SOURCE: "A Novel for Our Time: V. S. Naipaul's Guerrillas," in The Failure of Theory: Essays on Criticism and Contemporary Fiction, The Harvester Press, 1987, pp. 185-206.

[In the following essay, Parrinder addresses a number of themes in Guerrillas, including the notion of the "Noble Robber" and sexual violation.]

I

I think there's an element of nostalgia in reading Hardy, and even in reading Dickens or George Eliot. There is narrative there, the slow development of character, and people are longing for this vanished, ordered world. Today, every man's experience of dislocation is so private that unless a writer absolutely matches that particular man's experience the writer seems very private and obscure. So I think the art of fiction is becoming a curious, shattered thing…. I think it may be that the world now requires another kind of imaginative interpretation.

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.

Of the five contemporary novelists considered in Part II of this book, Anthony Burgess, Muriel Spark and Doris Lessing were born in 1917, 1918, and 1919 respectively. V. S. Naipaul and B. S. Johnson belong to a younger generation, having been born in 1932 and 1933. These novelists are 'English' in the sense that their life and work has been centred in Britain and the Commonwealth rather than the United States. For all that, two are resident in Mediterranean countries, one (Muriel Spark) is of Scottish-Jewish descent, and both Muriel Spark and Doris Lessing spent much of their childhood in Southern Africa. V. S. Naipaul is a Trinidad East Indian. Several of the five (like most successful English writers of the century) probably derive a large proportion of their income from the United States. Only Johnson, a Londoner and a London novelist, satisfies all the standard criteria of 'Englishness'—or did so, that is, at the time of his suicide in 1973.

V. S. Naipaul's characters are, as often as not, homeless expatriates. Like them, their creator has no fixed audience or close-knit community to which he belongs. He is not even a 'novelist's novelist' in the Jamesian or Conradian sense, having shown himself to be as uneasy about the inherited traditions of the novel as any of his contemporaries. His novels do not seem to have been written according to predetermined patterns or preconceived theories, and they have appeared at irregular and increasingly lengthy intervals. He has spoken of writing as an instinctive, unconscious process: 'The world abrades one, one comes to certain resolutions and then one devises by instinct and through dreams and all kinds of senses a story that is a symbol for all this'. Novels and stories are offered to him (as he once put it) from time to time, though in the last dozen years he has published only two of them, Guerrillas (1975) and A Bend in the River (1979). Meanwhile, his writing and his occasional interviews have emphasised the contemporary novelist's idiosyncrasy, his determined isolation and cherished independence of his fellow-writers, groups and movements.

The belief that a writer's identity lies in his or her unpredictability and independence is a defining characteristic of the culture in which Lessing, Spark and Burgess, as well as Naipaul, are significant names. B. S. Johnson was another dedicated individualist, the leader, as it were, of a literary movement that was never permitted to attract more than one member. Almost any other contemporary English novelist of repute could be chosen to illustrate the same qualities of pluralism and idiosyncrasy. Literary theory would argue, however, that the individualism of these writers is simply one of the delusions of bourgeois liberalism.

It is curious that two of the opposing literary dogmas of the age—the creed of authorial independence and the structuralist theory of the 'death of the author'—should particularly attach themselves to the writing of novels. (Roland Barthes' seminal essay 'The Death of the Author', for instance, begins and ends with the question of whether Balzac was an 'Author'). Naipaul has described the novel as a literary form 'born at the same time as the spirit of rebellion', which 'expresses, on the aesthetic plane, the same ambition'. The concept of 'rebellion', which Naipaul derives from Albert Camus' The Rebel, refers in the first instance not to collective upheaval but to the action of an individual, which is 'representative' to the extent that it comes to be seen as focal and symbolic. The novel also is an act of individual, not of collective, creation. Unlike works for the cinema, the theatre and the concert hall, it is not dependent on the dynamics of group performance for its realisation. At the same time, novels are composed of time-honoured structures and devices whose function it is to disguise and dissipate their origins in the work of named individual producers. These devices, such as the fictitious narrator, the multiplication of internal discourses and the artificiality of the narrative situation have understandably been emphasised by formalist and poststructuralist criticism.

In the past, many novels not only had a fictitious narrator but remained anonymous or pseudonymous on their first appearance. Yet the novel as Naipaul has defined it—as an expression of the spirit of rebellion—cannot forever remain anonymous. The fact that anonymous or pseudonymous novels have often been presented as 'authentic' and 'nonfictional' documents before their authorship was revealed suggests that a novel, like an act of rebellion, may be constituted as such at the moment when somebody claims the responsibility for it. A hold-up or a bomb explosion requires the signature of an individual or an organisation in order to be construed as an act of rebellion or sabotage; and much the same may be said of the way that we recognise a novel. But the author remains invisible, 'underground', even though he has put his name to the text; all we know for certain is that the visible fictive structure is his handiwork. To recognise the author behind the fiction requires an inductive leap comparable to the leap we make when we come to see a crime or a display of intransigence as an intelligible act of rebellion.

