ABSTRACT
In “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” Ursula K. Le Guin offers what amounts to an archetypal theory of Western culture in Jungian terms (Le Guin 1986). Moreover it is one distinguished by a primal division of gender, not in sexual or somatic structures, but rather based on formal distinctions arising from labor. While prehistoric hunters, not slowed down by suckling infants, had exciting adventures shooting spears at nimble prey, the gatherers were forced to multitask. Typically, they were searching for berries while taking care of children. Given that the earliest cultural artifact surviving from these times is a spear point, it seems organically linked to the earliest extant literature of heroic adventures. The spear-point stories of combat suggest the primacy of “epic,” a genre characterized by male heroes and splendid weapons fashioning a sense of linearity and phallic potency.
