Looking at Gail Jones's "The Man in the Moon" in Aestheticized Darkness

When the first astronauts landed on the moon, they left unfading bootprints on its surface, testifying to our human violation of its aesthetic and symbolic autonomy. Starting from the premise that this lunar invasion has forever scarred the moon, making it a carrier of loss and an embodiment of grief, my article seeks to examine how Gail Jones, in her own fiction, aestheticizes the starry night sky in order to bring together the astronauts’ human disfiguration of the moon’s face with the human figuration by writers and artists of this very defacement. Through art’s redemptive function in the face of loss and destruction, I argue, Jones has found a way to reinstate a sense of the moon’s autonomy. In particular, this article will focus on how her short story “The Man in the Moon” addresses the possibility of creating alternative cosmologies through art. Both her essay “Without Stars”, which discusses Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster to investigate the metaphysics of suffering and the poetics of grief, and her essay “Five Meditations on a Moonlit Night”, which looks at nature writing to examine the aesthetics of grief and the ethics of the gift, will form the backdrop of this exploration.