This argument suggests that, if the 'death of the author' proclaimed by literary theory had indeed taken place, the novel could survive only as a 'curious, shattered thing', a feeble anachronism. On the other hand, if the novel remains healthy it is surely because the inductive leap which converts literary structures into forms of individual expression is still everywhere capable of being made. The two epigraphs to this chapter (which both date from the early 1970s) show how Naipaul, for one, has oscillated between the paralysis of doubt and the energy of faith. Both the moment of doubt and the moment of renewed energy are implicit in the dialectics of the novel as an act of self-assertive rebellion. As for Naipaul's expressed belief that fiction 'never lies', that it 'reveals the writer totally'—these statements are no less true for being, on the face of it, outrageous paradoxes. It is as if he were calmly declaring that the ideal of a morally transparent art of fiction—the ideal towards which B. S. Johnson had so valiantly and yet so laboriously striven—was attainable, as it were, by default: that fiction always reveals the author (just as the deed reveals its perpetrator) whether he likes it or not. This belief bespeaks a confidence in liberal humanism which Johnson, for one, could not feel. But Naipaul's liberalism is not of a traditional sort, any more than his fiction belongs to such crude theoretical categories as 'classic realism' or the 'conventional novel'. To make this case we must turn to Guerrillas, a major novel which I shall interpret as Naipaul's answer, given in the mid-1970s, to the question of the 'kind of imaginative interpretation' which the world now requires.

II

Does fiction 'never lie'? Does it 'reveal the writer totally'? The cliché of 'imaginative interpretation' is a reminder that the novel occupies a middle ground between journalism (which almost inevitably lies as it attempts to tell the truth) and fantasy (which reveals the writer even in the act of concealing him). The plot of Guerrillas shows marked similarities with a series of actual events in Naipaul's native Trinidad in 1971–2—events which he has outlined in a penetrating journalistic essay, 'Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad' (1980). When Guerrillas first appeared some reviewers, aware of these events, mistook it for a documentary novel rather than a work of imaginative invention. It is not a documentary, as comparison with Naipaul's essay makes clear. Yet the essay also argues that the 'actual events' in Trinidad represented a horrifying and revealing acting-out of the fantasies of those responsible for them; and Naipaul in turn has fantasised about the events and has used his fantasy to explore the revelatory relations of the real and the fantastic. If the result is to be classed as fictional 'realism' then it is the realistic fiction of a fantasy age.

Even the title is a fantasy, for in Guerrillas no one is a guerrilla (though there is one disillusioned ex-guerrilla) and yet everyone fantasises about guerrillas. On the unnamed Caribbean island in which the novel is set 'the newspaper, the radio and the television spoke of guerrillas', but nobody really knows why they do so. The crimes and acts of violence that occur could be the manifestations of an organised revolutionary group, but it seems far more likely that they are the work of isolated bandits, fanatical sects, and criminal gangs. The government, however, has an interest in proving that the 'guerrillas' exist, and can be defeated, once it is confident of putting an end to the disturbances. The world-wide cult of the guerrilla which has inflamed the imaginations of many people on the island is responsible both for the spread of this collective fantasy and for the possibility of exploiting it.

A guerrilla is an irregular soldier. However, there are many other activities which overlap with guerrilla warfare to some extent, so that bandits, outlaws, terrorists, assassins, rebellious peasants, and agrarian revolutionaries all came to be associated with the cult of the guerrilla (which reached its height at the time of the killing of Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967). Guerrillas is constructed around the figure of Jimmy Ahmed, a would-be revolutionary leader whose 'agricultural commune' on a disused colonial plantation is looked upon by the authorities as a 'cover for the guerrillas'. Although some parallels could be drawn with events in Jamaica and Grenada as well as Trinidad, the model for Jimmy Ahmed is Michael Abdul Malik, the former Black Power leader known as 'Michael X' who was hanged in Trinidad in 1975. Four years earlier, Michael X had returned to his and Naipaul's native island, where he started a commune on a suburban plot near Port of Spain. The produce of the 1 1/2-acre strip of land was to be sold at a 'People's Store'. Far from becoming a base for agrarian reform, the commune was soon torn apart by the murder of two of its own members.

It is a reflection of the well-publicised spread of guerrilla and terrorist activities in the last twenty years that there has grown up a genre of 'terrorist novels', comparable perhaps to the industrial novels of the 1840s and to the anarchist novels of the 1880s and '90s. In addition to Guerrillas, Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist, Muriel Spark's The Only Problem, Brian Moore's The Revolution Script, Angus Wilson's Setting the World on Fire, and Raymond Williams's The Volunteers may be mentioned as examples of the form. Closely related to it are novels of violent social revolution, such as Nadine Gordimer's July's People, and novels of state terrorism and social upheaval such as Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm and Naipaul's own In a Free State. Many of these novels portray political violence from a 'middle-class' standpoint, but its handling in Guerrillas is unusually indirect: we do not even get an eye-witness account of the riots in which Jimmy Ahmed briefly emerges as a popular leader. Naipaul's most distinctive contribution to the 'terrorist novel', however, is his exploration of the symbiotic relations between revolutionary violence and literary fantasy. He has quoted a witness of the urban guerrillas in Argentina in the early 1970s as saying that 'They see themselves as a kind of comic-book hero. Clark Kent in the office by day, Superman at night, with a gun'. Of the murder of the Englishwoman Gale Benson, planned by Michael Abdul Malik and Hakim Jamal (an American Black Power campaigner) in Trinidad in 1971, Naipaul has written as follows:

This was a literary murder, if ever there was one. Writing led both men there: for both of them, uneducated, but clever, hustlers with the black cause always to hand, operating always among the converted or half-converted, writing had for too long been a public relations exercise, a form of applauded lie, fantasy. And in Arima it was a fantasy of power that led both men to contemplate, from their different standpoints, the act of murder…. Benson, English and middle class, was just the victim Malik needed: his novel began to come to life.

