(urth) Junie Moon (Again)

[Craig Brewer]

I just reread “Has Anyone Seen Junie Moon?” after reading
John’s question last week. I haven’t processed much yet, but here are my
initial reactions. And I’ll apologize in advance for the somewhat shotgun
nature of these responses. You’re reading the ideas “as they happen”…
 
I have a feeling the key to this story has more to do with
the Samson story than Juno/Hera’s, although that certainly must be addressed. Recall
that Samson ultimately wants revenge on the Philistines for being blinded, as
well as being deceived by Delilah. The title is of course “Has Anyone SEEN
Junie Moon,” and one of the problems throughout the story is that Sam Jr. keeps
not seeing things, or seeing things only partially: he can’t remember exactly
what he saw in Merlin’s cave or what the moon rock looked like the one time it
came to the circus.
 
And remember that Samson’s father is Manoah. Junie makes she
and Sam take on the last name Manoe after the feds find them.
 
There’s also the nice bit in the Bible about Samson telling
a riddle that only he would be able to solve since it’s about an experience
only he had. (Killing the lion and the honey that appears inside it.) Perhaps
there’s a kind of in joke here between Wolfe and Lafferty that we’re not
supposed to get…and, thus, part of the story’s charm is its impenetrability.
But only perhaps, because that seems a bit too obscure a reason for writing a
story, even for Wolfe.
 
Instead, it seems fairly obvious here that the Feds are to
be thought of as the Philistines. And what both the Feds and Philistines do in
both stories is keep people from knowing the truth. In the story, truth is a
matter, again, of correct sight, but also finding the right vantage point on
events (and how often in the story does that have to do with being at the right
height, whether it be throwing Junie up 15 feet, or telling the truth on the
plane, or figuring out what the White Cow Moon is made of so that you can
easily create escape-velocity vehicles…which seems to be the reason the Feds
get interested in Junie). And, of course, it ends with Sam Jr. saying that
people could join together and tumble the Feds, where “maybe we will bring the
whole thing crashing down,” which seems about as direct a reference to Samson destroying
the temple as we’re going to get. (And Junie will be found in the pieces that
are left over…suggesting that she is in fact already lost and not just far
away.)
 
As for the bits about King Arthur that appear, Junie says
that Laffer(ty) was definitely Merlin. But the knights are all portrayed as
just good old heroes that happened to be remembered. But it’s followed by a
short meditation on the value of stories of lost greatness: “It was dead and
gone like my dad. King Arthur was dead and his knights were too, and the bad
guys were the head of everything and had been for a long, long time. We were
the paint, even Junie was paint, and now the paint was getting dull the way
paint does, with cracks all over it and falling off. And I thought this is not
just where that king was born, this is where he died too. And I knew that was
true the way I meant it.” (131) In other words, fantastic stories (tall tales)
have a tendency to lose their efficacy over time, which seems to be a danger
that’s recognized multiple times. Junie’s whole purpose, after all, is trying
to figure out the truth of the White Cow Moon before it’s lost to her. (There’s
also the interesting point that Sam Jr. is compared to “the jolly old green
giant,” yet another Wolfean “green man,” but who, in an Arthurian context,
could be the Green Knight who actually tests Gawain to see if he’s truly
virtuous…is Sam Jr. a test for modern readers?)
 
Thematically, I think Fernando’s idea that the story is
about loss ties up many of the questions John originally had about the story.
I’m not sure it’s going to fit together in a puzzle-like way, but thematically,
it does for me. I don’t think that looking for exact mythical correlations will
work in this case, which is where much of the discussion seems to have gone.
(After all, we have Greco-Roman, Hebrew, and Indian mythical material floating
around this story, all in the context of talking about a storyteller who acts
like, as the narrator says of Indians: “they have all these stories that they
tell you and then they laugh inside.” (125) I get the feeling that this is less
of a puzzle we’re supposed to figure out. Instead, it’s a puzzle that wants you
to think about the nature of why it’s puzzling, not it’s solution. Dealing with
loss and hope at once may be a kind of puzzle that has no definite solution.
 
Anyway, the story works for me as a reflection on loss in
the form of a kind of hopeful elegy. In the story, Sam Jr.’s search for Junie
Moon reads like a loving portrayal of a lost (dead?) lover. The hope comes from
the idea that “Junie believes in dead people coming back and all that.” (124)
But, metaphorically, that hope starts to look like an unwillingness to let go
even if it requires telling yourself some fabulously tall tales in order to
keep hope alive.
 
On a meta level, the story’s also a kind of elegy of Wolfe’s
for Lafferty. The story itself is a “tall tale” like Lafferty would write, but
done in a Wolfe-like vein. Roy T. Laffer is already missing when the story
starts, but his legacy of tales of course live on. More specifically, however,
what lives on is the promise of those lying stories to perhaps hold a kernel of
truth that outlasts the man, the story, and the lies. I particularly like this
bit: “Do you know what it says on the tea boxes? The ones with the man with the
cap on them? It says honest tea is the best policy. I know what that means, and
I think that cranky old Roy T. Laffer knew it too.” (125) As I read it, the
pithy statement is at once a parable of the truth Laffer wanted to tell (as Sam
says, Laffer “knew lots of stuff…[but] they would never believe him even if it
was true” 125), but also a playful pun that actually doesn’t say what it says –
it says something true about honesty without being honest about how it says it,
if that makes any sense. You have to be tricky to get the truth, and maybe have
to know it already. So it points to a kind of shared idea of “truth” for both
Wolfe and Lafferty which might be many things: Catholicism? A love of stories
that don’t tell you what they mean? The idea that truth is most truthful when
pulled from a lie, or at least a tall tale? (And further bits fit this:
Lafferty was from Oklahoma like Laffer, Wolfe, a big guy, spent plenty of time
in Texas like Sam.)
 
