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I have just listened to a lecture in which the topic for discussion was the fig. Not a botanical lecture, a literary one. We got the fig in literature, the fig as metaphor, changing perceptions of the fig, the fig as emblem of pudenda and the fig leaf as a modest concealer of them, ‘fig’ as an insult, the social construction of the fig, D.H. Lawrence on how to eat a fig in society, ‘reading fig’ and, I rather think, ‘the fig as text’. The speaker’s final pensee was the following. He recalled to us the Genesis story of Eve tempting Adam to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Genesis doesn’t actually specify, he reminded us, which fruit it was. Traditionally, people take it to be an apple. The lecturer suspected that actually it was a fig, and with this piquant little shaft he ended his talk.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137307033_7

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