Naipaul is probably unique among commentators on the Malik case in focussing on Michael X's unfinished novel, a primitive narrative which nevertheless serves as a 'pattern book, a guide to later events'. In it he was 'settling scores with the English middle class'. Guerrillas, like 'Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad', tells the story of a literary murder, and in a certain sense both works are extended pieces of literary criticism.

Jimmy Ahmed's public statements, such as his 'Communique No 1' and his noticeboard advertising the 'PEOPLE'S COMMUNE/ FOR THE LAND AND THE REVOLUTION', are themselves a species of fiction. In addition, Guerrillas offers lengthy extracts from Ahmed's correspondence and from the novel he is trying to write. Both Naipaul's novel and his essay on Michael X can be read as the work of a genuine novelist relentlessly exposing a bad and bogus one. In the essay, Michael X is portrayed as the creator of an elaborate murder plot: 'When he transferred his fantasy to real life', Naipaul observes, 'he went to work like the kind of novelist he would have liked to be'. Whether or not Jimmy Ahmed's involvement in murder is premeditated to this extent is hard to determine; on the whole it seems unlikely. The murder in Guerrillas is felt as inevitable and is the outcome of a powerful literary logic—but the 'author' of this particular plot is V. S. Naipaul, not one of his characters.

Jimmy Ahmed has named his commune 'Thrushcross Grange'. In the opening paragraphs Jane, an Englishwoman, and Roche, a politically exiled white South African, are on their way to visit the Grange. Jimmy, Roche explains, 'took a writing course', and Wuthering Heights was one of the books he had to read. 'I think he just likes the name', Roche adds. But Jimmy, a half-breed who claims to have been born in a Chinese grocery, identifies with Heathcliff, to whom Catherine Earnshaw once said that 'Your mother was an Indian princess and your father was the Emperor of China'. Jimmy's self-projection as Heathcliff makes him one of the line of literary fantasists—including Ganesh Ransumair, the mystic masseur, B. (for Black) Wordsworth, the poet of Miguel Street, and Mr Biswas, sign-painter and journalist—who had been the central figures of Naipaul's early fictions. The comic innocence of those earlier books is summed up in the figure of Elias, the slum boy in Miguel Street (1959) who pronounces 'literature' as 'litricher' ('it sounded like something to eat, something rich like chocolate'). But Jimmy's mispronunciations, such as 'T' rush-cross Grange' and 'Wur-thering Heights', have a more sinister sound.

Guerrillas makes other references to the Victorian novel. Naipaul has mentioned Jean Rhys as the pioneer of West Indian fiction, and Guerrillas, like Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, has some crucial echoes of Jane Eyre. The heroine is called Jane, she is English, and she is associated with air travel, flying in near the beginning of the novel and being on the verge of using her return air ticket to the end; finally the fiction of her departure by air is used to cover up the fact of her murder. Jane, whose mind is a morass of borrowed notions and half-baked radical opinions, might be called Jane Air (she has no other surname). She is torn between two lovers—Roche, who has come to the island to work in public relations for one of the old colonial trading companies, and Jimmy—a choice faintly reminiscent of Jane Eyre's choice between St John Rivers and Mr Rochester, especially as Jimmy has a prior commitment in the form of his homosexual relationship with the psychopathic slum-boy Bryant. Socially the situations of Jane and her Mr Rochester have been reversed: he is the orphan, she is the 'blanche' or white lady. Yet her status cannot protect her from the series of violations foreshadowed when Bryant, aware that she is beginning her liaison with Jimmy, calls her the 'white rat'. (Jane Eyre, it will be remembered, was called a 'rat' by her arch-enemy John Reed.)

The tragedy of Guerrillas takes the form it does because Jimmy's affair with Jane arouses Bryant's latent fury. Jimmy has been described as a 'succubus', a word that Jane is forced to look up; this may mean that he has a demonic nature like Heathcliff, or it may be a codeword for homosexuality. Jimmy's ambitions are not confined to being the leader of an agricultural commune, 'buggering a couple of slum boys' in the bush. But despite the bravado of his public statements, in private he is a lost and disillusioned man in whose eyes the 'revolution' has become devalued to endless, anarchic and pointless struggle. As he writes to an English friend,

Things are desperate Roy, when the leader himself begins to yield to despair, things are bad. The whole place is going to blow up, I cannot see how I can control the revolution now. When everybody wants to fight there's nothing to fight for. Everybody wants to fight his own little war, everybody is a guerrilla.

(The last two sentences here supply Naipaul with his title and epigraph.) Many strands in Jimmy's make-up, including fear and something one can only describe as generosity, go into the promise he makes, immediately after writing these words, to pacify Bryant (who has just seen the 'white rat'):

He went and put his hands on Bryant's shoulders. His fingers pressed against the gritty jersey and the damp skin below. He took his face close to Bryant's and said, 'I'll give her to you'.

