Investing in Conrad, Investing in the Orient: Margaret Drabble's The Gates of Ivory

Abstract

The days of heroic travel are gone; unless, of course, in newspaper sense, in which heroism like everything else in world becomes as common if not as nourishing as our daily bread. Conrad, preface xviii I began to feel I was surrounded by almost palpable spectres from Lord Jim, Victory, and Falk whenever I was in Singapore or Bangkok--1 would catch flick of Marlow's nautical jacket or a whiff of his cheroot, or get a glimpse of Captain Whalley's bushy whiskers on Singapore's sunlit esplanade, and hear rattle of horse-tramway down Bangkok's New Road passing Schomberg's hotel. Young 2 In The Gates of Ivory (1991), Margaret Drabble's enterprise, and that of her protagonists, is stamped by Joseph Conrad's legacy, one that remains problematic, contested, and controversial. [1] This dark excursion into Southeast Asia, third volume of her trilogy that began with A Radiant Way (1987) and continued with A Natural Curiosity (1989), represents culmination of Drabble's negotiation with global issues, of her journeys both outward to perimeter and inward to the heart of darkness. Though her characters may be sent briefly to Africa in The Needle's Eye (1972) and The Realms of Gold (1975), Drabble's earlier fictions largely depict separate worlds of British northern provincial life and London's metropolitan culture, but primary address is increasingly NW3 or NW5, domain of middle-class professional folk, of journalists and television producers whose diaries record numerous lunch meetings at favored trattoria in Soho or Notting Hill Gate. Beginning with The Ice Age (1977), i ndividual struggles of her female characters are overshadowed by a sense of collective crisis (Sutherland); canvas is enlarged and Drabble establishes herself as chronicler of a contemporary Britain (Stovel 186), monitoring social, economic, and political realities in Age of Thatcher. Further, James Gindin asserts that Drabble always seen herself as part of an English literary tradition (255), and depends on a consistent use of guides and models from that tradition: Bunyan, Austen, George Eliot, Thackery, Dickens, and Arnold Bennett. As trilogy sends her metropolitan characters in search of outer limits of a known and knowable community, Drabble begins to diagnose a condition of world rather than a condition of England, and neither Bunyan's allegorical geography nor brimming social panoramas of nineteenth-century and Edwardian realists seem able to cope with this growing complexity. The new guide was not English-born; he knew Poland, Russia, France, Africa, and Eastern Archipelago before he counted England his home. It is to Joseph Conrad that Margaret Drabble turns to contemplate, if not to explain, cruel and bewildering path of contemporary civilization, and to interrogate shifting definitions of postmodernity. The relationship between novel and guide is therefore one key to Drabble's vision of her time; frequent failure of her characters to read Conrad is as much a part of that key. The issue of reading and interpretation is also signaled in novel's title and epigraph, taken from The Odyssey, Book XIX, where Penelope warns stranger to distinguish between false dreams that come to us through gates of ivory and those that appear through gate of polished horn and speak truthfully of what will come to pass. The lure of dreams that ultimately deceive is a crucial source of action, particularly for Stephen Cox, trilogy's most avid traveler and only truly dedicated reader of Joseph Conrad. At end of first novel in series, we learn that he has to Kampuchea (Radiant Way 392), gone to research a play about Pol Pot. The absent Cox is not forgotten through pages of A Natural Curiosity. Alix Bowen wonders about Stephen Cox and Cambodia. In Cambodia, people disappeared. …