• 1 Muyumba writes: “Since Love (2003), Morrison has been working in what one might call her late style (...)
• 2 Writing for The Seattle Times, Heltzel uses the word “allegory” to encapsulate the novel’s aestheti (...)
• 3 An earlier reading of magical realism in God Help the Child also pointed out its allegorical dimens (...)
• 4 On the debate on postmodernism and Blackness that emerged in the 90s, see Hooks; and Stephanson who (...)

1Toni Morrison’s eleventh and last novel, God Help the Child (2015), received contrasting reviews upon its publication. Qualifying what Walton Muyumba in his positive appraisal of the novel labels as Morrison’s “late style,” most critics found the short novel “flawed” (Charles), “discomfiting” (Sullivan 13), even “frustratingly flawed” (Gay). Others tried to define its aesthetics as resting, like her first novel The Bluest Eye (1970), on a fairy-tale structure (López Ramírez; Burdge).1 Morrison herself did not like to see the novel reduced to a “fable”: “I hope it’s more complicated than that” (Rose and Morrison). Sullivan, however, ventures the word “allegory” (14) to qualify the aesthetics of the novel as a whole, and so does Heltzel.2 It is through the prism of this literary mode that I wish to tackle a critical analysis of the text. Indeed, to read the novel as allegorical explains some of its features, notably what critics have deemed its didacticism (Sullivan), its lack of character development (Iqbal), its thinness (Hoby).3 Moreover, such an approach tackles her last novel and her novelistic output on their own terms. Indeed, Morrison refused the term postmodernism which she viewed with a certain amount of suspicion: “From a woman’s point of view, in terms of confronting the problems of where the world is now, black women [have] had to deal with ‘postmodern’ problems in the nineteenth century and earlier” (Gilroy 178).4

• 5 Fischer-Lichte here quotes Angus Fletcher’s Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, Cornel (...)

2A concise definition of allegory is that it “‘says one thing and means another.’ […] It is allos (other) and agoreuein (to speak openly, in the agora, in the market-place)” (Fischer-Lichte 174).5 This second feature fits Morrison’s engagement for African American literature as taking over from the Black sermon and/or Black music. Used in all forms of narrative and visual arts, allegory has repeatedly been defined and redefined throughout history. In his influential Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Northrop Frye tried to single out different types of allegory from naïve allegory (the medieval mystery plays) to continuous allegory (The Faerie Queene) to free-style allegory (The Scarlet Letter). Quite recently, approaching the notion from a late Marxist perspective in Allegory and Ideology (2019), Fredric Jameson claimed that allegory allows us to perceive a fractured social world while holding its fragments together. It might then seem a suitable mode for what Morrison, at eighty-four, called “my misunderstanding of what’s going on in the world” (Gross). Hence, allegory can be seen as a coping strategy, inducing a “more expansive knowledge” (Jameson 34). It emerges indeed when “the tectonic plates of deeper contradictory levels of the Real shift and grate ominously against one another and demand a representation, or at least an acknowledgment, they are unable to find in the Schein or illusory surfaces of existential or social life” (Jameson 34, italics mine). In his assessment of allegory as a crisis in/of representation, Jameson reflects on Walter Benjamin’s contribution to a redefinition of the term. Cannily, a reference to Benjamin appears in God Help the Child.

• 6 For an assessment of Walter Benjamin’s contribution to critical theory, see Bégot.
• 7 Both modes of expression rely on the relationship between image and concept and are linked to the p (...)

3Booker, the male protagonist of Morrison’s last novel, Bride’s “lover-man,” is said to have learned German. An avid reader of Walter Benjamin, he is “impressed by the beauty of the translation” (Morrison, 2015 135). Benjamin offered a different definition of allegory from Frye and Jameson in his early work, The Origin of the German Trauerspiel (1928). In this complex reassessment of the notion, Benjamin stresses its opposition to symbol, notably during the Romantic period.6 The following summary of his reappraisal of allegory underlines the features of the literary mode that led to the troubled reception of God Help the Child: “Esoteric, strange, obscure, mechanical, and too concentrated on outward appearances—such is its form because, like the philosophical treatise (also a form prevalent in the Medieval and the Baroque ages), it is geared to express unavailability, whether of truth or of being” (Cowan 115, italics mine). Allegory appears as “mechanical,” hence the didacticism that irked so many critics. It also contains an enigma, a mystery, something that cannot be said, since it works in indirection: it tells otherwise, in contradistinction to literal meaning. Its kinship with the African American trope of “Signifyin’” is evident (see inter alia Gates).7

