Boat Stories

Thinking about the two opposed theories, it struck me that between the carrier bag story and the hero’s journey, there is a third kind of story that is superior to both: the boat story. A boat is at once a motif of containment and journeying. The mode of sustenance it enables — fishing, especially with a net, a bag full of holes — is somewhere betw... See more

Male storytelling is a sublimated hunting narrative, female storytelling is a sublimated gathering narrative. One is born of brags, the other is born of rumors. One kind of writing throws a metaphorical spear at a metaphorical beast, attempting to kill it and bring back the carcass. The other kind puts relatively unresisting things into bags, and e... See more

If the hero’s journey is descended from the campfire brag, and the carrier bag novel from workplace gossip, blogging is descended from trolling.

This gives me a satisfying understanding of boat theory as applied to blogging: a blog is a public in a boat, sailing the zeitgeist seas, primarily fishing for sustenance, but not entirely averse to the memetic winds blowing you off to strange and distance places, where you can have premium mediocre intellectual adventures.

To blog you need to move. You need to sail in the Zeitgeist Sea to where the memefish are biting, find the there there, and capture things while they still have thingness. You need to have been there, done that, and tell tall tales about it. You need to play ironic, Quixotic hero, tilting at windmills (premium mediocre dragons).But you also need to... See more

The spear and the bag. And then there’s the net. A bag with holes. That is carried around on a different kind of bag: a boat. Which is used to gather fish the way women once gathered yams while men sat around repeating their hunting stories from last month. Fish fight back more than yams, but less than dragons. A hero’s journey is sublimated braggi... See more

The hero’s journey is more than male dickishness writ large. To read or write within that pattern is to experience real growth. Equally, carrier-bag storytelling are more than an antithetical feminine aesthetic of novel writing. To read and write within that form is to uncover truths about the human condition. As far as I am concerned though, both ... See more

Blogging has a father and a mother. It inherits features from both the hero’s journey and the carrier bag.

Anyway, the point is: the hero’s journey and carrier bag are both about narrative models rather than gendered modes of storytelling, and the rise of the novel was a fall of the hero (whether male or female) from epic demigod figure to boy-with-toy. Or girl-with-toy as the case may be.