The 'gift' of Jane to Bryant cannot be paralleled in Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights; on the contrary, love is fiercely possessive in the Brontë novels. We are in the presence of an older literary stereotype, to which a slender clue may be given by Jane's reading-matter shortly before she is murdered. For why should Jane, a representative of a section of the middle class which Naipaul has described as 'the people who keep up with "revolution" as with the theatre, the revolutionaries who visit centres of revolution, but with return air tickets, the people for whom Malik's kind of Black Power was an exotic but safe brothel'—why should Jane with her fate hanging over her be found indulging in such 'safe' reading as a copy of Hardy's The Woodlanders? Is it coincidence that the idea of the greenwood—the forest in which men struggle to maintain their independence and comradeship in defiance of the state apparatus—is subtly connected with Jimmy's 'agricultural commune'?

The Thrushcross Grange communiqué, a 'fairy story, a school composition, ungrammatical and confused, about life in the forest', begins as follows:

All revolutions begin with the land, Men are born on the earth, every man has his one spot, it is his birth right, 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.

Thrushcross Grange is not 'virgin forest' but an abandoned plantation originally developed in the days of slavery. Jimmy, whose personal slogan is 'I'm Nobody's Slave or Stallion, I'm a Warrior and Torch Bearer', ironically refers to Roche, the agent of the trading company which helps him with supplies, as 'Massa'. Fear of Jimmy and the power he might exert over the dispossessed has caused the leading capitalists of the island to subsidise the commune, which is ostensibly serving a useful purpose by rescuing slum-boys from a life of unemployment and gang warfare. Jimmy's description of his commune as an 'intrepid band' makes him a Robin Hood figure, and, since his threats have produced a small amount of charitable redistribution, he might actually claim to be robbing the rich and giving to the poor. The historian E. J. Hobsbawm has described Robin Hood as 'the quintessence of bandit legend', and Jimmy Ahmed's self-image corresponds, at most points, with Hobsbawm's analysis of the image of the Noble Robber which forms part of the world-wide mythology of peasant societies. Jimmy, that is, sees himself as a victim of injustice and persecution whose mission it is to right wrongs, to take from the rich and give to the poor, and to kill only in self-defence or just revenge ('I have no gun, I'm no guerrilla', he says). Jimmy relies on getting popular support, and for a brief moment when the poor quarters of the city erupt into rioting he becomes their leader. In all this he seems to be a twentieth-century radical intellectual playing at the role of Noble Robber or primitive rebel. At the end he is waiting to be hunted down by the authorities. Naipaul certainly does not glamorise the Noble Robber, but he takes this figure seriously, in a way that (for example) Muriel Spark in her recent novel The Only Problem singularly refuses to do. (To the extent that The Only Problem contains a subsidiary Robin Hood theme, Spark's sympathies lie unambiguously with the Sheriff of Nottingham.) Spark's international terrorist and bank robber, Effie, embarks on her career as a result of stealing two bars of chocolate from a petrol station. Her rich travelling companions are merely embarrassed by this woman who 'ate her chocolate inveighing, meanwhile against the capitalist system'. It is the companions, not Effie, who arouse Spark's curiosity and interest. The Only Problem is the work of a novelist who can only caricature and trivialise the issue which is fundamental to any prospect of real social justice and equality: the issue of forcible redistribution.

In Naipaul, redistribution and the circulation of commodities become the subject of a profoundly disturbing series of actions. Jane, the revolutionary tourist, is theoretically committed to political, economic and sexual redistribution. Politically, she has come to the Caribbean because she had subscribed, in London, to the theory that 'the future of the world was being shaped in places like this, by people like these'. But she has learned instead that 'she had come to a place at the end of the world, to a place that had exhausted its possibilities'—and she hangs on to her return air ticket. Sexually, Jane has a history of mild promiscuity and she measures up every new man as a 'candidate' or competitor for her sexual favours. In a novel in which sexual relations can be construed as commodity relations she is herself a prime example of the fetishism of commodities. When she arrives at the all-male commune of Thrushcross Grange she fails to respond when Bryant first addresses her, calling her 'sister'. The name to which she does respond, however, is 'white lady'—and she responds by giving Bryant a dollar. At the Grange, partly through her own choice, she becomes a priced and labelled commodity—first the 'white lady', later the 'white rat'. On two occasions Jimmy will lure her back to the Grange with the claim that Bryant wants to give her back her dollar. Bryant, however, actually spends the dollar on going to see a Sidney Poitier movie, which merely intensifies his sense of deprivation. Money in the novel circulates within a closed system: the advanced countries exploiting the Third World by holding out the lure of consumer gratifications. With sex, however, it is different. By telling the story of Jane, Naipaul means to bring home to his readers that redistribution can only be accomplished with violence, and that redistribution involves violation.

