[In the following essay, Knutsen examines Drabble's postmodern perspective and moral vision in The Gates of Ivory. According to Knutsen, “The Gates of Ivory is a novel about the unmasking of illusions,” including the inadequacies of postmodern philosophy itself.]

INTRODUCTION

Margaret Drabble has been described as an ardent traditionalist and a symbolic moralist. In the late 50s, she was a student of F. R. Leavis, and early in her career she was explicit about her identification with the Great Tradition of English literature. She shared Leavis's belief that great literature has moral import and that a literary critic's duty is to assess the author's moral position. Like the other Leavisites, Drabble was negative about the more experimental and subjective techniques of modernism—techniques which emphasized personal perception to the detriment of moral involvement in literature. She has often underlined her personal commitment to nineteenth-century social realism. In 1967 she claimed, ‘I don't want to write an experimental novel to be read by people in fifty years who will say, oh, well, yes, she foresaw what was coming. I'm just not interested. I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore’. In her latest novel, The Gates of Ivory （1991）, Drabble still presents social realism, but has to grapple with the tenets of the postmodern society she depicts. She is faced with the dilemma of how to create moral focus in a fictional world embedded in a pluralistic, fragmented social reality.

In this article I will argue that Drabble thematizes central postmodern philosophical views and uses postmodern literary techniques in The Gates of Ivory. Recognizing the postmodern quality of the world she describes and grapples with, Drabble still searches for a moral imperative and shows that a lack of Utopian ideals or moral vision is just as dangerous as the dogmatism which postmodernism aims to unmask.

Drabble belongs to that rare breed of fictional author who also writes literary criticism, and this duality is naturally reflected in her novels. The Gates of Ivory is the third volume in a trilogy. The trilogy begins on New Year's Eve 1979 in the first volume, The Radiant Way （1988）. It follows the fates of three women, Liz Headleand, Esther Breuer, and Alix Bowen, who are friends from their university days in the 50s. The trilogy ends eight and a half years later in The Gates of Ivory. Thus, we have a document of the 80s in Great Britain as experienced by these women and their families and acquaintances.

Each volume of the trilogy invites a different analytical approach. The Radiant Way is a bildungsroman which atypically explores the development of three protagonists rather than one. It has retrospective sections that help us piece together the narratives of their lives. In the second volume, A Natural Curiosity （1989）, the ‘plot thickens’ and encourages a psychoanalytic approach as it explores the mysteries of the unconscious and makes extensive use of symbols. After reading the first two volumes, the reader's expectations are frustrated in the last book. The Gates of Ivory thematizes postmodernism as an intellectual trend in the 80s. There is a seeming lack of closure, a diminishing sense of character, the form is fragmented, and the notion of reality fades away until one is left with an endless chain of substitutions; a deferral of meaning. The novel invites a deconstructive reading.

Studies of narrative techniques have postulated a psychological need for narratives in readers. However, this need requires that the ending of a novel sheds light over the beginning. At the end of The Gates of Ivory the reader is left groping for meaning and thus truly becomes immersed in the postmodern experience. The novel becomes Drabble's objective correlative in refuting postmodernism.

OUR POSTMODERN REALITY

In literature the concept of postmodernism must be seen in relation to literary modernism, either as the continuation of the modern project or as a reaction against it. Critics have recognized two strains in postmodernism; a negative, apocalyptic strain, and a positive, liberating strain wherein humanity is freed from dogmatism and deceptive ideologies are unmasked. The Gates of Ivory is a novel about the unmasking of illusions, but it also implicitly unmasks the postmodern perception of the world. Drabble deconstructs the negative strain of postmodernism, showing that the infinite deferral of meaning is in itself meaningless.

Philosophically, postmodernism adopts an anti-Enlightenment, anti-Humanism position. Postmodern ‘discourses are all “deconstructive”’, Jane Flax explains, ‘They seek to distance us from and make us skeptical about the ideas concerning truth, knowledge, power, history, self and language that are often taken for granted within and serve as legitimations for contemporary Western culture’. Throughout The Gates of Ivory Drabble scrutinizes and questions metanarratives that, to a large extent, have become indelible parts of Western culture, thus reinforcing the culture that has created them.