• 8 Underlining the novel’s extreme fragmentation, Evaristo explains that “sometimes the reader has to (...)
• 9 Of the genesis of the novel, Morrison explains: “It was so fluid.” … “Everything else I sort of h (...)
• 10 A section of the anthology New Critical Essays on Morrison’s God Help the Child. Race, Culture and (...)
• 11 For an analysis of child abuse throughout Morrison’s output, see Prabha.
• 12 From 1979 to 1981, at least twenty-nine Black people, mostly kids and adolescents, were killed in t (...)

4First and foremost, the allegorical dimension of God Help the Child stems from Morrison’s reviewing most, if not all, of the themes she has tackled throughout her entire oeuvre in what is a very short dense polyvocal four-part text, with many “chapters” limited to as little as two pages.8 Child abuse, beauty, colorism, consumerism, mother-daughter relationships, racial trauma: these themes are here chiseled, condensed, left bare of complex narrative arcs and intricate lengthy psychological developments.9 This device is a distinct version of intertextuality that Gérard Genette in Palimpsestes (1982) calls “autotextuality” or “intratextuality” (284).10 The most recurrent topos is that of child abuse at the heart of The Bluest Eye (1970), a plight that befalls most of the characters (Bride, Sofia, Raisin/Rain) and that irradiates throughout the text.11 Brooklyn alludes to it (Morrison, 2015 139), so does Queen Olive’s account about her children (170). Booker’s brother, Adam, has been assaulted and murdered, along with six other boys, recalling the unsolved Atlanta murders of young black boys and adolescents in the late 70s.12 In God Help the Child, Morrison balances Bride’s childhood trauma with a male protagonist who cannot mourn his brother’s death and suffers from melancholia. The depiction of pedophilia involving young boys, black and white, shifts the focus from the black girl-child to the generic child of the title, and of the last line: “Good luck and God help the child” (178). At one level, the text thus opposes “girl,” as in “YOU, GIRL,” the brand name of Bride’s line of cosmetics, and “BOY.” It is the noun that Sofia Huxley has the kindergarten children spell by cutting fruit in the shape of letters (18), the name of the pedophile’s dog, of the band Booker plays in, “Big Boys on Fridays.” Booker fights an exhibitionist (109-110), is arrested for trying to save another child from crack addict parents (128-129) and leaves Bride when she tells him her lie about Sofia’s sex abuse.

• 13 Throughout this essay, for want of space, I will not aim at being exhaustive and specific when refe (...)
• 14 Morrison argues, however, that Tar Baby is timeless because of the presence of spirits (Hoby).

5Allegorized in her final fictional work, the little black girl’s vulnerability, her woundability—Pecola in The Bluest Eye—is the deep subject of Morrison’s entire output. She spells it clearly in her 1993 postface, in which she said she focused “on how something as grotesque as the demonization of an entire race could take root inside the most delicate member of society: a child; the most vulnerable member: a female” (210). The character of the little black girl subject to sexual abuse recurs notably in Love, Home, A Mercy.13 The allegorical impulse emerges from the abrupt clash between the grotesque and the delicate as the black female child stands in for the whole race in a process of generalization. Like Pecola, Bride is rejected by her mother for being too black: midnight-black, or even black as tar (“Tar is the closest I can think of…” 3). Tar Baby (1981) is thus brought up in the first paragraph: it shares with God Help the Child the time of the narrative. Both novels are set in contemporary times and the heroine of Tar Baby, Jadine, an accomplished Sorbonne-educated top-model finds her displaced double in Bride, an equally successful businesswoman in the cosmetics industry.14

• 15 Morrison explains: “I wanted to separate color from race” (Gross).
• 16 In 2014, Morrison herself said that: “there is no such thing as racism. There is only the human rac (...)