Again, pardon my very disjoined ramblings here. I’m typing
as I think, which is never a good way to communicate. But I’d like to thank
John for getting me to reread this story which, this time around, is much more
memorable than the first.

Craig



----- Original Message ----
From: Fernando Q. Gouvêa <fqgouvea at colby.edu>
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Sent: Sunday, October 12, 2008 9:02:24 PM
Subject: Re: (urth) Junie Moon (Again)

Lafferty's story is "You Can't Go Back", in which the White Cow Moon 
appears. In that story, the White Cow Moon doesn't actually orbit the 
earth, it just floats around, so part of what Wolfe is doing here is to 
give a little more physical reality to Lafferty's story. Also worth 
pointing out is that the Lafferty story is about loss: the White Cow 
Moon was a magical boy to the main characters when they were children, 
but when they go back to it when they are adults they find that it is 
"dingy", smelly, not at all what they remembered.

Wolfe's story being about loss fits the theme. I agree that Junie is 
probably Juno, and that "Sam Jr" is probably Samson. Indians are 
connected to the White Cow Moon in the Lafferty story as well.

Just some added fuel for the fire...

Fernando

JBarach at aol.com wrote:
> Urthers --
>  
> Last night, I read "Has Anybody Seen Junie Moon?" for the first time.  
> It's in Starwater Strains and, to my surprise, is being reprinted in the 
> new Best Of, which implies that someone at least thinks it's one of 
> Wolfe's best -- and that implies that someone thinks he understands the 
> story.  Or perhaps whoever chose those stories (and I suspect Wolfe 
> wasn't really involved, or "From the Cradle" would be in there) thinks 
> that it's a story that demonstrates Wolfe's trickiness and repays study.
>  
> I have to admit that most of the story baffles me.  The basic outline is 
> fairly clear: It is narrated by an extremely strong man who works for a 
> circus and who has been hired/managed by someone named June Moon to look 
> for something called the White Cow Moon, which circles the earth at an 
> extremely low orbit and which has to be moving extremely fast in order 
> to do so.  She has disappeared, and the strong man is looking for her.  
> So much for the basics.  Almost everything else in the story is, for me 
> at least, mysterious.
>  
> The narrator is often called Hercules, and he thinks Junie Moon's real 
> name is probably "June."  I suspect he's wrong and that whoever pointed 
> this out on the list earlier is correct: Her real name is Juno.  Those 
> names put us in the sphere of Greek mythology, with Juno sending 
> Hercules out on some missions.
>  
> But I suspect that approach is also misleading.  Hercules is only the 
> narrator's stage name.  His real name is Sam.  Short for what?  SAMSON, 
> the strong man in the Bible. 
>  
> He is actually "Sam Jr." he says, which makes him the son of Samson.  He 
> isn't Samson himself, but he's the son of Samson.  And, in fact, I 
> suspect that "Sam Jr." is something of a joke on Wolfe's part, a joke 
> which hints at what I'm saying: The narrator is Sam Jr, which means he 
> is the son of Sam or "Sam's son."  Get it?
>  
> Incidentally, the name "Samson" is derived from the Hebrew word 
> "shemesh," sun, which is something an internet search easily turns up 
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson).  Given that Junie is a Moon, 
> perhaps that's significant.
>  
> There may be other allusions to Samson, too, including the tearing open 
> of the gate (Samson uproots the gates of Gaza) and the line at the end: 
> "If all of us get mad at once maybe we will bring the whole thing 
> crashing down."  And if those allusions are really allusions, then there 
> may be some parallel between "the feds" and the Philistines.
>  
> But even if this is correct, I still don't understand the story.  That 
> there's an allusion to a Lafferty story about a tiny moon orbiting the 
> world, I understand, and I think I follow the physics (the Moon would 
> have to be travelling considerably faster than a bullet in order to 
> maintain an orbit at such a low altitude). 
>  
> But ...
>  
> * What's the significance of Junie's last name, Moon?  She is herself 
> short and fat and therefore moon-like, but beyond that...?
>  
> * What's with the King Arthur, Merlin's cave stuff, and who are the 
> people they see? 
>  
> * What is the area in which Sam thinks Junie has disappeared? 
>  
> * Who are the feds and why are they after Sam & Junie?
>  
> * Why was Sam's dad killed? 
>  
> * Beyond being an allusion to Lafferty's name, what's the significance 
> of Roy T. Laffer and what does the discussion of the "T" in his name 
> (like "Honest tea is the best policy") mean?
>  
> * What did happen to Junie Moon?
>  
> The story begins, of course, with a reference to Indians who tell you a 
> story but all the time are laughing at you.  So was Roy T. Laffer, we're 
> told.  And so, I think, is Sam.  But I don't get the joke.
>  
> Thoughts?
>  
> John

-- 
=============================================================
Fernando Q. Gouvea
Carter Professor of Mathematics
Colby College                     Editor, MAA FOCUS
5836 Mayflower Hill               Editor, MAA Reviews
Waterville, ME 04901              http://mathdl.maa.org/mathDL/19/
http://www.colby.edu/~fqgouvea

There are those who claim that magic is like the tide; that it swells 
and fades over the surface of the earth, collecting in concentrated 
pools here and there, almost disappearing from other spots, leaving them 
parched for wonder. There are also those who believe that if you stick 
your fingers up your nose and blow, it will increase your intelligence.
   -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Volume VII

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