THE FRAGMENTED SUBJECT

One of the central ideas of Western Humanism and the Enlightenment is the notion of the unitary self and the belief that rationality is the quality which separates humans from animals. ‘Essential to all Enlightenment beliefs is the existence of something called a “self”, a stable, reliable, integrative entity that has access to our inner and outer reality, at least to a limited （but knowable） degree’. In postmodern society, many people have a diminishing sense of self. Alienation and fragmentation threaten the unitary self. Drabble reflects these feelings in the character of Stephen Cox, the protagonist who sets out to explore Kampuchea: ’“I can't stick it all together”, he said. “Sex, politics, the past, myself. I am all in pieces” … “the gaps are so great. I am hardly made of the same human stuff. The same human matter. There is no consistency in me. No glue. No paste. I have no cohesion. I make no sense. I am a vacuum. I am fragments. I am morsels”’. Such feelings of incoherence and fragmentation are symptomatic for postmodern society.

Literary modernism was strongly influenced by Freud's theories of the unconscious. In postmodern times, the theory that many of our actions are determined by unconscious impulses and drives has undermined the belief in man as a rational being. The character of Liz Headleand, the psychiatrist, is throughout the novel associated with bourgeois values. In theory Liz is very familiar with the workings of the parent-child relationship. But in practice her knowledge is useless; she is estranged from her younger daughter Stella. Freud's theories are shown to be irrelevant when it comes to ‘real life’. If anything, his model of the personality and of personality development has augmented the decentering of the self in postmodern society. Realizing this, Liz feels guilty about her high income as a psychiatrist, assuming that idealistic people must look down on her for exploiting the postmodern need to search for a coherent self.

Simplifications of Freudian theory have led Western society to blame all neurotic or pathological behavior on ‘bad mothering’. Drabble reflects on the relationships between children and parents, particularly on the relationships between mothers and sons. Stephen Cox's mother is wasting away in a nursing home. He remembers her ‘smother-love’, her preference for his older brothers, and how she tied them all to her apron strings. Madame Akrun, a Kampuchean refugee, suffers from the loss of her eldest son, Mitra, who disappeared during an ambush of the Khmer Rouge. Her second son, Kem, is ignored until he becomes an invalid, once again giving her purpose in life, and forcing him into a womb-like dependence. The war photographer Konstantin Vassiliou has a troubled relationship with his mother, as well. In fact, there are no unproblematic child-parent relationships in the novel. Has Freudian theory created problems that would not have existed otherwise? The development of an integrated self faces insuperable barriers if we are to accept the model of personality development which psychoanalysis fosters.

The exploration of psychoanalytic discourse is strongest in A Natural Curiosity. Yet Drabble is also interested in Freud's deterministic theories of character development in The Radiant Way. According to Roberta Rubenstein, Drabble uses the first book of the trilogy to explore the classical ‘nature-nurture’ debate. The characters are interested in finding out whether it is genetics or environment which tips the scales in personality development. This is a continuation of Drabble's earlier preoccupation with the concepts of free will and predestination. Her girlhood fascination with Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, as Joanne Creighton has pointed out, leads her to ‘create characters, like Bunyan's who are wending their way through unchartered “moral landscapes”, a world where the old values are no longer tacitly accepted and new views are unclear’. A Natural Curiosity continues the nature-nurture debate, revises certain theories and life stories and rehabilitates certain characters. Although Rubenstein claims that Drabble's ‘revisionistic impulse’ is not always narratively successful, I would argue that her revisions are necessary for the unmasking of psychological discourse inherent in the last volume.

The Gates of Ivory's unchartered landscape is the insidious landscape of the postmodern world. The novel continues the nature-nurture debate of the first two volumes, expresses the same revisionistic impulse and even incorporates the ubiquitous Freudian imagery of severed heads, amputated limbs, and stray bones of the second novel. This exaggerated use of Freudian imagery suggests that although psychoanalytic discourse attempts to explain the workings of the self by integrating the unconscious, it has undermined the conception of the unitary self and proved that man's claims to reason are questionable. Freud never believed that understanding our unconscious motives would make us happier; only that we would be able to bear our misery more stoically. The connections between self-knowledge, freedom and human happiness which have been assumed to follow psychoanalysis have been posited by later therapists.