6Colorism, rather than racism, is the focus of the novel.15 In the opening of The Origin of Others (2017), a collection of her 2016 Norton lectures, Morrison, who shuns autobiographical statements and refused to write a memoir, confides that her great-grandmother remarked on a family visit that she and her siblings had been “tampered with” (2), meaning they were not racially pure. Sweetness’s own grandmother passed, her mother could have passed, and so could her father, and Bride’s father leaves, thinking this too-dark child cannot be his. Although positive, Bride’s and the fashion industry’s fetishization of her blue-black skin is the flip side of racialization, a sign of the “color fetish” (Morrison, 2017 41-53). Booker tells her at one point: “scientifically there’s no such thing as race, Bride, so racism without race is a choice. Taught, of course, by those who need it, but still a choice. Folks who practice it would be nothing without it” (143). Together with her lectures on “Otherness,” Morrison’s own statements on “race” in interviews and essays find themselves “trans-lated,” i.e. dis-placed in a fictional text that reflects on and even quotes her other non-fictional writings and meditations.16 Booker is then partly Morrison’s mouthpiece as a version of the African American artist (musician, writer).

• 17 For want of space, I will only quote one such instance, but one could think of the rose tattoo (Sul (...)

7The mother-daughter relationship is here explored through Bride’s relation to Sweetness. Like Eva who kills Plum (Sula), Sethe who slits her baby’s throat (Beloved), Margaret who abuses her son (Tar Baby), Sweetness tries to smother her child with a blanket (Morrison, 2015 5). Sofia Huxley is imprisoned with a woman who tried to suffocate her own daughter in Decaton’s Women’s Correctional Center (Morrison, 2015 67). Her own mother mistreated her. The little girl who becomes Bride’s double, Raisin/Rain, is a child prostitute. A flawed mother, Queen Olive failed to raise her numerous children and eventually mistakes Bride for her daughter Hannah. A variation on that theme, Florens’s mother gives her away to save her from rape under slavery (A Mercy). Certain more deeply structural motifs at the level of the narrative also recur, such as the quest (see Song of Solomon, A Mercy) and the necessity to shed the accoutrements of a capitalist world, present in Song of Solomon. Macon Dead’s return to nature is here rewritten as Bride’s sojourn with Evelyn and Steve in their house in the woods after her car accident. It starts in Part II of the novel. Yet, the reader can also pick up discreet scenes in the narrative that recall other similar occurrences.17 For instance, the purifying bath that Macon Dead (Song of Solomon) is given in the hands of Sweet, is now the bath Bride receives when in Evelyn’s company. Within the text, it echoes the baths that Sofia Huxley, now working as a caretaker in an old people’s home, gives her patients. She fantasizes them as a way of putting “her black girl back together, healing her, thanking her. For the release” (Morrison, 2015 77). Bride then nurtures with tenderness Booker’s aunt, Queen Olive, on her hospital bed (166). The allegorical thrust is thus function of the recurrence of such elements (here the fractured black body nurtured and touched) throughout Morrison’s entire output.

• 18 Names and naming are major topoi of African American literature, which arise from the fact that sla (...)
• 19 Pecola’s family name in The Bluest Eye is also ironically “Breedlove.”
• 20 See Morrison’s “The Ancestor as Foundation” (1984b) for the place of the ancestor in African Americ (...)

8The onomastics underline the allegorical thrust of the tale-like narrative.18 Bride, who only wears white, is short for Lula Ann Bridewell. She is the “Bride” of the ending, pregnant with Booker’s child as the two lovers form a united couple at the close of their respective inner quests. After the dispersal of Queen Olive’s ashes, Bride announces that she is with child: “I’m pregnant and it’s yours.” Booker replies: “No . . . It’s ours” (Morrison, 2015 174-175). The name Booker means “someone concerned with books,” hence a scholar, but etymologically a scribe, a bookbinder. He is the Knight, the Prince Charming, i.e. the boyfriend, the lover, and future husband, but also the writer, the poet of “unpunctuated sentences” (122) as the fragments of texts sent as letters to Queen Olive attest (150-151). Bride’s mother’s name, Sweetness, since she refuses to be called “Mother,” ironically calls forth the adverse of her behavior.19 She tries to kill her newborn, brings her up extremely harshly, her excuse being that this education protects her from white oppression. The most obvious allegorical name is that of Rain. The couple who saved her call her by that name since they found her in the “rain” (86). The little girl, however, wants to be called Raisin, recalling Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), the last line of Langston Hughes’s poem “A Dream Differed.” Evelyn and Steve, the once hippie couple who rescue or kidnap Raisin, seem to inhabit a kind of Garden of Eden as their surnames suggest, while Adam is Booker’s deceased older brother’s name. Queen Olive is the archetypal ancestor, the grandmother the reader encounters in most of Morrison’s works: Eva (Sula), Circe (Song of Solomon), Baby Suggs (Beloved).20 As Morrison herself admitted, the three generations, grandmother, mother, daughter, reflect the structure of her own childhood household.

