In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K Le Guin debunks the ascent of the hero story, that linear narrative centred on conflict: cave man bashing his club or throwing his spear and so dominating other life forms. “It is the story that hid my humanity from me,” she writes. “The story the mammoth hunters told about bashing, thrusting, raping, killing.”
The carrier bag theory offers a different evolutionary narrative where the first cultural device is not a tool of destruction but a receptacle, a container where things could be held, shared and stored. The “fitting shape of the novel,” she writes, is a sack, “a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us”. If fiction is way of trying to articulate our reality and how we relate to others, the novel is “this vast sack, this belly of the universe”.
Lidia Yuknavitch’s Thrust consciously draws on this essay by Le Guin, whom she describes as both her friend and mentor. Thrust is a profound treatise on story, history, our relationship to others and to the Earth. The central character Laisvė moves through water carrying objects and connecting people between times. She comes from a future after pandemics, after collapse, after raids and rising waters. In her time, the Statue of Liberty is drowned, only the raised torch and parts of the head visible above the waters.
The statue’s configuration occupies the opening pages of the novel, narrated by a collective we, those immigrants who assembled her in the late 19th century. “The body of us thought that, because we built her, we belonged to her. We built her in pieces from our bodies, from the stories we held.” They see that in the very moment of her inception, the idea of liberty is already mitigated. In the original drawings, her broken chains were held in her hands, a potent symbol of the end of slavery. But in the final rendition, the chains move to her foot, barely visible under her dress, and they know, “some of us would not be fully counted”.
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Laisvė, whose name means freedom or liberty in Lithuanian, like those earlier migrants is a refugee, displaced by ecological catastrophe and dwindling planetary resources. She is neurodiverse, whispering knowledge lists to stave off fear and talking to animals, particularly those who have persisted through geological epochs and who precede humans: whales, turtles and earthworms.
Laisvė's heightened sensitivity suggests new ways of making meaning and telling story and Yuknavitch uses her conversations with animals as a way to interrogate the stories we have told about ourselves. For example, Thrust echoes Herman Melville’s epic American novel Moby-Dick in its ambition to contain a plurality of voices and meanings. The story captured in Melville’s novel is about a monstrous whale, one of those significant cruces about human interaction with what is other. Captain Ahab on a revenge quest sets out to exterminate a profound and mysterious creature that has evaded human capture. What does a sperm whale with 20 harpoons in its back mean? Laisvė talks to a whale who offers another story about Mocha Dick: “our story is about those twenty harpoons in his back, about the glow of his magnificent skin under the moon, about his son and his daughter and those kindred souls he swam with. How he led great journeys through the Atlantic Convergence.”
Prescient, elegiac and epic, Yuknavitch’s novel is an extraordinary receptacle of histories, ethnographies, letters, stories and the overarching narrative that connects disparate people across multiple generations. The week I read Thrust, the United States supreme court reversed Roe v Wade, limited the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to restrict industrial carbon emissions and the Capitol hearings were taking place. It’s accumulative rather than linear narrative is both beautiful and painful. There are interspersed ethnographies, one of them told by the workers in the Capitol who clean toilets and sweep floors and a final one inspired by the interviews Clara Long conducted with children held in cages at the US border with Mexico which were given as testimony before the US House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. There, without adult caregivers or guidance, children exhibit their instinctive and beautiful humanity. They take care of one another.
This book is a powerful lament for what we are losing; it is also a proposition about what we might become, how we might learn to listen differently and how water is rearranging things, including story.