The focus on names and role-playing in The Gates of Ivory enhances the postmodern perception of the de-centered self. Stephen Cox has written some of his books under a pseudonym. Hattie Osborne, the actress-cum-literary-agent uses her stage name, having discarded the name ‘Kathleen’ with the unhappiness of her childhood. Miss Porntip, a beauty queen from Thailand who gets involved with Stephen, prefers her friends to call her ‘O’, a name with pornographic overtones. Names are changed, identities are changed, sometimes on impulse, sometimes for survival. The myriad of names which follow in the wake of many of today's women is also noted. Liz has three surnames; Abelwaithe, Lintot, and Headleand, and also uses Cox in her passport when looking for Stephen.

In keeping with postmodern literary practice, Drabble includes historical characters in her novel. Historical events are also incorporated, but both events and historical characters are distorted, falsified, and fictionalized. Such texts expose the fictionality of history itself, Linda Hutcheon explains, allowing us to see that history books are also constructed. In this sense history is another ‘deconstructed’ discourse. Some of the historical characters also play the name-changing game, ‘Pol Pot was once Saloth Sar. He has other aliases, Eighty-seven aliases. Some say Eighty-Seven is one of them. In Paris he wrote as “Original Khmer”. To the world he became, memorably, alliteratively, Pol Pot. At last the world remembers. He has made his point. He has entered history. Noms de guerre, noms de plume, noms de theatre’.

In Kampuchea, many refugees with affiliation to Western ideas or lifestyles had to change their identities, the roles they played in order to survive. Pol Pot's dream of a new society, starting from ‘the Year Zero’ was a nemesis for these people. Mitra, the missing refugee, had dreams of studying medicine, but had to change his role to escape the wrath of the Khmer Rouge; he pretended to be a vendor of cigarettes. He persuaded his Paris-educated mother to pose as a noodle-stall owner. These changes of identity and roles help to create the perception of the de-centered self, the personality in a constant state of flux.

THE ‘LEGITIMATION CRISIS’

A second characteristic of postmodern society is the so-called ‘legitimation crisis’; the fact that we no longer have access to principles which can act as criteria of value for anything else. There have been major transformations in our time in the structure of the economy and the family. There is uncertainty about the place of former super powers in the world system. Political groups have emerged with increasingly divergent ideas. There is no consensus concerning particular demands for equality, social legislation, or justice. Our perception of the universe, in a sense, has become de-centered and unstable, in analogy with the perception of the self. In the words of one of the characters, Alix Bowen, ‘we got over Copernicus, we got over Galileo, we got over Darwin, we have survived Einstein and the Death of God and the Death of the Family and the Death of the Novel, and what can we do now but laugh?’.

Stein Haugom Olsen claims that in postmodernism the lack of criteria for validity is often seen as positive. No ultimate explanation of the world or human nature exists. Instead there are many different or alternative explanations, and this is perceived as an enrichment, a paradise for the creative being. Under these conditions, however, every ideological argument becomes a question of convincing others to share one's own view, since rational arguments do not exist. Every argument becomes mere propaganda. In postmodern thinking no values can have ultimate validity, and therefore moral values cannot have ultimate validity, either. In consequence, postmodern criticism has no room for the ethical perspective; a fact which Haugom Olsen deplores. He calls for a radical break with this postmodern attitude. On the surface level, The Gates of Ivory describes the breakdown of ideologies and moral values which postmodernism has led to; a complexity of clashing or competing discourses, none of which is allowed to dominate. Superficially there is no synthetic or coherent viewpoint in this series of positions; it becomes a polyphony of voices. On a manifest level, however, Drabble's characters do choose standpoints which they live by and take responsibility for. Deceptive as these standpoints and values may be, they are nevertheless necessary.