• 21 “Black is the new black” (Morrison, 2015 33) refers to the slogan of the 2008 Italian Vogue issue d (...)

9Allegory in Morrison works through violent inversion rather than indirection: ugliness becomes beauty; slapping, a sign of tenderness; lying, an attempt at redressing a wrong; a physical fight can be read as release. The paradoxical nature of such reversals and their prevalence, although resting on binary dualism, leads to a deconstructionist gesture. The reversal of the initial “ugliness” (The Bluest Eye) into the beauty of “blackness” remains caught in the white/black dichotomy and obeys a racist logic. The inane statement of Bride’s designer, Jeri: “black is the new black” (Morrison, 2015 33) brings to the fore the capitalistic forces at work in advertising, together with a tautological use of language.21 The fashion slogan is only the reverse of the slurs shouted at Bride as a child and does not undo the oppressive destructive violence at work. Psychologically, it leads to a narcissism that mirrors the shallowness of Bride’s environment. As Booker reflects, her “self-love [is] consistent with her cosmetic company milieu” (Morrison, 2015 133).

• 22 For an analysis of magic realism in the novel together with a psychoanalytical approach that relies (...)
• 23 The figure of the reader in Morrison’s works would require a full-fledged study since it occurs as (...)

12Paradoxically, the content, i.e. the exposure of consumer’s society as shallow through the figure of Bride and her reversal to girlhood, is also the form of the novel.22 Morrison has always claimed that form and content are one in her works (1984a 338). In this allegory, the thinness that the critics have underlined is precisely the object of the novel (the superficiality of materialist culture, but also the skin as surface and its color) and its form, i.e. stylization, condensation, summing up. For Morrison “beauty” is a lethal cultural construct, especially for women: “It can destabilize you if that’s all you have and that’s all you care about and that’s where your success comes from. There’s a three-dimensional person somewhere outside the clothes and the makeup and the nudity as they call it, since everybody beautiful is buck naked now” (Hoby 2015). The traumatic violence of colorism and child abuse doubly calls for allegory. It cannot be told “how it was.” The text imbeds this difference between indirection and realism in an exchange between Bride and Raisin as the former “listens to [Raisin] tell it how it was” (Morrison, 2015 104). Evelyn and Steve had failed to be adequate interlocutors for the little girl’s story. Bride is then the figure of the ideal reader and Rain’s story stands in for the text.23

• 24 “Whereas in the symbol with the sublimation of downfall, the transfigured countenance of nature rev (...)

13At a deep level, the cosmetics industry is allegorically represented by a vanity case: it is a small bag in which Bride finds her mother’s beauty products as a child: “Her grown-up woman stuff crowds her vanity: tweezers, cotton balls, that round box of Lucky lady face powder, the blue bottle of Midnight in Paris cologne, hairpins in a tiny saucer, tissue, eyebrow pencils, Maybelline mascara. Tabu lipstick. It’s deep red and I try some on” (Morrison, 2015 54). She traces her current job to that vanity case. It also triggers the memory of the child abuse she witnessed. Vanity is also an adjective: Bride’s Jaguar sports a “vanity” license plate (“my car, sleek, rat gray, with a vanity license plate looked like a gun” (14) and Raisin is Rain’s “vanity” name: “Thank you, Raisin, you saved my life. Really. Bride, grateful for another vanity name, let a tear sting its way down her cheek” (86). It is a noun in the narrative of Bride’s and Booker’s affair: “…the fairy-tale castle collapsed into the mud and sand upon which its vanity was built” (135). Thus, vanity as a sin (pride in one’s appearance) also calls up its meaning as futility, as something of no substance, as vanishing. The “Allegory of Vanity” is the title of many Renaissance paintings depicting woman’s narcissism, but also the brevity of life, often represented as a skull (such as in Antonio de Pereda’s 1632-1636 painting). In-fitting with the workings of allegory, the vanity case (as container) comes in correspondence with the candy box full of little boys’ penises that the police find at the house of the pedophile, “the nicest man in the world”: “When Mr. Humboldt’s house was searched a dirty mattress sporting dried blood was found in the basement along with an elaborately decorated candy tin that held carefully wrapped pieces of dry flesh, which on not very close inspection turned out to be small penises” (119). Morrison’s version of allegory uncovers not so much a “death’s head” (Benjamin 174) as cut-off penises: emasculations that recall the lynchings of black men accused of raping white women.24 They are the morbid unwatchable mirror of Bride’s attempt at creating beauty products (partial objects that make up for a fake self), although, as underlined, she herself wore “no makeup” since her black skin sufficed (133).

