, a backpack, or just things rolled up in a towel.
The stories that carriers tell are amorphous. In my bag, you can find a granola bar that I picked up yesterday and did not eat, a tennis ball that someone else gave to me, and a laptop with sticky keys. Each of those has stories. Perhaps those stories are of hunger, of friendship, and of spillage. But they could also not be. They could be stories of wasted food, theft, and carelessness. I am an unreliable storyteller, and you are a curious listener.
To listen to a heroic, as I’ll call these hero stories, you have to join the audience instead of being a participant. You have to shed your particular self and honor the invisible fourth wall between you and the storyteller. If, perchance, the wall shows a crack, and you are bestowed with the opportunity to inquire further about a hero’s adventures, you will be gifted with another mini heroic that adds to their legend.
There is a lot you can gain from a heroic. For one, once you listen to it, you can retell it just like it was. Your story listeners, like you, will know what to expect: a clear “plot” with “conflicts,” which together reveal that he, the hero, is made of “the good stuff.” If you tell heroics often enough, you may even embark on your own. Many young men have walked down that path.
Although, once you try to be a hero, you have to follow some rules. Without the rules, you can’t write a tale that people will so reliably repeat.
Rule one: You can’t spend too much time at home, where you are “he who pooped himself in 4th grade.” At home, there are all sorts of small things that are contested, and that you accumulate no matter what you do. You have to make sure that you only let a few tales from home, that support your hero’s journey, into the world.
Rule two: You can’t spend much time being curious or distracted. You need to overcome obstacles towards a specific, lofty goal, no matter how mighty. Without a fixed goal, the conflict in your plot becomes gossip. Heroes aren’t gossiped about.
Rule three: If you have many sides to you, you must pick one. You can’t be like John Donne, who was a privateer for a bit, then a lawyer, then a pamphleteer, and finally a priest. Oh, and after he died, it turned out he was writing a lot more poetry on the side. If you have so many things going on, how will people narrate your story? The audience will have too many questions, and they won’t remember what to tell others. General audiences are pretty unreliable.
Finally, you must remember that many heroes’ tales are written by others, in retrospect. Those people never pay the costs. If you choose to embark on your own tale, and it doesn’t work out, you may lose out on home, curiosities, and much of your non-heroic personality.
These risks may dissuade some people, but what’s the alternative? It’s hard to get a rise out of anyone over how your laptop keys got sticky, except the few curious listeners we accumulate in our lives. “How dare the keys get sticky?”
Or maybe, heroes’ tales are just the easiest, cheapest way to tell stories, and nothing else. Maybe there aren’t that many heroes. Maybe, in one way or another, we’re all bound up in carrier bag lives, no matter how hard we try to escape them.