The fig tree

There is a metaphor in The Bell Jar that I’m fond of recalling whenever I’m discerning next steps: Esther Greenwood is paused under a fig tree, imagining the various possibilities of her life as the fruits above her head. For a moment, all of her potential futures—a mother, a poet, a world traveler, an athlete—are all full, unplucked figs, live on the branches. But shortly, she knows, she’ll pick one, and as soon as she does the rest of them will shrivel up, die.1

You only get to choose one, in other words. But there’s a beat before the choice, when all of the possibilities remain real, if distant, overhead.

It’s a faulty metaphor, because of course life is surprising and winding, and you end up back under that tree again and again, faced with fresh decisions at another season. It’s faulty because one choice doesn’t neccessarily negate all the others. But it’s true in the sense that—yes, you make a choice, you take a path, you foreclose certain futures. Or, more often, you get denied some. A few of those figs drop off and you’re left with one or two dangling low before you.

I think of the fig tree because I like to remind myself of what is good and bad about both of these moments: the decision and the time that precedes it. It is dizzying and uncertain to lay under that tree and look up at it, to not know where you’ll be a year from now; it can make you want to leap to the end and just know already. But it is also an intensely creative time, when the future hasn’t arrived yet, when it can still be many things. It’s a time when reality hasn’t asserted itself—a time when that high, impossible to reach fig on the top branch still allows itself to be an object of your imagination. It will fall and smash on the ground soon (you know it), but until then, you are free to look up at it as though it won’t.

What I think this image offers—aside from a moment of contemplation for Esther or a little parable about choices in life—is a way to think about plot and narrative possiblity in fiction.

I am thinking about the fig tree right now because I have no idea where I will be next year—but also because I am in the middle of re-drafting the novel, at a place in the narrative where things ought to be uncertain for the characters too. Also because I have been reading query letters for a press, which is making me more cognizant of the pitfalls of overly-determined plots (no one likes to read a story and anticipate exactly where it’s going) and completely untethered ones (few people, I’d warrant, like to feel at a loss for what is happening either.) A common problem, then: how to deal with possibility.

I’ve been recalling a number of stories I love that have this sort of fig-tree moment. Where you can feel a narrative’s capacity to go in a multitude of directions—where these possibilities feel as alive and real and multiple as they can, sometimes, in life.

And I’ve been remembering, too, all the times I’ve felt the tension of existing in this liminal space before, when competing futures had yet to resolve themselves. When I might have chosen to live in one house or another, when community and relationship could have taken multiple different forms, when I was waiting for an acceptance or a rejection letter. Or (a more interesting narrative, a more complex plotline) when all of those things were happening at once.

In both fiction and life, some of this curtailing of choice comes from outside—an opportunity lost, the decisions of others, minor or major ruptures in the surrounding environment. And some choice, however small, is left to the individual.

When it comes to writing, I think it’s fruitful to linger in this moment, to let the tension be felt. To perhaps fully imagine all these plotlines not taken—so that when the story ultimately doesn’t move in the countless other directions it might have, the loss of these other plots feels real.

There is another metaphor, another passage that sometimes floats into my mind when I’m at a crossroads, or perhaps just when I encounter an alternate version of how my life could have unfolded. It’s this image of the ghost ship, from Cheryl Strayed’s old advice column, Dear Sugar.

In the column, she’s responding to a man who is trying to decide if he should have a child or not. He’s never been sure if he wanted to be a dad, but he and his partner are in their 40s, and he’s uncertain if they’ll regret never becoming parents later in life. Their situation is particular, but Strayed, responding as her advice column persona “Sugar,” unfolds a broader idea about how all our crucial decisions create “phantom lives” we might have lived. Through her reading of a poem by Tomas Tranströmer, she imagines this second life as a ghost ship that follows a person, a kind of shadow life that twins our real one. In the end, this sister life is one we we observe but don’t live. It is, she says, “important and beautiful and not ours.”

