Why are Toni Morrison's novels are so overwhelmingly apocalyptic?

[Kimberly]

Hi Kenny! As a former English Lit professor with a primary focus on Women and Minority Lit., Toni Morrison has always been one of the most fascinating authors I've ever studied. However, this is the first I have ever heard of her writing being referred to as apocalyptic. Her writing is certainly a multifaceted blend of the past and the present, and at times very challenging for any reader. I would highly suggest reading The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism by Henry Louis Gates.

[Lorrie]

I'm thinking about your word apocalyptic, Kenny, and am really trying to apply it to her books. Yes, incomprehensible disasters happen in each book, but I think that is also due to the time period and the unspeakable horrors that were occurring in those time periods. Minorities led apocalyptic lives....period. Ms. Morrison documents those lives in a voice that I have not heard before.

[kisha]

Hello Kenny. I am with Kimberly and Lorrie on this one. The use of apocalyptic literature when refer to Toni Morrison specifically Beloved is a bit confusing. Could you explain what you mean? I know apocalyptic literature to mean a revalation of things to come. Usually happening in Christian/Jewish fiction.

When I think of Morrison I think more pyshcological with many themes and messages, even dark or perhaps sometimes even mystical. She is in a league of her own so it's almost hard to put her in a genre. But I think what she is more popular for is her many messages that are in her novels in disguise of other stories i.e ghost ect.

[Anastasia Kinderman]

When I think apocalyptic I think end of the world in flames. I must be missing something.....

[Scott]

Silly people, words don't mean anything any more. Vocabulary is so last century.

[Zanne]

Kimberly wrote: "Hi Kenny! As a former English Lit professor with a primary focus on Women and Minority Lit., Toni Morrison has always been one of the most fascinating authors I've ever studied. However, this is t..."

I agree. The Signifying Monkey will help to "decode" Morrison's work as well as Zora Neale Hurston's. If you don't have the African American historical background going into it then you really need something to get grounded if you are going to get an indepth reading and understanding. Yes, anyone can read the book and get something out of it, women in particular, but the background in African American history will add so much more to it.

Morrison is a blend of AA writing with its mystical African roots and very Southern Writing. She is often compared to Faulkner and read as Southern Gothic. Indeed you can read "Beloved" in that fashion as it exposes the decaying underbelly of the antebellum South as Sethe's tale is exposed.

However, I would never classify it as apocalyptic especially in view of the fact that the novel in the end turns of Sethe being told that she is her best thing. That is a line of hope and forgiveness, not apocalyptic. Although it may seem that the novel is about events that rip the world apart at the seams, it is actually only the South pre-Civil war about which she writes in this book and it does not end with that world ripped to shreds and left in chaos or the after effects. Even Morrison's other works like "Song of Solomon" or "The Bluest Eye" aren't apocalyptic. The characters aren't in a world of chaos but their world is dark. It's more of a systematic cultural darkness than one born out of a complete breakdown of all order for everyone which would happen in an apocalyptic event. Morrison is exposing the dark underbelly of injustice that people purposefully ignore as they life in their structure lives in an orderly, civilized and so-called just world. I think that's a little different than an apocalyptic event where those things break down because of a monumental worldwide event.