The central image of violation in the novel is sexual: rape and sexual degradation leading to murder. The sexual politics of Guerrillas will probably not meet with universal approval: both men and women are shown as being complicit in the sexual violence and commodification. Men are the consumers of pornography, the sexual aggressors, and the projectors of an agrarian communism in which (apparently) there is no place for women. Jimmy treats Jane as if she were a commodity, although his fantasies—revealed in the Mills-and-Boon style romance he is writing—convert her image into a fetish. Jane's sex life, however, has always been a process of violation, with which she has more or less willingly complied. It is she who reaches out for her neighbour's pornographic book in order to while away the time during her flight from London. When Jimmy goes to bed with her he perceives that 'without knowing it, she had developed the bad temper, and the manners of a prostitute'. And with Jimmy she realises that she is 'playing with fire', and yet she goes on playing with it, just as Jimmy himself goes on playing with the idea of revolution. Both seem destined to die in the knowledge that they have been fooling themselves.

Guerrillas is the most sexually explicit of Naipaul's novels, with an explicitness which only the social currency of pornography in today's world has made possible for the writer. The meaning of the sexual acts Naipaul describes is that, through them, his protagonists find themselves working out the symbolic conflicts inscribed in the history of the Caribbean—a history of slavery. The men reading pornography on the plane are executives of the American bauxite company which, as Roche puts it, 'owns the island'; in earlier days they would have got their kicks from exploiting the 'niggers'. Both Jimmy and Bryant, as Jane's murderers, are acting out fantasies based on the role of the rebellious slave—the slave who cannot get at his real aggressors, such as the bauxite company's shareholders or the American soldiers whose arrival at the airfield is sufficient to quell the city riots. The circuit of sexual redistribution is thus not only violent but wholly ineffectual, symbolic; but this is the case with almost all the actions of primitive rebels.

Of Jane we are told that 'she was indifferent, perhaps blind, to the contradiction between what she said and what she was so secure of being'; and this faculty of saying one thing and being another is, according to Naipaul, a characteristic of European duplicity. Nevertheless, every figure in Guerrillas has a split personality, and each of them is guilty to a greater or lesser extent of Orwellian 'doublethink'. On several occasions we see one person inflicting humiliation by exposing the contradictions of another; yet Jane, having been humiliated by Jimmy, is eventually killed by the one character who is more helpless and vulnerable than she is. The split in Bryant is represented by the irreconcilable dualism of his taste in films: on the one hand, Sidney Poitier movies, and, on the other, 'interracial-sex films with Negro men as star-boys', which he comes to believe are wicked. Bryant's split personality gives rise to an intense self-hatred, which can only find an outlet in spasms of uncontrollable symbolic hatred of others. Together with Jimmy he kills Jane, and (if the authorities do not get there first) he will probably end up by killing Jimmy as well.

Jane's sexual value as a 'white lady' and Bryant's murderousness are, in a sense, the givens of the novel, the barbarous and unexamined results of a history of colonialism and slavery. Jimmy's behaviour and emotions are more elaborately fantastic, more of a deliberate narcissistic creation. He writes a novel in which Jane is the narrator, and in which Jane sees him as the incarnation of the Noble Robber:

He lives in his own rare world, his head is full of big things, he is carrying the burden of all the suffering people in the world, all the people who live in shacks and grow up in dirty little back rooms…. He is an enemy to all privilege and I am middle class born and bred and I know that in spite of his great civility and urbane charm be must hate people like me. I only have to look in his eyes to understand the meaning of hate.

The extent to which Jimmy's self-consciousness is a fictional artifice is revealed when we learn that, in England, a female journalist had written of him that to look into his eyes was to understand the meaning of hate. In Jimmy's novel, in Mills-and-Boon style, 'Jane' reflects that 'he's the man who controls this hate I see around me and he's the only man who can turn this hate into love'. In place of self-reflection Jimmy has substituted the fetishisation of a fetishisation.

The presence of Jimmy's debased romantic narrative within Naipaul's novel is an exemplification of Harry Levin's view of the realist novel as a dialectic of 'fabulation and debunking', a synthesis of the 'imposition of reality upon romance' and the 'transposition of reality into romance'. Unusually, we see the progress of Jimmy's fictionalisation of Jane and of his actual attempt to start an affair with her side by side. The fictionalisation feeds his behaviour; at one moment early in the seduction he even tells Jane that 'I thought my imagination might have been playing tricks'. Jane is aware of what this might mean, but she is trapped because she 'yet allowed herself to play with the images he had set floating in her mind'.

III

We say that Jane is trapped because …—and in that judgment, and in judgments of a similar kind that we might make about many other characters and incidents, lies the whole force of Guerrillas. In other words, Naipaul's novel stands or falls by its mimetic evocation of the Aristotelian processes of probability and necessity. The novel for Naipaul is a supremely rational imaginative medium, an inquiry into human action and the reciprocal relationships of fantasy and action. Like a juridical process, the inquiry itself is open to inquiry, and that is why Naipaul could later claim that 'fiction never lies': to the extent that it did lie, it would be found out. Perhaps it is inevitable that fiction of this sort would come down harshly on the spectacle of the imagination playing tricks on itself. Finally—as in a law-court—'truth' and 'fantasy' have to be distinguished from one another. If my reading of Guerrillas is found to be persuasive, then Naipaul's fundamental opposition to the sort of nihilism which is endemic in deconstructionist thinking will be evident; indeed, I would say that Guerrillas poses a challenge to contemporary literary theory of a kind that theory, as at present constituted, could only meet by misreading or belittling Naipaul's work. After all, to a rigorous conventionalist the idea that there is some external moral standard against which hallucination, or the imagination 'playing tricks', could be weighed and found wanting is meaningless. All that matters to the conventionalist is, so to speak, winning tricks in the game that the imagination plays. And this is why poststructuralist 'textuality' tends to exalt comic fiction, with its self-delighting virtuosity and witty reflexivity, and (by the same token) to call in question the gravity of tragic fictions which, so often, turn on what we must call the 'fact' of murder. Tragic novels cannot force our acceptance of the deaths or murders, with which they conclude, as 'facts'—for they are after all fictions—but unless we accept these deaths as truths in the Aristotelian sense (that is, as probable and necessary outcomes) tragic gravity will seem to be no more than a device and the impact of the fiction will be much diminished.