To return to fiction, again: I wonder if another way of avoiding the deterministic plot is by keeping that ghost ship present. To have it follow a character around a little: what might have been, what didn’t happen. To feel, after the point of departure, both the truth of narrative possibility (life really could have gone another way) and the fact that it didn’t.

It’s a kind of haunting (though not necessarily in a negative way), to encounter the fact that your life is contingent on choices that could have been made differently, or circumstances that could have unfolded otherwise. You’ll never really know the details of this other life. You can see traces of it sometimes, but never in a fully corporeal form—it is a ghost, after all.

I didn’t recall, until I was writing this, that I was introduced to both of these operating metaphors around the same time: I was two years out of college, splitting my time between Washington and Portland, between teaching and graduate school. I read The Bell Jar for the first time and wrote about the fig tree as part of a reflection paper for my program while I waited to figure out what I would be doing in the coming year. And then a high school friend of mine, who had moved out to Portland from the Twin Cities, shared the Dear Sugar column with me.

I was at one of those crucial points where I was porous and ready for metaphor to seep into my consciousness and form my thinking. And here were these two, right at the opportune time.

In the end, that year, most of my particular possibilities shriveled up naturally—namely, a first round of MFA applications that came back with no’s. Jobs I researched but did not apply for. I was left with an acceptance to an MA program and the possibility of staying at the school where I was teaching in eastern Washington. Staying had felt like a real possibility—it was a real possibility, one I thought I wanted—right up until the moment the acceptance email sailed in, after the sea of rejections. I was sitting in the tiny teacher’s lounge beside the printer when the email came, and the program I thought I didn’t want, I suddenly really did.

The ghost ship of that other life—the one in which I stayed—is not one that follows me now. Because my life in the MA program is so vividly real to me (the classes I took and the people I met and the weird life I had living and working in an undergraduate dorm as an assistant rector.) And the single year in which my roommates stayed out in Washington on their own just kind of washes into the two years we lived there together. I don’t ever wonder about that life.

But this is from ten years after the fact. In the moment, with my roommates still out west, from the odd vantage point of returning to my undergraduate campus, from the discomfort of finding myself (for the first time in my life) unable to talk in a seminar class that first semester without feeling stupid, unable to write creatively—I did wonder about my choice. When I talked to my roomates on the phone, I would picture myself back there, and not just back in time, but in the new life they had crafted for themselves outside of the teaching program we had been enrolled in the year before.

This is how choice and outcome often feel in life, I think. The entire web of possibility—what is and what might have been and what could be yet—remains imaginatively alive at once. And so part of the task of fiction might be to stay large enough. To remember not just what does happen in the plot—but what could have happened too.

Mostly, what these images show is the tension of living with choice. The moment before a choice (the fig tree) and the moment after (the ghost ship). All of this is good for narrative—contemplation and tension, action and consequence.

But in The Bell Jar scene, Esther is completely paralyzed by decision. The figs die, not because she plucks one off, but because she fails to do anything at all.

Whenever I turn the image over in my mind, I leave that part out. I didn’t write about this detail in the reflection paper for my teaching program, and it never became a part of the metaphor for me, because it didn’t suit my purposes then—and I’m tacking it on at the end of this post because, well, I assumed when I started writing that it wouldn’t fit my purpose here either. The Bell Jar is a bleak novel, and really what I’ve done with the fig tree metaphor, all these years, is turn it into something lighter and simpler in my head.

When I returned to the actual passage with the fig tree at the start of this post, when I was forced to look at the language and not just the stripped-down image I’d constructed in my head, I found myself thinking about choice and possibility, not just in novels in general, but in The Bell Jar, specifically. I found myself trying to recall, with precision, how the story ends.

I’d read it once in Washington and once two summers ago. And once again, just now.2

The Bell Jar ends with Esther embarking on a sort of future, but it’s a future shaped by all the intervening events—her breakdown and suicide attempt and institutionalization. The novel ends with her impending departure from the mental institute; it takes her to the brink of that future:

I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead—after all, I had been ‘analyzed’. Instead, all I could see were question marks.

