Abstract
Margaret Drabble’s The Gates of Ivory highlights the challenges to responding to trauma by confronting protagonist Liz Headleand with the task of locating her friend Stephen Cox, who has disappeared in Cambodia. By initiating Liz’s crossing of the threshold from “Good Time” London to “Bad Time” Cambodia by way of the Gothic trope of the found narrative (a package containing Stephen’s unfinished play alongside fragments of human finger bone), the novel forces Liz to accept responsibility for trauma represented in the media and viewed at a distance. But despite her opportunity to move beyond mere spectatorship, Liz’s retreat back to her comfortable middle-class life suggests that trauma fiction as an ethical mode of writing is, perhaps, merely a convenient narrative absolving readers from true responsibility.
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Notes
- 1.
Pol Pot himself had an unsuccessful education in Paris, part of what makes him such an alluring figure to Stephen, who wonders whether “a million Cambodians died to avenge Pol Pot’s defeat at the hands of the French educational system” (Drabble 1991, p. 12).
- 2.
Miss Porntip is the focal point of many of Stephen’s unabashedly Orientalist depictions of his journeys through Vietnam and Thailand to the Cambodian border, which are separated from the main text by italics: “This is the gorgeous East,” Stephen writes. “Conrad was here” (p. 47). The novel’s ambivalent treatment of Miss Porntip reflects the novel’s broader engagement with, and problematization of, a Conradian view of “The Orient.” Roger Bowen argues that this ambivalence derives from Drabble’s recognition of the postcolonial imperative “to increase the role and give more voice and subjectivity to the indigenous other” entering into conflict with her seeming unwillingness “to surrender completely those orientalizing habits of characterization, evident in the representation of [Miss Porntip’s] speech and her sexual power…. In sum, Miss Porntip’s economic ascendancy and cultural hybridity remain a provocative but problematic model” (1999, p. 283). However, given the novel’s degree of self-reflexivity, it seems likely that this ambivalence is intentional and reflective of a broader interrogation of the biases that enter into ostensibly ethical forms of representation of “the Other,” which come into sharp focus in Liz’s encounter with another heavily stereotyped figure, Mme Savet Akrun.
- 3.
This is the view put forth by Alvin Toffler in Future Shock (1970), in which he coins the phrase “information overload” to describe the way in which the “cognitive overstimulation” produced by the constant novelty that mass media generates “interferes with our ability to ‘think’” (p. 311).
- 4.
OED definitions of “Witness” (n.) include “the action or condition of being an observer of an event,” and “[a]ttestation of a fact, event, or statement; testimony , evidence; evidence given in a court of justice” (2016), both implying a testimonial obligation. In contrast, definitions of “spectator” (n.)—“person who sees, or looks on at, some scene or occurrence; a beholder, onlooker, observer, and “[a] person who is present at, and has a view or sight of, anything in the nature of a show or spectacle”(2019)—imply a layer of insulating distance (between audience and stage, stadium seat and playing field, or either side of the television screen) that absolves the viewer from any obligation beyond that of passive onlooker. One definition of “witness” does, however, conflate the testimonial with the spectatorial—“[o]ne who is or was present and is able to testify from personal observation; one present as a spectator or auditor”—pinpointing the danger for witnessing to slide into spectatorship (2016).
- 5.
When asked in an interview if she considers herself to be a postmodern author, Drabble takes issue with the way critics have attached to her novels the label of “realist,” “often in a hostile kind of way,” and states that she was, even in her earliest work, “already doing something quite different there and I’ve gone on doing it—sort of moving on from realism” (Drabble 2000).
- 6.
Here Favret alludes to the “stranger” on the grate from Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight”: “the thin blue flame/Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;/Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,/Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing” (2006, pp. 13–16).
- 7.
The contrast between the “raw material” of trauma and the final, often sanitized, image is one that will return later in relation to Pat Barker’s Double Vision via the raped and mutilated body of a girl found by the novel’s protagonist, war reporter Stephen Sharkey, in a Sarajevo stairwell.
- 8.
The notion of trauma as “unassimilated matter” is supported by van der Kolk’s study (outlined in Chap. 1) of the anatomical changes to the brain of victims who have suffered traumatic events.
- 9.
Giorgio Agamben describes the same “non-coincidence between facts and truth, between verification and comprehension” in relation to the Holocaust (2002, p. 13).
- 10.
Liz also, it is noted, “very occasionally, and against her better judgment, allow[s] herself to be moved to particular donation by a particular appeal for a particular catastrophe” (Drabble 1991, p. 24).
- 11.
The traumatic legacy of the Cambodian genocide, which carries an estimated death toll of 1.6 million, or 21% of the Cambodian population (Kiernan 2008, p. 458), lingers to this day. The Khmer Rouge Tribunal, established in 1997, continues to hold hearings for war crimes committed by top-level figures within the Khmer Rouge regime; however, concerns over the fading of the genocide from history are rife due to the “deadlocked” (Cohn 2003) status of the tribunals, which have led to only five indictments and three convictions in their twenty-year existence and which are plagued by accusations of corruption, “government interference,” and “lack of public information over the investigations” (Wright 2017). Efforts to fight the loss of knowledge of the genocide and to preserve the memory of the victims of the Khmer Rouge are ongoing: in 1980, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh opened on the site of the former Tuol Sleng prison; it is home to the identification photographs of many of the over 12,000 prisoners (Brewer 2015) who were imprisoned, tortured, and executed between 1975 and 1979. A selection of these photos formed part of an exhibition by the Royal Ontario Museum in 2012 entitled Observance and Memorial: Photographs from S-21. A similar exhibit can be found at the Landmine Museum outside Siem Reap, in which “photos of guards and victims are purposely mixed side by side in the exhibit without description in an attempt to show how the Cambodian people all suffered and were ‘one’ during the genocide whether victim or perpetrator” (Kislenko 2011).
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Joyce, A. (2019). Gothic Collisions: Regarding Trauma in Margaret Drabble’s The Gates of Ivory . In: The Gothic in Contemporary British Trauma Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26728-5_3
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