Jane views her sex life as a form of compulsive play; but play that is a 'continuing violation'. 'She spoke as though she had never exercised choice. Events, society, the nature of men, her own needs as a woman, had sent her out into the sexual jungle, to play perilously with the unknown'. Her 'needs as a woman', as she sees them, are principally a need for the 'little delirium', the adventure of sexual excitement. Naipaul views this need without compassion, revealing it rather as one of the phenomena of cultural decadence: his characters are conscious of decay and corruption all around them, of a sense of desolation learnt in England but enhanced by the squalor of the Third World and the tropics. This shared vision of a 'world running down' and coming to an end stands in the novel for a version of truth; a truth against which the characters' addiction to various forms of play is to be judged. But there seem to be other forms of truth in Guerrillas, manifestations more specific and local, and perhaps more absolute. These are truths that appear in the form of momentary insights or pronouncements, 'sentences' which are unforeseen, involuntary, and apprehended privately. In Guerrillas, then, we find a contrast between the discourse of imaginative play and literary invention—a poetic mode of perception, moulded by fantasy, whether in the narrative voice or attributed to a particular character—and a discourse of revelation or annunciation: a perception, later to be authenticated by the unravelling of probability and necessity, which is said to be visited on the individual from an unknown source.

Jimmy Ahmed, for example, finds his equivalent to Jane's 'little delirium' in the act of writing sub-pornographic fiction; but once he has lost the 'writing excitement' he sees that 'The words on the page were again just like words, false'. The words are a screen intended to blot out his 'vision of darkness, of the world lost forever, and his own life ending on that bit of waste land'—a prophetic vision which by the end of Guerrillas seems very likely to be fulfilled. Jane's momentary intimation of danger after she lets Jimmy seduce her is more explicitly invested with prophetic authority:

She looked at the driver's mirror: his red eyes were considering her, and they held her return stare. She looked out at the fields; the junked motor-cars beside the road; the men far away, small and busy, stuffing grass into the boots of motor-cars to take home to their animals; the smoking hills, yellow in the mid-afternoon light. But she was aware of the driver's intermittent stare; and whenever she looked at the mirror she saw his red, assessing eyes. A whole sentence ran through her head, at first meaningless, and then, as she examined it, alarming. She thought: I've been playing with fire. Strange words, to have come so suddenly and so completely to her: something given, unasked for, like an intimation of the truth, breaking into the sense of safety, of distance being put between her and the desolation of that house.

We can, of course, discount this if we wish: the taxi-driver's eyes are a familiar figure for the Protestant conscience—Big Brother is watching—and, the 'little delirium' over, Jane feels as if she has been naughty and has been found out. But the narrative will confirm that this was indeed an intimation of the truth. Roche, arriving at Thrushcross just after the murder and also aware of someone else's gaze, has a comparable moment of insight:

He thought: This place has become a slaughter-ground. The words seemed to have been given to him, and he thought: I've just done the bravest thing in my life. He concentrated on Jimmy and addressed him mentally: You wouldn't do anything to me. You wouldn't dare.

The moment is not without its irony: Roche's 'courage' does not consist in denouncing the crime that has been brought home to him, but in saving his skin by turning his back on it and walking away. The words which are 'given to him' and which convey an intuitive knowledge do not in any way guarantee a proper or heroic response. If language in Naipaul sometimes acquires a mysterious authority—as if it were the very voice of reality—his characters are destined to be judged by the reader not to have listened to it. But the novel itself does not enact such a judgment—it is left entirely to the reader. Where the modern tragic novel such as Guerrillas differs from its nineteenth-century predecessors is chiefly in the narrative restraint that it shows, presenting a delicate and arduous case and inviting the reader to serve as juror.

The central difficulty of moral judgment in Guerrillas is provided by the figure of Roche. At first sight he seems something of a cliché, an embodiment of the pathos of the defeated liberal. He seems to attract more narrative sympathy than either Jane or Jimmy, and his perceptions are made to seem more authoritative than theirs. Roche is a former guerrilla fighter who was involved in amateurish acts of sabotage in South Africa, and was subsequently imprisoned and tortured. He was exiled to England, wrote a book, and acquired something of a martyr's halo. But, like Jimmy's, his English reputation was bogus: he had lost his political vision, and left England for the Caribbean not under the sway of idealism but because he had been frightened away by the South African secret police. Torture and humiliation have entered his soul; to what extent, we do not fully realise until after the riots when official disapproval has descended on Thrushcross Grange, and Meredith Herbert, a politician and media personality, subjects Roche to a devastating radio interview. Roche has a propensity for walking into traps: in South Africa, in his Caribbean job of organising support for a commune which could not conceivably have fulfilled its promises, and in the interview—given when the government is in need of a scapegoat—which effectively undermines his position on the island. He does not fight back against the people who trap him, preferring to escape from their clutches and move somewhere else. There is something abject and sterile about his passivity, which Meredith (who would have made a passable torturer) cunningly exposes on the radio. Roche's intelligence and rationality are made to seem futile. Like Winston Smith, though much less sensationally, he bears an unacknowledged responsibility for his own victimisation. None of this, however, prepares us for the ending which robs him of the last vestige of moral heroism.

