The scandal surrounding Alice Munro’s complicity in the sexual abuse of her youngest daughter hangs over her Nobel Prize for Literature and her death. Where once it was acceptable to measure the poetry in her prose and examine her surface details that accentuate visceral truths, now any reading of her short stories must take into account Freudian and feminist perspectives. Throughout her oeuvre, themes and techniques of revelation and concealment become more evident in her disturbing open secrets. The Moons of Jupiter is filled with concealment and revelation that would seem to highlight the suppression of fraught relationships between a mother and daughter. Indeed, in this story, the narrator Janet has an absent mother and daughter, and these absences are interwoven with cubist techniques, gothic themes, and the return of the repressed.
The story’s title isn’t clear until near the end; instead, Janet begins with her visit to the hospital where her father is to undergo cardiac surgery. “I found my father in the heart wing, on the eighth floor of Toronto General Hospital.” The sentence is so straightforward that we barely notice the implications of heart or wing – the former for its emotional resonances, the latter for senses of flight associated with wing. The even shorter, matter-of-fact sentences that follow – “He was in a semi-private room. The other bed was empty.” – barely conceal themes of privacy and emptiness in the remainder of the story. And the final sentence in this opening paragraph points to Munro’s fretting about affordability and social status, for her father’s insurance covers only a bed in the ward with its more public humiliation.
Her father is hooked up to medical machinery, wires taped to his chest. “A small screen hung over his head.” Munro continues to build on the apparatus, gradually drawing out implications: “On the screen a bright jagged line was continually being written. The writing was accompanied by a nervous electronic beeping. The behavior of his heart was on display.” Narrative writing accompanies and parallels this jagged line, while the heart on display (and its need to be protected) is the subject of much of Munro’s fiction – medical, or otherwise. Although the narrator tries to ignore what she has just witnessed, she is engaged in a kind of screen play: “It seemed to me that paying such close attention – in fact, dramatizing what ought to be a most secret activity – was asking for trouble. Anything exposed that way was apt to flare up and go crazy.” Munro pays close attention, dramatizes, and exposes open secrets and wounds, but manages to avoid going crazy.
She backtracks from this dramatic moment: “It had been a different story the night before.” Every story is another as it morphs into a different story, yet connected like the wires taped to the patient’s chest. She backtracks even further in time, jaggedly delineating moments of crises: “Once, our chimney caught fire; it was on a Sunday afternoon and I was in the dining room pinning together a dress I was making.” This dress rehearsal highlights crisis and restraint, as father blames the fire on his daughter for her transgressive sewing on Sunday. Within the hospital the clock is ticking as Janet waits in the emergency waiting room for an hour, but this temporality is measured against narrative time lapses into the past and into the future of the planetarium in “The Moons of Jupiter.” The question of time comes up again when Janet asks the young cardiologist how long her father would live without an operation.
Another digression in the waiting room: she reads an article about a younger writer and thinks about how her father would react to an article about herself. His reaction would produce in her “a familiar dreariness of spirit” because the message she gets from him is simple: “Fame must be striven for, then apologized for. Getting it or not getting it, you will be to blame.” Fame, shame, and blame: in this judgmental world, you are damned if you do, or don’t.
“Through variations of mood, tone, and atmosphere, Munro’s fiction offers a lot of wise and otherwise.”
The first section ends with more fatalistic speculation about time. “Yes, it’s time; there has to be something, here it is. I did not feel any of the protest I would have felt twenty, even ten, years before.” She hardens her heart in response to his, faces the prospect of mortality, and confronts the inevitable under the ruse and guise of “otherwise.” She tells her father that his health is good “otherwise,” which he repeats gloomily. She ends the section with “Otherwise is plenty.” Through variations of mood, tone, and atmosphere, Munro’s fiction offers a lot of wise and otherwise.
Even as the doctors examine their patient, so Janet probes her father in the next section, which begins with “The next day he was himself again.” She confirms her father’s upbeat condition: “That was how I would have put it.” The way Munro puts it is to have daughter repeat a word her father has used: an older doctor tells him that rest and medication “might do the trick. I didn’t ask him what trick.” Munro’s trick of fiction reverts to the father’s past – “the poor farm, the scared sisters, the harsh father.” The family secret includes harsh males and scared females. She pictures her father running away, running along railway tracks where he finds a quince tree, an unlikely growth in Ontario’s landscape. She doesn’t want to think about his younger selves: “his bare torso, thick and white … was a danger to me.” Now, his defective valve elicits a different response, punctuated in parallelisms. “I stressed his independence, his self-sufficiency, his forbearance.” She follows this with another triple construction of strength: “He worked in a factory, he worked in his garden, he read history books.” Jagged phrases and clauses measure the heart’s defective valve.
