Reality is circular and squiggly. It is a chorus, by turns quiet and cacophonous. It offers many kinds of journeys and innumerable experiences that may not be journeys at all. Reality is filled with conversations, private moments, and small details of care. So why then does the most pervasive form of storytelling train reality to fit to the straight edge of a spear?
Famed scholar Joseph Campbell taught that myths awaken us to a complexity of patterns of human behavior and he has inspired generations to see themselves in the multitudes of experiences our earliest stories express. However, his description of the Hero’s Journey has been used to taxidermize story past, present, and future, “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and divisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” The outsized influence these words have had on the ways story is taught and on the industries in which story is currency, make it hard to see and to create outside of a singular version of the Hero’s Journey.
These are the journeys in Odysseus, Horatio Alger’s novels, the Star Wars franchise, and indeed much of popular fiction.
These are also the journeys of the recent Academy Award-winning documentary film My Octopus Teacher, the daring exploits of conflict journalists, the detective yarns of the Serial podcast, and indeed much of popular non-fiction.
These are entertaining stories, meaningful and poignant, but there is much they do not capture, and perhaps cannot. The insistence that story as form center one hero and his journey has wrought some powerful and destructive myths –– the myth of the American dream, rugged individualism, and other ideologies that take on the over-simplified form of the hero’s journey to sustain or justify exploitation.
This is why we must ask:
Who does the hero leave behind in the domestic spaces of home?
What fills the days of those left behind, if not mysterious adventure and decisive victory?
What if those left behind do not want the hero’s boons, which he so graciously offers?
What – or who – has the hero worn down under his feet?
And if we exit his well-beaten path, what will we find thriving in the forest?
In her essay, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” Ursula K. Le Guin topples the hero from his pedestal. “So the hero has decreed through his mouthpieces the Lawgivers, first, that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there and THOK! Hitting its mark (which drops dead); second, that the central concern of narrative, including the novel, is conflict; and third, that the story isn’t any good if he isn’t in it. I differ with all of this. I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag.”
Le Guin bases her preferred shape for a story, “the Carrier Bag,” on what anthropologists have cited as the first tool: not a weapon, but a bag. A bag is used to gather, to keep, and to hold dear items of both necessity and joy. Narratively, this bag is a seemingly bottomless vessel for the keeping and valuing of experiences, ways of being, and conceptions of time.
Artist Sin Wai Kin expands on the contemporary resonance of Le Guin’s ideas, writing “We need carrier bag stories that complicate oversimplified narratives of gender, race, sexuality, of government, of punitive systems, of nature, of existing as an individual in a context with others within incredibly complex systems.”
Reality is more complicated, more collaborative, and more interesting than the Hero’s Journey. It does not follow a beginning, middle, and end, with rising action and turning points that deliver a resolution with all threads tied up neatly in a bow. Many non-fiction makers have always created work that is outside the Hero’s Journey. Work that meanders through squiggly time, that is polyvocal, and that de-centers simple conflict. However, artists are increasingly trained to present themselves as the hero of their own artistic-biographical story, with their process acting as the journey, and their product acting as the boon brought home to audiences, erasing the collaboration that goes into non-fiction storytelling and forcing makers to narrativize their practice and commoditize themselves.
Spaces that encourage makers to experiment and play are essential in allowing story to meander, and can be instrumental in challenging audiences, teachers, and gatekeepers to let other story forms in. Fascism is resurgent, the climate is in crisis, and economic exploitation is reaching new heights. To organize for a better world, we must first be able to imagine it, which we will not be able to do if our stifled imaginations are trained to squish reality into the narrow edge of a spear. If we do not make and consume work that reflects collectivity, then facing these realities will be a lonely and devastating journey indeed.
The John B. Moore Documentary Collaborative invites non-fiction makers working in any medium to apply for the MDOCS Storytellers’ Institute, where we will be playing, collaborating, arguing, and taking care in the forest, far off the beaten path of the Hero’s Journey.
By Sarah Ema Friedland, Director of the MDOCS Storytellers’ Institute
With generous feedback from Ruth Goldberg, Adam Tinkle, and Sam Stein.
With inspiration from the authors cited above and the podcast Crafting with Ursula: Lidia Yuknavitch on The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.
