V. S. Naipaul and the Dream of Blood: Atavisms in Universal Civilization

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU is a visiting professor of English at SUNY-Oswego and a frequent contributor to Modern Age.

Revolution as blood and punishment, religion as
blood and punishment: in [Mullah] Khalkhalli’s mind the
two ideas seemed to have become one.
And in fact, the double idea, of blood, fitted revolutionary
Iran. Behzad, my interpreter . . . had his own
dream of blood. His hero was Stalin. Behzad said, “What
he did in Russia we have to do in Iran. We too have to do
a lot of killing. A lot.”¹

I

Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul
often finds himself bracketed with
Joseph Conrad as a writer about the incursions
of the West into the non-Western—
the African or Asian—world, both
by those critics who would praise and by
those who would condemn him. Criticism
categorizes both men as chroniclers of the
great imperial project and of “the white
man’s burden.” Of course, Conrad wrote
in the heyday of the European empires and
Naipaul writes in their extended and agonized
aftermath—he writes both in and
of the era of independence. Conrad was a
British subject of Polish origin and Naipaul
is an Anglophone West Indian of Hindu
parentage who has thoroughly assimilated
himself to British culture. Yet discussions
of the Conrad-Naipaul succession that
stress either the cartographic or the ethnographic
theme, as it were, tend to be superficial; they remain tied to Bandung-Conference
topics such as “race,” “the Third
World,” “colonialism,” or “exploitation”
(all vintage 1955 and of Marxist pedigree)
that provoke much emotional heat but shed
little philosophical or belletristic light.

The significant point of contact
between the two writers lies less in their
geopolitical treatment of the European
and Afro-Asian collision than it does in
their common examination of the peculiar
bloodthirsty melding in the modern world
of resentment and ideology. We think of
Conrad as the novelist of the Congo or of
the Malay Peninsula, and we leave out his
abiding and massively informed treatment
of revolution and nihilism in the European
homeland of the nineteenth-century
overseas empires, as in Under Western Eyes
(1911) or The Secret Agent (1907). As for
Naipaul, even when he writes about Africa
or Asia, his interest is often in what Western
radicals do in the decolonized nations
to destabilize societies no longer directly
governed by this or that imperial power
or how so-called independence becomes
contaminated by the worst traits of “the
Universal Civilization.” The “Big Man” of
A Bend in the River (1979), modeled after
Zaire’s Mobutu, is, for example, a mass
murderer convinced of his own godhood,
but he draws much strength in his delusions
from his Western advisors, academic
types in charge of his university, who
cynically inculcate on the local scene the
wretched Marxism cum existentialism that
has failed—and failed again—in the West.
These political mentors, often working in
lavish institutes and polytechnics, supply
a sophistical justification for their patron’s
criminal regime and so contribute to a blatant
and destructive propaganda. A certain
deformed conviction about life, the idea
that the world’s basic structure entails a personal
humiliation and that one is ordained
to shift that structure, issues, given the
right encouragement, in a demand like
that of the Iranian Communist quoted by
Naipaul in Beyond Belief (1998): “We too
have to do a lot of killing.” This “dream of
blood,” married with what is called theory,
savaged the twentieth century. What Naipaul
knows together with Conrad is the
combined psychological and anthropological
explanation of the destructive—the
demonic and sacrificial—ideologies that
have besieged modernity and of those who
espouse them. With an eye toward Naipaul’s
Guerrillas (1975), then, a masterly
exposition of the criminal-revolutionary
temperament, let us begin by considering
the plain criminality of Conrad’s
two characters, “Gentleman Jones” and
his “secretary” Martin Ricardo, from the
South Seas novel Victory (1915).

