Jacqueline Landey

Literary Fruit 

Essay published in An Illustrated Catalog of American Fruits & Nuts

“Citron does not come from true seed. If you plant an orange seed, a grapefruit might spring up.”1 So writes John McPhee in Oranges, his fascinating exploration of that apparently ordinary table fruit. “A single citrus tree,” he explains, “can be turned into a carnival, with lemons, limes, grapefruits, tangerines, kumquats, and oranges all ripening on its branches at the same time.”2

The image conjured is of something fantastical, as if from a child’s drawing. Such a picture could be hung seamlessly among a wall of kindergarten artworks—so frequently rich in botanical misplacement—where bunches of grapes are crayoned onto oak trees and bright yellow pineapples are scribbled onto palm trees. But the carnival of citrus that McPhee enlightens us with is all the more wonderful in that it is real. 

The great Victorian art critic and philosopher John Ruskin lauded the idea of drawing as a means of seeing truly. In his seminal Elements of Drawing, he wrote that his chief aim was for the pupil to obtain “a delicate method of work, such as may insure his seeing truly… the sight is a more important thing than the drawing; and I would rather teach drawing that my pupils learn to love Nature, than teach the looking at Nature that they may learn to draw.”3 This advice is still acted on today in amateur drawing classes the world over, whenever a lonely apple is placed on a plinth and students are told to draw only what they see. Looking carefully, they shade the gradations of the apple’s surface, mark each speckle, recreate the darkness of the hollow at the stem. In this process the students are encouraged to forget what they know or expect in an effort to really see. In another such activity, an art teacher may turn a reference image upside-down to help students to sketch it more accurately.

A similar exercise is practiced in writing classes. To inspire clear and original prose, budding writers are asked to describe something familiar, a piece of fruit for instance, to a creature from outer space. Pioneering botanists had a similar writing challenge in describing unfamiliar specimens on expeditions. In Australia in 1770, Joseph Banks wrote in his journal about “something resembling a heart cherry only the stone was soft (Eugenia) which had nothing but a light acid to recommend it” and of “a fruit we calld Plumbs, like them in Colour but flat like a little cheese ( ), and another much like a damson both in appearance and taste; both these last however were so full of a large stone that eating them was but an unprofitable business.”4 He wrote of another “so unwholesome” that those that tried it “tho forewarnd… were violently affected by them both upwards and downwards.”5 

Where the task of botanists was to make the strange familiar, more contemporary writers writing on fruit, in a world of widely distributed produce, must make the familiar strange. A fresh description brings the fruit right into the room. Oscar Wilde brought us pomegranates which had “split and cracked with the heat, and showed their bleeding hearts.”6 Wallace Stevens gave us peaches, “large and round, Ah! And red; and they have peach fuzz, ah! They are full of juice and the skin is soft./ They are full of the colors of my village/ And of fair weather, summer, dew, peace.”7NoViolet Bulawayo presents bull guavas “big, like a man’s fist… green on the outside, pink and fluffy on the inside. They taste so good I cannot even explain it.”8 After gorging on these stolen guavas, the characters in this story are “violently affected” as were Joseph Banks’ friends.

Like the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden, fruit often features as a narrative device in propelling a story forward, or as a catalyst to a character’s growth. (In Eric Carle’s beloved children’s book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, literally so.) The sweetness of fruit makes it an appropriate device for showing tensions between childhood and maturity, temptation and resistance, joy and repression. In Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, tasting the spiced fruit cake is the pivot on which Oscar turns from his father’s religion. The pudding contains cherries, which Oscar has never before seen, raisins and “a single precious orange.” His father calls it “the fruit of Satan” but “Oscar had tasted the pudding. It did not taste like the fruit of Satan.”9

Through metaphor and symbolism, writers imbue fruit with wide-ranging meanings. For Sylvia Plath, a fig-tree could illustrate the paralysis of indecision: ‘“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree….”10 In Jeannette Winterson’s Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, the orange symbolizes heteronormativity. In Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, watermelons are used to satirize the derogatory racist representations that proliferated around the Emancipation Proclamation.11

As all fruits exist within social, cultural and agricultural contexts, each kind of fruit inevitably represents different things in different historical periods. Though freely available in cans today, in 18th-century England, pineapples were very rare, and so, in novels of the period, they signal aristocratic wealth and status, being displays rather than offerings to dinner guests.12

Our understanding of fruit is not only laden with social and cultural associations but also personal memories and preferences. And how we see fruit relates to these experiences and our exposure to their many representations. 

Reading John McPhee’s Oranges and Michael Pollen’s “The Apple” in his illuminating The Botany of Desire, offers the opportunity to see the everyday orange and the humble apple in a fresh light. These writings offer insights into the origins of the fruits, their agricultural and social histories, uses around the world, how they are grown, how that process has been industrialized and how they have become homogenized. These investigations reveal the role marketing has played in public perceptions of the fruits and explore the myths surrounding them. These writers take the apparently familiar and reveal the extraordinary in them. The following excerpts put the orange and the apple on a metaphorical plinth and invite you to take a good look. After reading these pieces, oranges and apples may appear anew—as to a sketcher in Ruskin’s drawing class—how you never thought to see them before.

References cited

  1. McPhee J. (2000) Oranges. Daunt Books, London, p. xv.
  2. McPhee J. [1967] Oranges, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. (2000) Daunt Books, London, pp. 21-22.  
  3. Ruskin J. [1857] The Elements of Drawing, (2009) The Project Gutenberg, p. xiii. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30325/30325-h/30325-h.htm.
  4. Banks J. (1768-1771), The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, Volume 2, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. p. 259. https://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/ozlit/banks/banksvo2.pdf.
  5. Banks J. (1768-1771), The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, Volume 2, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. p. 286. https://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/ozlit/banks/banksvo2.pdf.
  6. Wilde O. [1891] “The Birthday of the Infanta.” In A House of Pomegranates, Methuen & Co Ltd, London, (2014) The Project Gutenberg, p. 31.  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/873/873-h/873-h.htm.
  7. Stevens W. (1939) A Dish of Peaches in Russia,https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=54&issue=4&page=4.
  8. Bulawayo N. (2010), “Hitting Budapest”, The Boston Review, http://bostonreview.net/bulawayo-hitting-budapest.
  9. Carey P. [1988] (2010), Oscar and Lucinda, Faber and Faber, London p,10.
  10. Plath S. [1963], The Bell Jar, Faber and Faber, London. (2016) The Project Gutenberg, Chapter 7,  https://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/plaths-belljar/plaths-belljar-00-h.html.
  11. Black WR. (2014), “How Watermelons Became a Racist Trope,” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/12/how-watermelons-became-a-racist-trope/383529/.
  12. Beauman F. (2006), The Pineapple: King of Fruits, Vintage, London, e-book location 3053.