Shunting between generations, the narrative backtracks two days to cover the encounter between Janet and her younger daughter Judith at Toronto’s airport. She and her boyfriend Don are driving to Mexico, and Janet is invited to stay in their apartment while they are away. Janet asks Judith where her older daughter Nichola is. In another shadow or ghosted dialogue, mother imagines asking Nichola what her plans were, to which the latter would reply, “’Plans?’ – as if that was a word I had invented.” This echo of a monosyllable serves to dramatize the imagined dialogue, and to examine her daughter’s failure as a student and waitress. The narrator has invented not only a word, but also a fraught relationship with her daughter. If the echo of “plan” is one stylistic means of highlighting family fate and fortunes, then parentheses are another form of communicating messages: Judith “said Nichola had moved out of her apartment (that dump!) and had actually telephoned (which is quite a deal, you might say, Nichola phoning).” Tucked within the parenthesis, “you might say” serves as a means of distancing a daughter and commenting on her behaviour (which is similar to the exclamatory “dump” of family furnishing). If Nichola is “incommunicado,” then others in the family who have “dumped” her are as much to blame.
The narrator’s paranoia follows in the wake of her daughter’s absence, as if the constellation of characters prepares for the moons of Jupiter: “I thought of the conversations they must have had, Don and Judith. Or Don and Judith and Nichola, for Nichola and Judith were sometimes on good terms. Or Don and Judith and Nichola and others whose names I did not even know. They would have talked about me.” This family spin goes viral – “regretting, blaming, forgiving.” A Freudian and feminist interpretation overtakes Munro’s story: “I wished I’d had a boy and a girl. Or two boys. They wouldn’t have done that. Boys couldn’t possibly know so much about you.” The elephant in the room clashes with the glass ceiling: boys will be boys in the lives of girls and women.
The repressed always returns in Munro’s story. Janet recalls being a young mother in Vancouver where she exchanges stories with a friend. “We talked about our parents, our childhoods, though for some time we kept clear of our marriages.” She concludes that memory of their failures with “What presumption.” Munro’s presumption continues in other memories handed down from parents to children, and again she resorts to echo and parallelism to filter and structure details. Her father declares that those years when she was growing up were a “kind of blur,” to which she responds, “yes, blur was the word for it.” To blur the past is to shield it – to cover up any hint of revelation through screen memory. She repeats “I could have told how old I was,” as if telling and retelling get at the truth. She blurs the telling and tells the blur.
Retrospection filters the buried past. “Those bumbling years are the years our children will remember all their lives. Corners of the yards I never visited will stay in their heads.” In these crevices of consciousness children retain secrets. Examining her daughters’ features, Janet concludes: “Many people must know things that would contradict what I say.” In the hospital where she continues “looking at the line his heart was writing,” the reader witnesses the parallel line of writing, the genealogical line, and the emotional impact of all of these heartfelt memories from the past.
When Janet leaves the hospital for the nearby planetarium, the narrative shifts from the familial to the universal. “Innumerable repetitions, innumerable variations. All this rolled past my head too.” The planetarium parallels Munro’s creative process. “Now realism was abandoned, for familiar artifice,” for Munro abandons more than meets her narrative eye: “I set my dodging and shrinking mind sternly to recording the facts.” Ever the artful dodger, she questions the universe: “Why did they give out such confident information, only to announce later that it was quite wrong?” She defamiliarizes planets and orbits, spinning from fathers and daughters to cosmic metaphor. After the show she focusses on the children in the planetarium who have watched “horrible immensities” with their own “natural immunity,” which may be shared with adults: “weren’t they immune themselves to the extent that they could put in the echo-chamber effects … simulating the awe that they supposed they ought to feel?” Munro’s storied echo-chamber clarifies and obfuscates immunity, immensity, and “churchlike solemnity.” Questions interrogate her echo-chamber: “Awe – what was that supposed to be? A fit of shivers when you looked out the window?” In the aftermath of mother and daughter we know what that shivering awe is. “Once you know what it was, you wouldn’t be courting it.” With their misfits and shivers, Munro’s houses of fiction fenestrate gothic and cubist furnishings and landscapes.
The final section of the story takes place outdoors near the museum and planetarium, as Janet imagines seeing Nichola: “I felt like one of those people who have floated up to the ceiling, enjoying a brief death.” She levitates between hospital and planetarium, headquarters in Vancouver and museum in Toronto, father and daughter. From the ceiling she lowers her sights to the tomb in the Chinese garden: “I meant to get up and go over to the tomb, to look at the relief carvings, the stone pictures, that go all the way around it.” She displaces these stone stories by avoiding them, for they are like the moons of Jupiter and lives in Ontario. The narrator plays with the sculptural and mood senses of the word: “A relief, while it lasts.” The short story contains a little death that precedes (im)mortality. She seeks relief in the carvings of planets and hospital monitors, escaping from reality to fiction, projecting voice and vision onto a daughter. Her lunar eclipse covers minute details and astronomical bodies in equal measure, the skin of surfaces and hidden depths. Janet’s father describes the moons of Jupiter as the first heavenly bodies discovered with the telescope; on the other hand, Janet scopes and circles earthly bodies without looking at them. From the small screen that hangs over her father’s bed to the relief carvings around the tomb, “The Moons of Jupiter” floats to the ceiling and beyond to conceal and reveal a mother’s misgivings and misdemeanour.
About the Reviewer
Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.
I resent the recent accusations against Munro being held against her body of work when the quality of her work still resounds with so many. Scholarship is based on the eternal value and enduring quality of an author's work, against which material that has nothing to do with the actual work's value doesn't mean shit. If you get the Nobel Prize, and are the only Canadian author to ever have gotten it so far, that means considerably more...