Jones and Ricardo bring nemesis to
Victory’s central persona, Axel Heyst, who
lives with his young wife Lena and a Chinese
servant, Wang, amidst the detritus of
his failed steamship colliery on an island
(“Sumbaran”) of the Indonesian chain.
The Surabaya hotelier Schomburg is the
first to have contact with the pair: when
the “Gentleman”² comes ashore at Schomburg’s
waterfront lodging establishment,
Conrad notes for us the brigand’s “careless
yet tense attitude” and his “black, cavernous,
mesmerizing glance”;³ the “secretary,”
for his part, strikes even the lessthan-
astute Schomburg as “toneless”⁴ and
“mesmerizing,”⁵ while suggesting at the
same time an “astonishing ferocity.”⁶ Jones
mainly lets Ricardo speak for him, hanging
in the background so that, as Conrad
says, he “lolled”⁷ while the secretary stood.
Ricardo can be voluble; Jones remains
laconic. Conrad will repeatedly invoke the
vegetable indolence of his menacing pair,
especially of Jones, as the two seek some
stimulus to rouse them to violent action.
Schomburg holds a grudge against Heyst.
He gets rid of the two malingerers by stimulating
their predatory interest in Heyst.

Of Ricardo—and implicitly, although
qualifiedly, of Jones—Conrad says that
he is “not used . . . to self-control”⁸ and
regards those who do submit to restraint
as contemptible, or, in Jones’s term, as
“tame.”⁹ The pair’s “predatory instinct”¹⁰
does not contradict Conrad’s insistence on
their laziness—or, in the Gentleman’s case,
a tendency to vegetate at a low level when
not “imagining the swag.”¹¹ Ricardo, borrowing
a sophisticate’s vocabulary from
Jones, refers again to ordinary people as
“ypocrits,”¹² which would be a synonym of
tame. Filled by Schomburg’s mendacious
stories with the vision that the reclusive
Heyst (in fact, a failure) hides on his island
amidst a miserly cumulus of lucre, Ricardo
imprecates the man’s supposed “dirty tame
artfulness.”¹³ That the well-being of others
functions as an ontological scandal both
for the Gentleman and his secretary is an
analysis upheld by Jones’s habitual insistence
that he is “not ordinary,”¹⁴ that he
is “a person to be reckoned with,”¹⁵ and
by a “contemptuous tone”¹⁶ in all his relations
of ego to alter. The Gentleman’s unsolicited
protestations of his own remarkable
personhood suggest his assumption a priori
that the mere presence of others constitutes
a presumptive low opinion and that
he must correct the error.

Jones’s deep-seated ressentiment (he is
entirely a creature of it) comes out starkly
in his reaction to Heyst’s insular realm
when he arrives there, intent on plunder.
Despite the entirely unpropitious poverty
of the scene, the Gentleman remains convinced
that Heyst is hiding “secrets.”¹⁷ Says
the interloper to the unluckily disarmed
Swede: “A man living alone . . . on an island
takes care to conceal property.”¹⁸ Jones sees
the world as a conspiracy to lead him into
a forfeiture of what is rightly his. Conrad’s
repeated use of the charged term spectral to
characterize Jones points to a purely derivative
existence. Jones does not live except
under the allure of those whom he conceives
as possessing the being of which he is
wrongly denied; he is a specter who haunts
the established order of custom and tradition,
of rights and property, of morality and
the law. The Marxian connotation seems
unavoidable. Jones tells Heyst:

Not everyone can divest himself of
the prejudices of a gentleman as easily
as you have done, Mr. Heyst. But
don’t worry about my pluck . . . .
We are adequate bandits; and we are
after the fruit of your labours as a—
er—successful swindler. It’s the way
of the world—gorge and disgorge!¹⁹

This specimen of self-justifying criminal
rhetoric inverts all actual values inherent to
the scene and chicanes the two terms labor
and swindle with a cheating deftness worthy
of the most concerted examples of modern
truth-twisting figuration. This pattern
of the concupiscent personality has a long
history, appearing, for example, in Plato’s
character of Callicles in the dialogue Gorgias,
who argues to Socrates that “natural
right consists in the better and wiser man,”
by which the speaker designates himself,
“ruling over his inferiors and having
the lion’s share.”²⁰ By “better and wiser,”
as Socrates shows, Callicles simply means
“stronger” or “people who have the ability
to carry out their ideas, and who will not
shrink from doing so through faintness of
heart.”²¹

