the carrier bag theory of fiction — ursula le guin

We know about the sword out of the stone theory, the hero theory. Here is the carrier bag theory of fiction. Ursula le Guin prefers the bag, not the hero, as story, as sentence. The contents of your bag. A list can be full of repose. 

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, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do the same again — if to do that is human, if that's what it takes, then I am a human being after all.

At home when I pick blackberries or go up the garden for salad or veg, at the market buying fish on a Wednesday, I am the woman with the basket, and yes, there's a freedom in having the fruits of your gathering to bring back in a basket, and process in due time, or just after, or breaking off mid-phrase, like the wood pigeon.

reading where you are

I am slow to read the novels that come out of Ireland now. Opening Night by Sara Baume is the first for many years. From the start I was uncomfortable. Too much stating of terms; explanation that allows for intimacy, rather than, au juste, the other way around. Like slow passage through a sieve. Ian Breakwell said he didn't want to read anything that had no risk, no invention. Or, I would add, that isn't old or ancient.

Running like a basso continuo these weeks I have read Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. The pages are wrinkled from our sentimental journey, in the autumn of 1991, through France and Italy down to Sicily and back. I read it on Bonassola beach, alternating with Borges' Seven Nights. So many sentences I could read over and over, between swims. A true marriage of beach and book.

I didn't pause at any phrase, any sentence in Opening Night. Contemporaneity happens in a strange silence. A permanent solar eclipse. Some worried birdsong and then silence. We are travelling along the N71, swimming at Toe Head or Lisheen Bay, having coffee in Bantry. There are dogs and names of dogs. It is relatable. An irksome shorthand. I am not hungry for any of this. I want to be, as Kafka said, plunged into the icy sea by what I read.

Mehalah, Gothic Novel, (A Story of the Salt Marshes)

John Berger writes about receiving his new book from the publisher, and, finding it badly produced, burning it. High-minded perhaps — he lived in the Alps — but I understand. An ugly book is sad. I got one in the post the other day: Mehalah Gothic Novel (A Story of the Salt Marshes) by Sabine Baring-Gould. Print on demand. Confect a cover out of online prompts; cram the text into 170 pages, which would be better spread over twice that. There was a time when I read gothic novels for their otherness, their badness, their removal from the here and now. Whatever I read I like it to be for pleasure. I like a book to be a book. This is a tomb. 

However, as a child of salt marshes, read it I must. It's a way of visiting my home turf, albeit in 1880. The flatness of the Essex coast has given it in recent times a flatness of character in the popular imagination. Back then there was a rich life with dialect and contraband, as well as some of the detail I remember from my childhood, like shrimps and winkles measured by the half pint in a pewter mug, and smoked eels, but most of all the marshes and their arcane channels and the bottomless mud I feared.

The plot is rich, fecund and ridiculous. The book was a sensation when it came out. Halfway through my reading I realised the author was a man, and a vicar. Which changed everything. Mehalah, most often called Glory, was a strong, capable, beautiful gipsy type, with a failing mother, a beloved George who vanishes, and an evil landlord Elijah who keeps a mad brother locked in the cellar. The twists of plot keep you, reluctantly, reading. Everything ends badly, which is what makes it gothic rather than romantic. Mehalah marries Elijah, not George, burns out his eyes with vitriol, feels guilty and, although George reappears, vows to atone for her sin by staying with Elijah, who padlocks them together in a boat and pulls out the plug.

There is much about the fires of God, which I noticed afresh after I knew the author was vicar of Mersea Island for ten years. To me this confuses everything, but it adds fire without going so far as the fires of hell imbued into the folk of Ireland.