I kept shooting impatient glances at the closed boardroom door. My stocking seams were straight, my black shoes cracked, but polished, and my red wool suit flamboyant as my plans. Something old, something new....

But I wasn’t getting married. There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice—patched, retreaded and approved for the road. I was trying to think of an appropriate one when Doctor Nolan appeared from nowhere and touched me on the shoulder.

‘All right, Esther.’

I rose and followed her to the open door.

Pausing, for a brief breath, on the threshold, I saw the silver-baked doctor who had told me about the rivers and the Pilgrims on my first day, and the pocked, cadaverous face of Miss Huey, and eyes I thought I had recognized over white masks.

The eyes and the faces all turned themselves towards me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room.

For a grim novel, and one that ends on an uncertain note, this final scene is nonethless filled with the language of possibility: questions marks and birth; an open door and its threshhold; the road and rivers and pilgrims.3

As before, when Esther stood under the fig tree, the possibility is not wholly positive. In fact, it’s mostly disorienting. She had “hoped. . . [she] would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead.” She doesn’t.

But unlike the earlier scene, where she remains static under the tree, this one ends with a simple action: Esther stepping into the room.

I don’t love The Bell Jar, as a novel. I’ve always preferred Plath’s poetry. There are isolated passages, like the fig tree one, that have stuck with me over the years, but as a whole, the narrative style and structure have never been my favorite. It’s always felt a little messy—indicative of Esther’s mental state, but still a bit haphazard. So I was surprised, rereading the ending, to find so much there. And to find myself thinking about the novel holistically, and the fig tree’s placement in it.

I saw, in the ending, a repetition of the fig tree, but with Esther choosing action where she’d previously chosen inaction. Her stepping into the room is a stepping into the unknown—she doesn’t know what lies ahead, and the novel itself refuses this disclosure too. In an odd way, the entire narrative paradoxically remains under the fig tree even as it gestures past it. Nothing is chosen; no future is arrived at; we never find out what’s in store for Esther. But at the same time, there is movement—a future is coming. The fact that we don’t know what it is doesn’t mean it won’t arrive.

I don’t mean to make the ending overly rosy. There are still mixed cues about Esther’s agency in this scene. (The “magical thread” that pulls her towards the door sounds like a positive, gentle force—but it is, nonetheless, something coming from outside her.) And you can feel the loss of the previous moment, even as it’s partially regained: This is not the same Esther as before.

But also: The Esther before hadn’t felt capable of dealing with uncertainty. This Esther still finds it terrifying—but the uncertainty doesn’t paralyze her. Whatever figs are currently on the tree, they won’t be shriveling up from her sitting there.

It remains unclear what is left on that tree for her, though, and that’s behind some of the language in the scene too. If nothing else, time has passed—she’s lost the intervening year between these scenes. So who knows if any of the futures she previously pictured remain as they were.

The point I want to return to, then: You feel (or at least I do, rereading this scene) what might have been and what obviously wasn’t. The ghost of Esther’s non-futures follow her to this final scene, because even if she tries to follow them now, they won’t be the same as if she pursued them a year prior. Maybe things could have gone differently (maybe) but it’s also very clear why they didn’t. And yet, there’s also an opening up at the end, in the unnamed possibilities and the potential return of the previous ones.

For a seemingly simple scene—for a narrator who, within it, acts so little—there’s surprising multiplicity. And it’s there because, well, Plath has set it up that way, by imagining all these lives for Esther earlier, all these potential directions. It’s there because we’ve inhabited that dream space along with Esther. The ending doesn’t need to spell out another fig tree—Plath has done all the work to take us back there already, with a few key words and a bit of suggestion. Esther steps through the door—and we don’t know what’s coming, and neither does she, but we know all the past and present choices flowing into that moment. We can guess at the future, empty or full; we can feel the emotional weight.