It is Jane's intuitions about Roche which add up to a different story. In the opening chapter, we read that 'Roche laughed, and Jane saw his molars: widely spaced, black at the roots, the gums high: like a glimpse of the skull'. No explanation is offered for this detail, but we later become accustomed to Jane's perception of Roche as a split personality, divided between his 'saint's manner' and the 'satyr's smile' which appears when he reveals the roots of his molars. What is Jane, and what are we, to make of these glimpses of a 'grotesque stranger'? 'In these relationships some warning, some little hint, always was given, some little sign that foreshadowed the future', the narrator tells us (we are not quite sure whether or not to attribute this superstitious awareness to Jane). If we follow the logic of intimations such as these, we shall come to see all three of Naipaul's main characters as based on primitive archetypes: Jimmy the succubus, Jane the prostitute, and Roche the satyr. But Jane cannot deal with the 'little sign', and neither for the time being can the reader. The narrative foreshadowing is not obtrusive, and the ending, which shows Roche to be a personality as crippled as Jimmy or Jane, comes to us like a new and shocking revaluation.

Guerrillas is formally open-ended: Jimmy, Bryant and Roche are still apparently free agents, even if Jane is dead. There is not even the likelihood of the discovery of the murdered body and of a trial and a hanging such as closed the case of Michael Abdul Malik. Nevertheless, a burden of judgment is, as we have seen, laid upon the reader (though a poststructuralist interpreter would doubtless emphasise, not the nature of this judgment, but its deferral). The imagined evidence that Naipaul puts before us—though a good deal more complex than a necessarily simplifying and foreshortened account such as the present one can indicate—is not 'undecidable': it admits of a verdict. The narrative is one of circulation, a redistributive cycle in which a human being is violated by being turned into a commodity, but finally the circulation comes to a stop: Jane's violation is terminal. At this point we can pass moral judgments on those who took part in it. But the judgments are of a different sort from those implied or stated by more traditional 'liberal-humanist' fictions.

In an essay on 'Character Change and the Drama', Harold Rosenberg draws a distinction between the 'biological/historical' and the 'legal' views of character. According to the biological or historical view, character is the expression of a psychological condition, a developing organic identity. Action or behaviour, in this view, is 'a mere attribute of, and clue to, a being who can be known only through an intuition'. The organic view of personality as based on 'continuity of being' is expressed in biography and, for the most part, in the modern novel; and this is the view which is normally associated with liberal humanism. The legal view, by contrast, defines the human individual as an actor, whose identity arises from the 'coherence of his acts with a fact in which they have terminated (the crime or the contract) and by nothing else'. Individuals are 'conceived as identities in systems whose subject matter is action and the judgement of actions. In this realm the multiple incidents in the life of an individual may be synthesised, by the choice of the individual himself or by the decision of others, into a scheme that pivots on a single fact central to the individual's existence and which, controlling his behaviour and deciding his fate, becomes his visible definition'. This mode of identity is represented in tragic drama, even though, from a traditional liberal-humanist perspective, the identification of a person with a single, terminal act (say, as a murderer or an accomplice after the fact of murder) may be no more than a 'legal fiction'. The legal identity of the individual is determined not solely by his own actions but by the judgment that is passed upon them.

The contrast between 'organic personality' and 'legal identity' is likely to be present in all major novels and plays: Rosenberg himself applies it to the analysis of Hamlet. My claim is that in Guerrillas Naipaul exploits it in a way that is quite different from nineteenth-century fiction, where a delayed revelation of legal identity is normally used to endorse organic identity. In his interview with Meredith Herbert, Roche is trying desperately to preserve and justify his own sense of organic identity in the face of Meredith's indictment of his actions. Roche is, in effect, arguing for forgiveness, for the right to make mistakes, the right to be judged on the purity of his intentions. He would like to plead that he is someone apart from his actions. Meredith, a harsh prosecuting counsel, denies this, mocking what he takes as Roche's self-indulgence: 'what a nice world you inhabit, Peter. You have so much room for error'. Inhabiting such a 'nice world' is, Meredith implies, one of the privileges reserved for 'white people'. The interview, however, is not fought to a finish, and the question of its moral outcome is something Naipaul is careful to leave suspended.

