Critical Response Archive: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

As more experimental literature entered the literary world, the question of what could be classified as “postmodern” had to be asked when examining these texts. While a novel could be experimental, it did not necessarily make it postmodernist. Jeanette Winterson’s novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is one of those novels that some would consider to not belong in the post-modern canon, for though she does some rule-breaking and experimenting that include stories-within-stories and unreal moments in the novel, it’s not so radically deviant from convention like the works of John Barth, William Burroughs, and Donald Barthelme. Yet one could argue that Oranges is postmodern, just in a different way from those canonical authors—after all, postmodernism is a flexible movement.

The most obvious element of experimentation, and the nature of its post-modernism, is the fact that much of the novel could very well be directly lifted from events that happened in her real life, and are nakedly so. Like Winterson, the narrator’s first name is Jeanette, she was adopted by Pentecostal evangelists, trained to become a minister, and she is a lesbian, among other autobiographical similarities. One begins to wonder how much truth lies behind the story—it could all be true, or it could be false; the reader doesn’t know enough about Winterson to draw any conclusions. Since it was published as a novel, one must accept it as fiction, with some facts and a grain of truth behind it. This is quite a contrast to the traditional memoir, which one reads expecting all the events that take place to have actually happened, when they might be exaggerated or even untrue.

And though the novel is basically a straightforward bildungsroman about her coming out and her relationship with her mother (framed within her coming out), there are some peculiarities about the prose—not just her unique writing style—that set it apart from typical autobiographical novels. For one, there are abrupt transitions from one scene to the next, big moments are interrupted tangentially, and in between we have lengthy metaphorical or direct real-world commentaries—an entire chapter, “Deuteronomy”, follows this vein. Images of such things as oranges and demons that would only appear in a carefully constructed reality constantly pop up, instead of being camouflaged in realism, glaringly symbolic of Jeanette’s conflicted identity. One character that pops up only in times of distress is her orange demon, and though this pebble that he gives her exists in the real world, the reader wonders if the demon is real or a hallucination—after all, nobody else could see him. It calls into question the realism of visions: as Jeanette was raised to believe in such visions, she believed the demon was real, even if it was never there at all. Winterson makes no argument that these visions are inconsequential: after all, the fictional Jeanette is compelled by her demon to leave home and stay true to herself.

Winterson also plays with perspective: though the story is obviously told from an adult Jeanette, descriptions of observations and beliefs she held in childhood reflect the point of view of a precocious child, or else a childlike adult—otherwise a person who does not understand the conventions and traditions of the world she grew up in. The reader witnesses her perception of the world develop and change, just as she does from childhood to adulthood. Her particular point of view as a lesbian could be a part of its uniqueness, as that perspective is hardly given a spotlight in serious literature.

In Oranges, Winterson blurs the line between fiction and memoir, fantasy and reality. One could classify her novel as a “fictitious memoir,” since Jeanette’s personal history parallels her namesake’s, though the various details may be exaggerated or fabricated. While Winterson does not deviate from convention to critique fiction, she does critique the memoir, showing that every person’s life story is just that—a story, shaped by his or her perception of the world—though this does not take away from the significance or uniqueness of that story. So in a way, her first novel could be classified as postmodern.