Our ethical sense has been numbed by the mass media's twisted presentation of the world. Criteria for truth are ignored, for example, in news presentations. We tend to forget that the news involves ‘the selection of truth’, and that there may be many versions of the truth. Drabble's characters are involved both in the production and consumption of mass media products. As Marshall McLuhan has pointed out, we are on the threshold of a new era; the art of printing shaped our way of thinking about the world as linear and continuous, with a built-in cause/effect structure. The mass media return us to an auditive world instead of a visual world of print. Whoever watches news programs on television cannot fail to notice their fragmented version of the world. The presentation lacks a linear form with a beginning and end. It is a concoction of catastrophes, criminality, and celebrities. Furthermore, overexposure to media fragmentation makes us shut out parts of reality in self-defense. Drabble's narrator points out, ‘The dead and dying travel fast these days. We can devour thousands at breakfast with our toast and coffee, and thousands more on the evening news’. There is a limit to the amount of ‘truth’ postmodern man can endure.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE NOVEL'S TITLE

Stovel points out that ‘the source of moral conflict in ＼Drabble's］ fiction is the basic opposition between reality and illusion … Each of Drabble's novels centres on a dominant symbol which presents the major theme of the work through a skilful pattern of imagery. In every case, Drabble selects the central symbol as the title of her novel’. Thus, the title, The Gates of Ivory, has double allusions. It refers directly to Homer's The Odyssey. The preface to the novel is a passage from this work and introduces the central symbol of the ivory gates, and, by association, the gates of horn. The gates of horn also allude to Harry Levin's The Gates of Horn, a classical study of realism. This intertextuality connects Drabble's novel to the traditional debate on the realistic qualities of literature. Levin traces the ancient history of the two types of gates. One set was of opaque ivory, and the other of transparent horn. Through the ivory gates only fictitious dreams passed, whereas only truth could pass through the gates of horn. The ivory gate is slowly closing with the decline of romanticism, Levin infers, while the advent of realism has caused the gates of horn to open wider than ever.

The symbolic opposition between the gates of ivory and the gates of horn appears to be the opposition between falsehood or fiction and truth. Language has countless such binary oppositions: black/white, masculine/feminine, slow/fast—and so on. These oppositions in themselves imply a systematic imposition of order, something that deconstructive practice strives to undermine, as such analogical oppositions lead to oversimplification. Linked to oversimplification is the tendency to give one side of the binary opposition negative value and the other positive value, as in the opposition between feminine/masculine or nature/culture. One deconstructive tactic for undermining this binary thinking is the reversal of such values. Drabble's choice of title is deconstructive. We are presented with the binary opposition between the gates of ivory and the gates of horn. Earlier literary theorists adopted the gates of horn as a symbol for realism. The use of the terms real and realistic clearly implies their antitheses, like unreal or unrealistic, fantastic. We like to think of literature as revealing some sort of truth about life and humanity, yet Drabble has reversed the value hierarchy. Because both gates ultimately symbolize dreams, we are left with no ‘truth’ and no determinate ‘meaning’ with which to settle the meaning of the text. There is an indeterminate Derridean weaving, unweaving and reweaving of the fabric of discourse. A tension arises in the intersection between the two gates: ‘The worlds at times overlap and intersect. Stephen Cox meets a Kampuchean refugee who is playing the role of a Kampuchean refugee in an American semifictionalized documentary about Kampuchean refugees … The gates of ivory, the gates of horn. The shadow world’.

Since criteria for truth have disappeared in postmodern society, the choice of the ivory gates as title and central symbol is an apt one. The dreams which come through the gates of ivory are deceptive illusions. The dreams and ideologies Drabble presents often turn out to be illusory, unreal. Throughout the book she thematizes the discrepancy between the real and the false. Postmodern society has lost the ability to discern the difference because the Enlightenment idea of truth has been unmasked as just another chimera.

IS SOCIAL REALISM POSSIBLE IN POSTMODERN SOCIETY?

It has been claimed that a striking feature of literary works produced in the Western world during the present century is that they are generally susceptible to being divided between the idealistand realistphilosophical positions. While modernist literature ‘often seems to point to the existence of a set of multiple and irreconcilable realities … Realist literature … is monist rather than pluralist vis-a-vis reality …’ In contrast to this divided perception of the world, Drabble combines the idealist and realist philosophical positions in a dual vision. ‘Realism provides the perfect vehicle for the artist's moral vision’, Stovel argues, ‘for Drabble is aware that the more crass the actual, the more crucial the ideal. While the realist holds the mirror up to society, the idealist paints a vision of a golden realm to judge it by’.

Levin sees a pattern of disillusionment as a major part of what we call realism. The Gates of Ivory is a novel about the postmodern unmasking of illusions. Dreams are also illusive, and in keeping with Freudian discourse, Drabble uses series of dream descriptions to show us how the characters' daytime preoccupations invade their nightly dreams. In the following passage she explores the sleeping dreams of characters who have recently spent an evening together, ‘Liz dreams of temples and monkeys and tigers, of chattering and screeching, of jungles and ruins and an ambush on an ill-made road … Hattie Osborne dreams that Stephen Cox has come home and wants his bed back. He is standing by her bedside, saying, “Get up, get out, get up!”’ We are drawn into the dreamworlds of the characters and see how their dreams are generated, how they link with reality. A recurring dream in the novel is the dream of Mme. Savet Akrun. She ‘dreams of the thud of the spade on skull. It is like no other sound in the world. It repeats and repeats. In a dry sweat, dreaming, she wills herself to awake’. This nightmare is an instant replay of a real situation she has experienced. Drabble probes the relationship between the real and the false, the conscious and the unconscious; we see that they overlap.

COMPETING DISCOURSES

In addition to the fitful dreams of sleep, the book presents a number of ideological dreams or discourses which also turn out to be from the gates of ivory and are shown to be deceptive. The prime deceptive dream is the age-old dream of Utopia, Bunyan's ‘shining city on the hill’. This is a dream which comes in many versions and distortions. It was the dream of Martin Luther King. It was the dream of Pol Pot and Ho Chi Minh. Stephen Cox and many of his contemporaries were captured by this dream in their youths, in the form of Marxist socialism. In their version of the dream lay the belief that the wealth and resources of the world could be divided fairly among the peoples of the world. The Utopian dream has become an indelible part of the social conscience of today's world, the mainstay of the defenders of socialism and the egalitarian society. Although this Utopian dream proves to be deceptive, unrealizable, many of Drabble's characters choose it willingly. In spite of their disillusionment, their actions are based on a private moral imperative.

Capitalism and competition have triumphed, religion has withered away, and there is no longer any place in the West for self-sacrifice, brotherly love, compassion, community. The agencies whose representatives now clustered round Stephen had been founded to cure this excess … But it had appeared that they had all been misguided. They had acted on false premises. For there was, it had turned out, no superflux. There was no limit to man's greed. He could eat and eat and swell and swell and yet want more and more. This was the lesson of the eighties.

Stephen Cox wanted to know what went wrong with the socialist dream. He was also basically skeptical of what he heard and read, so he started his quest to Kampuchea to see for himself. His dream was also the dream of Pol Pot. But when the Khmer Rouge tried to implement the dream, results were disastrous: ‘One million, two million dead. Corpses, skulls, killing fields. How can it all have happened? How could a French infection from the Sorbonne drive this quiet, faraway peasant people mad?’ Stephen joins the statistics of the dead in Kampuchea. His death of a fever contracted in the jungle might seem senseless. The biblical connotations of martyrdom connected with the name Stephen give his death an ironic tinge. Yet the death of this proponent of Marxist socialism foreshadows the collapse of the Marxist ideology we have witnessed, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Republic. The discourse of socialism/communism has been unmasked, but in Drabble's novel the ethical quality of altruism remains in spite of this collapse. Drabble shows us characters who are constantly searching for cohesion in their lives, some antidote to the fragmentation of the modern Western world where personal relationships are tentative, divorce prevalent, and only death certain. Like Stephen they protest, ‘All this waste. All this wasted possibility. All this suffering. All these dreams. All this cruelty. All these dead’. Her characters resist the postmodern attitude and seek moral and ethical purpose.

At the other end of the scale, the extremes of another ideological dream are presented. Miss Porntip, goddess of materialism, is a parody of this discourse. She repudiates Stephen's picture of global suffering.

‘No, is not so. Is better now. Is better life expectancy, more electrics, more saloon cars, more soap, more rice, more nice clothings and suitings, more ice-cream, more Ovaltine, more champagne, more cassette players, more faxes, more aeroplanes, more Rolex watches, more perfumes, more satellites, more TV, more microwave, more word processor, more shower fitments, more motorbicycles, more chips, more tampons, more tweezers, more cabinets, more musical, more confections, more bracelets, more prawns, more fruit varieties, more choice, more liberty, more democracy’.

The sheer excess of Porntip's speech gives it an accumulative, incantatory effect. She functions as the spokeswoman for materialism, tempting people away from reality, luring them to block out the horrors of life. As Calypso captured Ulysses, Porntip captures Stephen. She tells him, ‘Is not necessary stay in horrid places’ … ‘Is not necessary see poor people and horrid places’. This is the discourse of capitalism; advertisement, possessions, happiness on hire-purchase, which competes with the discourse of world misery, and also seems to have won. The juxtaposition of the two discourses is a moral indictment of the 80s.

Since postmodernism repudiates rational argument, all political arguments are reduced to propaganda. ‘Truth’ belongs to the party which has the greatest powers of persuasion; or should we say the persuasion of power? The novel illustrates this idea in an ironic way. In England, Alix Bowen reflects on the life of her politically idealistic parents, now dead: ‘Defeated on almost every front by the swelling materialism of the 80s and the fading of the left-wing, CND dreams, this austere and slightly ludicrous couple had found their twilight home in the green movement’. Drabble connects the ‘green’ mentality of modern society with the original dream of Pol Pot through Stephen:

Stephen had expressed his interest in his curiosity about a country which had tried to cut itself off from the forward march of what is called progress … It had returned to People Power. Men yoked with oxen pulled the plough. Men and women with bare hands built dams and dykes as in the dawn of time. They had doused one another with bitter leaves, and given one another transfusions of coconut juice.

A sort of original Green Party, Stephen had suggested to Liz, with his dubious little smile.

The juxtaposition of the British Green movement with the implications of Pol Pot's ‘green’ thinking shows how postmodern argumentation can lead to totalitarian systems when powers of persuasion become the persuasion of power. As Haugom Olsen puts it, ‘The torturer can convince more easily than the advocate of human rights’. Drabble unmasks the moral morass of postmodern thinking and proves the need for a moral imperative.

The Enlightenment belief in progress has also been questioned by postmodern philosophers. To link science and progress with happiness, becomes, at best, ironic in the light of Hiroshima or the Holocaust. Another grim irony is that the economic comfort of Westerners may ultimately be dependent on the underdevelopment of the Third World. Drabble's description of the consequences of a ‘green’ lifestyle in Pol Pot's Kampuchea is, of course, a caricature. The green movement in Britain is rather evidence of the fact that people are searching for a better way to live, Utopian in its dimensions. Stopping the forward march of ‘progress’ is no solution. Although belief in an automatic progression towards a better world is unmasked as naïve, people need to believe in world amelioration and work towards it actively and consciously.

THE POSTMODERN STYLE OF THE NOVEL

The subject of The Gates of Ivory is postmodern society and the novel has a fragmented, non-cohesive form which mirrors and underscores this subject matter. Technically the narrative is disrupted and the levels of narrative are complicated by quick changes in focalization and by intrusive comments from the implicit narrator. The narrator self-consciously reflects on form and content, ‘perhaps for this subject matter, one should seek the most disjunctive, the most uneasy and incompetent of forms, a form that offers not a grain of comfort and repose’.

Drabble's use of metafiction in intrusive narrational comments draws us out of the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ so familiar in period realism. Postmodern fiction seeks to establish a different reading pact with the reader. As Pierre Vitoux points out, ‘Postmodern novels, by placing the narrative situation in the foreground, emphasize the relative conjectural nature of their fictional construct’. The new postmodern reading pact allows that a truth is being told, supported by facts, but we are aware that a teller constructs that truth and chooses which facts to present. Self-reflexive metafiction foregrounds the figure of the author and the act of creation. It also dramatizes the role of the reader through ‘defamiliarization’; the everyday becomes strange. The reader is forced to see a new view of reality. Defamiliarization is a carry-over from modernism and falls in with the postmodern wish to pose questions about the relationship between the text and reality.

Postmodern literature often has the effect of collage with its changes of focalization and mix of genres. In the depiction of Hattie Osborne the novel jumps from an omniscient point of view to the first person confessional mode familiar from Drabble's early fiction. Another narrative variation is fragments from the disorganized notes of Stephen Cox; tableaux from his travels in Southeast Asia: ‘The Fever Hospital’, ‘The Black Swan’, ‘The Red Road’, ‘The Leper King’, various atrocity stories and reunion stories.

Part of the frustration the reader feels about The Gates of Ivory may be due to its apparent lack of closure. Postmodernist texts tend to reject narrative closure. Purposefully shying away from closure, Drabble presents several of her characters with undecided fates. Mitra, the Kampuchean refugee, is an example of this self-conscious manipulation. His fate is open-ended throughout the book.

Mitra pushes a glittering articulated snake of super-trolleys down a gleaming corridor in Toronto, whistling as he goes. Mitra bends over his medical textbooks in an attic in a Parisian suburb and late into the night he studies the names of the small bones and the large. Mitra lies in a field hospital of delicate bamboo, delirious, with a newly amputated leg. Mitra in a smart pastiche uniform of white and gold and green bows at the gateway to the Shangri-La Hotel. Mitra in a tattered uniform of camouflage and UN cast-offs sits on the earth with a group of children instructing them in the art of throwing grenades which they have not got … Mitra is dead and has been dead for ten years.

In this manner, Mitra represents the fate of each and every war refugee; he becomes the universal refugee.

Earlier theories of narrative closure were preoccupied with ‘narratives which work towards visions which embody certain kinds of ending or conclusions, such as apocalypse or utopia’, Roger Webster says. In recent literature, ‘the concept of closure refers to the ways in which a text persuades a reader to understand and accept a particular “truth” … to accept a certain view of the world as valid or natural, and works which have apparently “open”, unresolved or ambiguous endings still contain an ideological closure’. Postmodern narratives tend to embrace ambivalence and ambiguity, to accept that there is no metanarrative of truth or morality. The ending of The Gates of Ivory appears ‘open’, or unresolved, because none of the competing discourses in the novel is given precedence. However, the characters in Drabble's novels all finally seek the protection and consolation of family and community, even though these institutions are under siege. Drabble seeks an Archimedes point from which to measure value and finds it in community. She conforms to the opinion voiced by Alan Wilde in his description of our postmodern reality: ‘an indecision about the meanings or relations of things is matched by a willingness to live with uncertainty, to tolerate, and, in some cases, to welcome a world seen as random and multiple, even at times, absurd’.

The ideological closure inherent in the actions of the fictional characters suggests that we need a version of truth to live by—a moral vision. The ability to embrace ambivalence and ambiguity—to accept that there is no metadiscourse of truth or morality—does not necessarily mean that we do not need a moral vision to live by.

The question remains whether the postmodern point of view, with its renunciation of all metanarratives, allows an ethical or moral vision. Steven Connor believes that if we examine the postmodern critique of the metanarratives of truth and justice closely, we will find that it implicitly depends on the assumption of ‘the universal right of all not to be treated unjustly and oppressively—otherwise, who would care whether metanarratives were false or not, oppressive or not, and what reason might there be for their abandonment when they no longer compelled assent?’ Skepticism toward metanarratives is, therefore, not a symptom of the collapse of ethical principles, but proof of their continuing corrective influence. The trilogy shows how far we have drifted from the ideological hopefulness of the 60s and 70s and illuminates how deeply we have sunk into the disillusionment of the fin-de-siŠcle. The confusion the reader feels in this postmodern narrative is analogous to the ethical confusion that reigns in our postmodern world. The ultimate responsibility of refuting ethical relativism lies with the individual.

CONCLUSION

In The Gates of Ivory, the ivory gates symbolize the deceptive metanarratives which postmodernism unmasks. Drabble's novel questions the metanarratives of the West, demanding that we reassess our values before exporting them to the East. We may see Connor's statement as one more persuasive argument, or we may have to admit, as Terry Eagleton does, that as students of English literature, we are all ‘Leavisites’ whether we know it or not, irremediably altered by Leavis's historic intervention. His creed ‘has entered into the bloodstream of English studies in England as Copernicus reshaped our astronomical beliefs, has become a form of spontaneous critical wisdom as deep-seated as our conviction that the earth moves round the sun’.

The Gates of Ivory is therefore not a farewell to The Great Tradition. It is a painful probing of postmodern society which reveals our innate need for criteria of validity. Great literature still has moral import.