Many, perhaps most, of Conrad’s villains
fit a similar pattern. Take the bankerswindler
de Barral (“the great de Barral”)
from Chance (1920), a man “lawless and
proud”²² who exhibits “no pity, no generosity,
nothing whatsoever of these fine
feelings.”²³ Like Jones, de Barral strikes
others as a “haunting”²⁴ presence, an indication
again of an essentially derivative
sense of selfhood; like Jones, the ex-financier
nurses himself on a sense of “outrage,”
²⁵ gravitates to “plunder,”²⁶ takes
animation from a “furious jealousy,”²⁷ and
views the world as a vast cabal intent on
leaving him wretched and deprived: “I
have been locked up by a conspiracy,”²⁸ he
remarks on his conviction for investment
fraud, when he has really only been duly
processed by the courts. Particularly relevant
to the discussion of what cues Naipaul
picks up from Conrad, however, is
the character of Victor Haldin, the nihilist
bomb-thrower and assassin of a government
minister in Under Western Eyes, all the
more so because after his arrest and execution
he becomes a martyr in the eyes of
those—the revolutionary underground—
who have supported him and provide the
discursive rationale for his action. Haldin’s
mother, by no means a Christian, nevertheless
compares her son to Christ: “Even
among the apostles . . . there was found a
Judas,”²⁹ she says in reference to her son’s
deletion by a police informer. It is naked
oratorical opportunism.

Where Jones and de Barral seek vindication
of their deeds in their hatred of the
world and in their ability to mislead others,
when it succeeds, Haldin has assimilated an
elaborate rhetoric of rectification through
violence with distinctly religious (say
rather religiose) overtones; his confederates
interpret his crimes in light of this perverse
faith in “spectral ideas,”³⁰ with its eschatology
of absolute destruction visited on the
ancien régime, after which a vague utopia
will ensue. One always senses that the age
of fire and sword—what Naipaul, two generations
later, calls in his work the “dream
of blood”—means more to the faithful than
the ensuing paradise on earth. One sponsor
of revolution, a slumming lady aristocrat
with access to her deceased husband’s
fortune, maintains in her house, where the
conspirators meet in their Geneva exile,
an “atmosphere of scandal, occultism, and
charlatanism.”³¹ She urges candidly, “It is
not despair we want to create . . . but indignation,”
³² and speaks of her plan “to spiritualise
the discontent.”³³ Haldin tells Kyrilo
Razoumov, his eventual delator, whom he
has recklessly made to look an accomplice
in the assassination: “You suppose that I am
a terrorist, now. But consider that the true
destroyers are they who destroy the spirit
of progress and truth, not the avengers who
merely kill the bodies of the persecutors of
human dignity.”³⁴ A short while later he
denies having committed murder, declaring
that his actions constitute “war”: “My
spirit shall go on warring in some Russian
body till all falsehood is swept out of the
world. The modern civilization is false, but
a new revelation shall come out of Russia.”
³⁵ Conrad’s narrator judges Russia a
land of “spectral ideas.”³⁶

This “war” that Conrad puts in Haldin’s
mouth is once again “the dream of
blood.” Haldin differs from Jones and
de Barral, mainly in that he does not
act alone but joins his agenda under the
collective sign of “retributive justice”³⁷
against “the fi lthy heap of iniquity”³⁸ that
constitutes all non-revolutionary humanity
and submerses it in the theosophical
aura enwrapping the insurrection, both
on its Russian home ground and in Swiss
exile. These are important differences,
but they should not obscure the fact that
all the plaintiffs against normative order
in Under Western Eyes show the same basic
personality-structure as Jones and de Barral.

