The Carrier Theory of Fiction

LeGuin writes that some of mankind's earliest tools were not spears or knives, but carriers, containers to carry food back home. Stories of slaying a mighty mammoth naturally stood out in the cultural memory, but the older -- and to LeGuin, more relatable -- stories were those of the daily work, the foraging and preparing and regular devotion. Culture, she says, originates from containers, not from spears:

So long as culture was explained as originating from and elaborating upon the use of long, hard objects for sticking, bashing, and killing, I never thought that I had, or wanted, any particular share in it.

And so too is it for novels.

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. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.

[...] Conflict, competition, stress, struggle, etc., within the narrative conceived as carrier bag/belly/box/house/medicine bundle, may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterized either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process.

Finally, it's clear that the Hero does not look well in this bag. He needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, like a potato.

That is why I like novels: instead of heroes they have people in them.