“Bluetopia”: music and memory in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child

“Full fathom five thy father lies, / Of his bones are coral made, / Those are pearls that were his eyes, / Nothing of him that doth fade, / But doth suffer a sea-change, / Into something rich and strange” (The Tempest, 1.2). In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Ariel’s song conjures up a corpse transformed by the sea “into something rich and strange.” Likewise, in Toni Morrison’s ultimate novel God Help the Child, set in present-day California, Booker’s wave-like, italicized poetry “dissolves” the trauma of slavery “in a seaworld,” turning it into something bluesy: “You accepted like a beast of burden the whip of a stranger’s curse […] along with the scar it leaves […] a slim line drawn on a shore and quickly dissolved in a seaworld any moment when an equally mindless wave fondles it like the accidental touch of a finger on a clarinet stop” (Morrison 2015: 149-150).Like her aptly named Booker character (an avid reader, trumpetist, and experimental writer named after a former slave become advisor to several US presidents), Morrison not only wrote to recall the tragic times of the Afro-American community, but also to reclaim—after its appropriation by the mainstream—the music originally created by her people to transfigure the trauma. As Morrison confided in an interview, “There was a time when black people needed the music. Now that it belongs to everybody, black people need something else which is theirs. That’s what novels can do, what writing can do. I write in order to replicate the information, the medicine, the balm we used to find in music” (Bigsby 1992: 29). Morrison’s writing more than “replicates” the original musical “balm”: it uses the latter’s music and orality to dissolve the written word of the novel—an artform, consensus has it, of white European origin—, dismembering, remembering, decomposing and recomposing the black and white aesthetics, alchemizing them into “something else.” Morrison’s ultimate novel is her finest achievement in this regard, colouring the world as it does in a “rich and strange,” iridescent kind of blue which I propose to term “bluetopia” (my variation on the word “utopia,” from the Greek “no-place”). I would define “bluetopia” as an intersemiotic, unfathomable interval where the two aesthetics become alchemized as a result of their interplay. This paper is an approach in three movements of this bluetopia.The first movement will be devoted to the 21st century slave song flowing from God Help the Child, where black and white voices relay each other delivering first-person solos, in a collective effort to break their chains—somehow like a colour-blind and mixed blend of the Freudian talking cure, Aristotelian catharsis, and jazz jam sessions. The second movement will lend an attentive ear to the novel’s Orphic blues: like Orpheus’ severed head carried away by the river to an alien shore, Morrison’s dismembered characters keep singing to be re-membered and transfigured by waves of blue. The last movement will aim at detecting the “blue notes,” or “blue harmony” (as musicology qualifies them) incorporated by Morrison between her lines—a genuine feat as such notes are almost impossible to reproduce on a musical staff, let alone in a novel.