Provocation | The Spear and the Sack

If the literature departments in Israeli universities ask to stay relevant, they should start by teaching the work of Ursula K. Le Guin, the celebrated science fiction writer who died of old age in 2018.  

Marian Wood Kolisch (American, 1920-2008), Ursula K. Le Guin, 1988, gelatin silver print, Bequest of Marian Wood Kolisch, © Portland Art Museum, 2009.30.35

In order to support this reading, I would like to present the radicalism of Le Guin’s thought and the way in which it affected the way I think about literature, life, and their mutual influence. For this purpose, I will use the gate set by the media theorist Marshall McLaughlin and his best known idea: “The medium is the message”.

The argument underlying “the medium is the message” is that what is important, when considering any technology is the medium itself, rather than the content that passes through it. A train is a train is a train, and it affects humanity in the same way whether it transports goods in Europe or people to work in Asia. McLaughlin said that the machine, the production line, affected man the same way whether it churned out luxury cars or popcorn. This is of course true for television – what matters is not what we watch on tv but the fact that we sit in front of it in the evening – and this is also true for literature, and more specifically for storytelling, a medium that is almost transparent to us. We always think about the content of the story but do not take into account that storytelling itself also contains a message by the very fact of its being what it is. And whatever it is, it’s much more biased than we think.

In the 1980s, Le Guin published an article called The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction – the carrier bag, the shopping bag theory of literature. In the article she claims, broadly speaking, that for tens of thousands of years humans have lived in small societies. We picked fruit, collected nuts, gathered plants and occasionally, luck yielded a small hunting trophy. One day some men got up, went out into the field and came across a large animal – in our collective memory it is of course a mammoth – they killed it and returned with the loot to the tribe. But what they brought back to the tribe was much more significant than the meat of the hunt – they returned with a story of heroism. “I did that, and my friend jumped on it from here, and I surrounded it from there, and he strangled it and trampled under it, and then I slit its throat with this pointed stick and killed it.”

This story became the human story, and this tool – the spear, the sword, the arrow – became human technology. For us, this phallic form is the first technology and what allowed us to expand and become what we are today, and this story – a hero who encounters a monster (real, mental, bureaucratic) and defeats it (or loses, if it’s a tragedy) – is the story we know. For us, this is how a story should be told.

But Le Guin reminds us that before all this there were tens of thousands of years of gathering. We ate from the tree and the field and what we wanted to keep for tomorrow we put in a pouch or basket of some kind – this is the tool; this is the initial technology that allowed us to spread and expand. This was the first thing that turned us from being an animal that lives from one moment to another into a complex creature that thinks about tomorrow. But there is no story in it; it is impossible to tell a heroic story about how I struggled with the nutshell and returned home with ten acorns. It’s not interesting.

IIn her literature, Le Guin tries to tell a different story. True, there are always heroes, and they always have obstacles that they try to overcome, but “the real journey is the return“, to borrow one of the favorite phrases from The Dispossessed. In the above-mentioned article, she writes that the hero stole the novel, and she does not believe that he should be allowed to stand on a stage, rather he should be put in the basket or sack to mix with the other ingredients. The societies she describes in her novels mix femininity and masculinity, reality and dream, actions and consequences, intentions and acts; Everything is more circular, more ambivalent. It is not clear that if the hero will just want enough and kill enough monsters he will get his desire, because even this desire – it is not always clear what it actually is. The way she tells stories isn’t exactly the aforementioned forward arrow, that clear linear movement of hero-desires-obstacles-triumph.

That’s why her literature is so radical. Because it makes us think what if – and what if is the thing of science fiction – what if not the story of the forward arrow was the default of storytelling but the circular story. Not one but zero. Not a spear but a basket. What would reality look like then? Some capitalistic, masculine, violent injustices might have been spared from us. She reminds us to think about the medium of storytelling itself, and not only about the content of the story, but about how a story is told.

She is not only radical because she describes to us in her novels anarchist or socialist or asexual society options, but because she shows us what the basis of this thing could look like, how the very thought would have changed, and how this thought would have affected the world. And it’s much more interesting than reading literature through a gender or class prism or all this crap that’s being taught in literature departments and faculties of humanities. She is truly radical. And that’s the kind of radicalism we need.