In nineteenth-century novels the commonest way of uncovering a character's organic identity is to look into his or her face: the face serving as a window allowing us to read off what is written in the soul, or the heart. Jane, we have noted, has moments of recognition in which, looking at Roche's sinister smile, she intuits the 'inner man'. But the value of these moments is left uncertain, and what is revealed is so shockingly different from Roche's own sense of his 'inner man' that the intuition can only be taken as a parody of comparable moments in nineteenth-century novels. Jane does not see anything that liberal individualism would recognise as an organic identity. Instead, she sees a satyr, a being that is irreducible and inhuman: an alien. (In this, Guerrillas perhaps resembles Wuthering Heights, where the protagonists also invest one another with non-human characteristics. Both novels break with liberal individualism by invoking archaic and demonic notions of identity.) The significance of Jane's vision is that, arguably, it foreshadows the true 'legal identity' of Roche, as it appears from his terminal actions at the end of the novel. But we can scarcely maintain that Roche 'is' the satyr—we see him in all his complexity as a represented character—a character, however, who eludes our attempts to reduce him to organic coherence.

We can ask: who or what are Roche, Jimmy, Jane?—but finally our questions will turn to the novelist who animates these fictions with such originality and truth of observation. In Guerrillas Naipaul has furthered a technique of impartiality which is, more or less, constitutive of serious modern fiction. It is the technique of 'perpetual shifting of the standpoint' and of the 'artifice of seeing through the eyes of characters' which, as long ago as 1895, H. G. Wells observed in the novels of George Meredith. What Wells added on that occasion is also relevant: 'It may be that Mr Meredith sometimes carries his indirect method to excess, and puzzles a decent public, nourished on good healthy straightforward marionettes'. There is no 'revolutionary' break between the fiction of writers such as Meredith and Conrad and that of Naipaul, but the degree of indirection achieved by the latter would, surely, have puzzled Meredith's most ardent readers. Naipaul's ostentatious, even fastidious, detachment is the most difficult element in the novel that we must unravel: a detachment which implies disinterestedness, but scarcely impartiality, for it 'reveals the writer totally'. Our sense of Naipaul's detachment comprehends a number of factors. There is, for example, a tension between the novelist's almost vindictive exposure of his characters' inadequacies and self-contradictions, and his shafts of surprising sympathy and generosity towards the least lovable of them. There is Naipaul's palpable irritation with the more rootless of his characters (those uncommitted to life on the island), and his, or the narrator's, rather unquestioning respect for the 'authorities' who have the task of making a continuing orderly life possible there. There is the curious and disturbing feature that, in such a mordant study of contemporary racial and sexual confusions, Naipaul has eliminated characters of his own race and has tied his characters' 'revolutionary' hopes to the success of a homosexual commune, a foundation on which (by definition) the future cannot be built.

The quality of detachment in Guerrillas is linked to the fact that, alone among Naipaul's novels, it does not contain a single character of Indian descent. (In real life Michael X's entourage included two Trinidad Indians, one of whom gave himself up to the police and was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment.) Naipaul's early novels, The Mystic Masseur and A House for Mr Biswas, portrayed the Trinidad Hindu as comic epic hero. His two other major novels, The Mimic Men and A Bend in the River, are first-person narratives told by Indian settlers (the former in London and the Caribbean, the latter in East and Central Africa). Even 'In a Free State', his novella-length study of Europeans in a politically turbulent African state, includes the image of an ordinary, 'decent' Hindu trader. In these books detachment coexists with an open warmth and partisanship; the characters' success in engaging our attention is also the author's, even when he mocks them. Guerrillas, however, is set not in Trinidad but on a fictional Caribbean island inhabited by Negroes, creoles, Europeans, and Chinese, but not apparently by East Indians. Is that why the island is so unremittingly condemned as a lost and fallen world, in which—though good order and restraint are still felt as virtues—'When everybody wants to fight there's nothing to fight for'? Can it be that in Guerrillas Naipaul has constructed for himself a way of playing with fire without getting burnt?

If so, that is his privilege. The weaknesses so fully exposed in Roche, Jane, and Jimmy, are human weaknesses, which in some way must reflect the weaknesses of their creator. If the figure of Jane, the murdered and violated woman, is offered as the embodiment of circulation as violation, the novelist is a circulator who can share the viewpoints of all his characters and yet remain inviolable. For example, in an unforgettable passage, Naipaul allows us to enter into Bryant's consciousness. Bryant, stunted, poverty-stricken and starved of affection, symbolises the moral injustice of the distribution of the world's resources which leads to the perennial, and misleading, legend of the Noble Robber. Bryant is doomed: whatever charitable gifts are made to him—his place in the commune, his dollar, his 'rat'—are only aids to his destruction. Bryant is rooted on the island, while the novelist, like his principal characters, is free of such roots: the slum-boy is, so to speak, the human material which Naipaul, as traveller and journalist, goes to investigate. And from this we may conclude that Naipaul, like Roche (his 'satyr') is an escape-artist, and that his art is the art of the survivor who pieces together a tale which could only be 'authentically' voiced by people who have been silenced, who have suffered violent deaths or who languish imprisoned by their own inarticulacy, if not by the law. Naipaul's art is, inevitably, fabricated, speaking not through revealed truths but through the constructions of fantasy and the 'legal fictions' of probability and necessity. Its significance lies not only in its intricate construction and imaginative play but in its wisdom. Writers, whom Naipaul has rather wistfully compared to tribal wise men, must, he has said, 'know more, have felt more and thought more than others, offering us some point of rest'. They must also address the tribe on matters on which the rest of the tribe is silent.