• 25 The twin, the imaginary friend, recurs throughout Morrison’s output as schizophrenia, notably in Th (...)
• 26 Morrison embeds in this narrative both a childhood memory (her mother and other relatives used to b (...)
• 27 In her Fresh Air interview, Morrison owns that old age, idleness, boredom, and the many departed ar (...)

14Bride’s “vanity,” a consequence of her mother’s internalized self-hatred, but also the vanity of appearance, is echoed by Booker’s psychic make-up (“void”) as he internalizes the death at birth of a twin: “[…] somehow he’d always known it, felt the warm void walking by his side” (115).25 Over the years this void becomes an inner companion until his older brother, Adam, replaces the twin. With Adam’s murder, “Booker had no companion. Both were dead” (115). Much like the African tribe who punish the murderer by having him “carry the rotting corpse around” (120), Adam’s death is figured as a corpse that Booker carries around (in/as himself). Yet he is not his brother’s murderer. His melancholia means that he has incorporated “death” itself; rather, the constant thought of his dead brother kills him. As Queen Olive tells him, he has ended up “lashing up Adam to his shoulders so that he can work day and night filling up your brain. Don’t you think he’s tired?” (156). She goes on: “You called Adam back and made his murder turn your brain into a cadaver” (157). Filling “the warm void” of his dead twin, first with Adam when he was alive, then with Adam’s dead body (he goes to the morgue with his father to recognize his remains), Booker needs to separate himself from that inner emptiness, an encrypting of death. Queen Olive’s death by fire and his sending his trumpet downstream figure his letting go of a fixation on death.26 He turns towards Bride and their child to be, i.e. (new) life.27

• 28 Note that the exclamation “God help us!” can be used ironically in colloquial speech.
• 29 See Raynaud 2019 for highlighting the “ineffable” in Morrison’s understanding of language and its u (...)

15As the title God Help the Child proclaims, children are left to a hypothetical divine benevolence in a world rife with lethal violence (sexual, racial, class-related, historical): they are “world-hurt” (Morrison, 2015 83). The ending, in Sweetness’s words (she is now in a “nursing” home), leaves it up to the readers to ponder whether the child to come will escape trauma. Booker’s inability to mourn had left him stuck in a melancholia so deep that his brain became a cadaver. Benjamin analyzed that the German Trauerspiel or Baroque “drama of grief” was run through melancholia because of the “immotivation” of the world which caused the allegorical “way of looking at the world” (quoted in Cowan 118). Although Bride’s and Booker’s trajectory leads them to overcome their respective childhood traumas and thus changes her self-hatred into care and altruism, and his melancholia into proper mourning, the last chapter, much like Florens’s mother’s last words in A Mercy, leaves the question of a resolution open, a hallmark of Morrison’s endings. By definition, melancholy is never erased. As Bainard Cowan emphasized in his reading of Benjamin’s understanding of the workings of allegory as form and content: “The rhetoricity of allegory is thus something that does not drop away once its object is unveiled but rather forms its inner structure. Whatever unveiling of eschatology allegory may accomplish, it does not efface the negativity of the discourse out of which it leapt: the trace of the leap remains with it even in its most mystical moments” (Cowan 119). For “eschatology,” read resolution in a loving relationship (Bride and Booker) and the colloquial appeal to God, as in “God help us;”28 for the “negativity of the discourse,” read the unbearable unspeakable violence of the adult world as directed at children.29 Morrison’s last novel relies on an allegorical impulse precisely because of the evil of/in the world, as what cannot be represented. Death lurks in the text as the maggot-cleaned bones of the murdered Adam, a twenty-first century “vanity,” while salvation is a leap of faith that must fight the void, an emptiness that only allegory as form can fill. Benjamin’s words underline the paradox at/as its core: