Guerrillas by V. S. Naipaul

First published: 1975

Type of work: Satiric realism

Time of work: Sometime in the 1970’s

Locale: An unnamed Caribbean island

Principal Characters:

• Peter Roche, who was once a revolutionary hero in South Africa and is now a perpetual refugee working for an international firm
• Jane, Roche’s mistress
• Jimmy Ahmed, a romantic black revolutionary
• Meredith Herbert, a local politician who becomes a minister after the troubles on the island
• Harry de Tunja, a local businessman and friend to Peter, Jane, and Meredith
• Adela, a servant to Peter and Jane
• Bryant, a local orphan who lives in Jimmy’s commune

The Novel

Based loosely on V. S. Naipaul’s nonfictional essay “Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad,” the action of Guerrillas recasts the story of postcolonialism in terms of the relationships between four people on a disturbed West Indian island. The novel opens with a sentence whose tone, eerily out of place, recalls that of other nineteenth century English stories whose ideology creates an ironic subtext: “After lunch Jane and Roche left their house on the Ridge to drive to Thrushcross Grange.” Peter Roche is a man who has gained respect, employment on the island, and press coverage for his first book as a result of his reputation “as someone who had suffered in South Africa.” He works for an American bauxite company (once associated with the slave trade) from which he gets secondhand machinery to support his association with Jimmy Ahmed, a Black-Chinese radical leader. It is to Jimmy’s commune, Thrushcross Grange, that he drives Jane at the start of the novel. Jane is a white female version of what Naipaul elsewhere called a “mimic man,” a person who has mindlessly and inattentively learned to mimic what she hears in print and words. Living vicariously through others, she follows Roche to the island only to be progressively disappointed by his lack of power and authority. She starts, thoughtlessly, a sexual affair with Jimmy that ends only with her brutal rape and murder at the end of the book.

The action of the novel results from the unexamined and unacknowledged consequences of the apparently innocent “drive” to Thrushcross Grange. For Jane and Roche, the visit is the start of the disintegration of their fragile relationship. For Jimmy, meeting Jane is the start of a fevered imaginary encounter with a deranging object of ambivalent desire that he translates into a fictional Clarissa in the hysterically romantic novel he is in the process of writing. For Bryant, one of the poor local youths who lives in the commune, it is the start of his sexual betrayal by Jimmy.

The novel alternates between chapters that depict the action from the perspective of each of the major characters, who view, with varying degrees of insight, the political, racial, and economic problems of the island. The cold journalistic eye that reports the action of the first chapter contrasts with the frenzied confessional yearnings of Jimmy’s fictional self in his letters and novel and with the brilliant chapter in which Meredith interviews Roche on radio. The action of the novel begins with illusion in the possibility of revolutionary change, disperses itself into a cloudy uprising, and ends with a grotesque rape-murder. As the epigraph to the novel, written by Jimmy, suggests, political actions built out of mindless slogans result in personal, communal, and political chaos: “When everybody wants to fight there’s nothing to fight for. Everybody wants to fight his own little war, everybody is a guerrilla.” The sequence of action reflects Naipaul’s conviction that politics is but the extension of human relationships and that the corrupt fantasies that sustain neocolonialism must necessarily be expressed in the corruption of the private relations that engender such fantasies. At the end of the novel, Roche knows that Jimmy has murdered Jane, escapes the island concealing evidence of her existence, and, in the process, necessarily denies connection, knowledge, or memory of her.

The Characters

Peter Roche has in his own way been a “guerrilla,” a white man who has written a book about his torture and imprisonment by the South African government; he now sees himself, however, as a man without a function who undermines himself daily. His involvement with Jimmy’s idea of a revolution based on land, a fantasy agricultural commune, is exposed by the end of the novel to be as ephemeral as his relationship with Jane. The irony of his present job as a public relations officer for Sablich, a firm that was once involved with the slave trade, suggests the discrepancy between the ideals of his autobiography and the reality of his daily life. Chapter 13, in which Meredith interviews Roche, is the crucial chapter in this respect, revealing the emptiness beneath Roche’s illusions of himself as a revolutionary on the side of the local blacks. In fact, as the interview suggests and as Roche has earlier admitted to Jane, the driving force in his personality has not been the revolutionary’s desire to subvert the establishment but rather the need of the colonial personality to identify with the oppressor rather than the oppressed. In admitting his acceptance of authority, Roche blames the educational system that subjected him to a kind of humiliation that conditions colonizers to revere order, power, and the group, and to fear the alien Other.

Jane, the white upper-middle-class woman educated on fantasies of class, power, and race, is compelled to face her own duplicity and lack of identity in relationships on the island. Her relationship with Roche duplicates the falsehood and dependency of a depraved colonial relationship: It is dependence without responsibility, action without historical memory, and a bond based on illusion and fantasy of the power of the Other to protect and provide a reason to be. Her relationship with Jimmy is entered into with a characteristic thoughtlessness and indifference to consequences. Because she becomes a symbol of the white world that Jimmy desires and loathes, she becomes both a victim and a scapegoat for what the colonial oppressors have done to the oppressed.

Jimmy Ahmed, the vacuous, central “guerrilla” of the novel, is a character created by the verbal adulation of a European press. Celebrated in England as a radical black leader, Jimmy is a nightmare vision of the victimized, marginalized, excluded man (Heathcliff in the subtext of the novel) who empowers himself through subjecting others to his personal, political, and sexual demands. Jimmy’s mental baggage, like the interior decor of his house, is made up of the refuse of colonial education: “The furniture was also English ... of a kind seen in the windows of furniture shops.... On the fitted bookshelves a number of books . . . stood solidly together: The Hundred Best Books of the World.... It was a room without disorder.” So, too, his ordered dreams are made up of packaged, meaningless revolutionary cliches and slogans:

All revolutions begin with the land. Men are born on the earth, every man has his one spot, it is his birthright, and men must claim their portion of the earth in brotherhood and harmony. In this spirit we came an intrepid band to virgin forest, it is the life style and philosophy of Thrushcross Grange.

The pathology of his demented relationship to his fictional “Clarissa” is duplicated by all the other personal, social, and political relationships in the novel.

Critical Context

The first of Naipaul’s novels to win acclaim in the United States, Guerrillas is the most bitter of a series of novels he has written about the contemporary history of the island of his birth, Trinidad. Like his later novel A Bend in the River (1979), Guerrillas had its inspiration in reality, in the Trinidadian Black Power cult figure Michael X, who killed a white woman. It is one of Naipaul’s darkest, most complex studies of politics, history, postcolonial traumas, and individual identity, a brilliant examination of the problem of identities made marginal by culture, history, and economics, and of the terror of reforming identity in exile.

Bibliography

Gurr, Andrew. Writers in Exile, 1981. Hemenway, Robert. “Sex and Politics in V. S. Naipaul,” in Studies in the Novel. XIV (Summer, 1982), pp. 189-202.

King, Bruce. The New English Literatures, 1980.

Lim, Ling-Mei. V. S. Naipaul’s Later Fiction: The Creative Constraints of Exile, 1984.

Wirth-Nesher, Hana. “The Curse of Marginality: Colonialism in Naipaul’s Guerrillas,” in Modern Fiction Studies. XXX (Autumn, 1984), pp. 531-545.