The African-American Text as a Cultural Event: Toni Morrison’s Case of Aging, Gender, and Creativity in God Help the Child

Abstract

Just as the emergence of the novelist Toni Morrison in 1970 can be defined as a Badiouian “event” that breaks with what African-American literature had been before, so too can the fact that she continues to renew her last/latest fiction be seen as a literary event. Morrison published Love at age 72, A Mercy at age 77, and Home at age 81. In 2015, she published her eleventh novel God Help the Child at the age of 84. Fiction writing is a relentlessly time-consuming and brain-consuming job. But like other older writers such as Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, J. M. Coetzee, and the late Doris Lessing, Morrison would not stop writing fiction simply because she has aged. To use some key terms from age studies, Morrison does not seem to accept “decline at midlife” as natural. Regarding the relationship between aging and creativity, we need to take a look at what is at issue in literary gerontology. Over the last quarter of the twentieth century, much attention was paid to issues of diversity. At a consequence, “age,” along with the three major analytical categories of race, class, and gender, has similarly obtained minor status as a social classifying device and a determinant of subjectivities. Inspired by scholars of age studies such as Katheen Woodward and Margaret Gullette, this paper analyzes briefly the aged characters of Morrison’s later novels under the rubric of the literary gerontology. Then, focusing on the relationship between age and youth in God Help the Child, I examined the ways in which the novel’s elderly black female characters affect younger ones.