To the loner’s ressentiment, Conrad adds
the liturgical trappings of a secular religion,
to borrow Raymond Aron’s term. As Aron
says, “Revolution, then, the crucial element
in what might be called socialist eschatology,
is not merely a social upheaval, the
replacement of one regime by another. It
has a supra-political value that marks the
leap from necessity to liberty.”³⁹ Yet alongside
the “supra-political value” stands a
sub-revelatory, anti-Biblical animus. The
secular religions of the century just past are
both contributions to the chaos of modernity
and symptoms of modernity’s creeping
disintegration. The simple existence
of civilized order strikes the rebellious ego
as an affront. Jones would kill Heyst, de
Barral the husband of his daughter, Haldin
the representative of governance, purely
and simply. It is the Dionysiac sparagmos,
which, as a political program, inevitably
becomes a holocaust.

Hence the schedule of the Iranian mullahs,
as Naipaul has accurately accounted
for it in Among Believers (1981) and Beyond
Belief. In 1979, the hanging judge, Mullah
Khalkhalli, who had already condemned
hundreds, struck Naipaul as both “a figure
of revolutionary terror”⁴⁰ and as a clown.⁴¹
During an interview in Qom shortly after
Khomeini’s accession, Khalkhalli said to
Naipaul that he had begun life as a shep
herd boy so that “right now I know how
to cut off a sheep’s head.”⁴² The others
present during the interview, on hearing
the mullah’s statement, “rocked with
laughter.”⁴³ In addition to having butchered
many “sheep,” boasted Khalkhalli, he
had also “killed Hoveida, you know”⁴⁴—
Hoveida being the deposed Shah’s prime
minister. Again, catching the reference,
the other guests “threw themselves about
with laughter.”⁴⁵ Khalkhalli all but promised
more of the same, saying, “the mullahs
are going to rule now,” and forecasting
a hyperbolic “ten thousand years of
the Islamic republic.”⁴⁶ Twenty years later,
as Naipaul records, Khalkhalli insisted
grudgingly that, despite two decades of
his own zeal, the revolution of the Imams
was “only thirty per cent”⁴⁷ fulfilled. The
judging and killing obviously could not be
suspended, as long as seven-tenths of the
regime’s enemies remained beyond reach
of the hand of justice. Naipaul describes the
Iranian revolution as a peculiar mixture of
the fantastic and the pragmatic, the holy
and the secular. In the early days of Khomeini’s
return, for example, the Islamists
and the Communists (Tudeh) cooperated;
a mutual hatred of the Palavhi dynasty
united them. One latterly disaffected participant
of those times told Naipaul: “We
were always fascinated by stories of the
French Revolution [as] something done by
God . . . . We were hypnotized by . . . stories
of the French Revolution. We thought
[that] revolution was something beautiful
. . . as though we were in a theater.”⁴⁸ A
theater of blood, Iranian Islamism—quite
like Leninism and Stalinism—needed two
kinds of victims: enemies of the Law and
martyrs to it.

II

Jimmy Ahmed, né Jimmy Leung, the
homicidal central character of Naipaul’s
prescient Guerrillas, has taken a Muslim
name; he has also adopted his rhetoric of
retribution from a vulgar form of Marxism.
Naipaul bases his character Ahmed
on an actual Trinidadian person, Michael
de Freitas, also known as Michael Abdul
Malik or Michael X. In his essay, “Michael
X and the Black Power Murders” (1975),
Naipaul writes:

Malik had spent fourteen years in
England . . . . In Notting Hill . . . he
had become a pimp, drug pusher and
gambling-house operator; he had
also worked as a strong-arm man for
Rachman, the property racketeer,
who specialized in slum properties,
West Indian tenants, and high rents.
A religious-political “conversion”
had followed. Michael Freitas became
Michael X. He was an instant success
with the press and the underground.
He became a Black Power “leader,”
underground black “poet,” black
“writer.”⁴⁹

For Jimmy Ahmed, Guerrillas implies a
similar background, leaving out only the
particular designation of Trinidad as the
native place; instead, Naipaul establishes
an anonymous Caribbean island-nation
with demographics similar to Trinidad’s,
struggling with the disappointments of its
post-colonial independence. Like the real
Malik, the fi ctional Ahmed fancies himself
a poet and a leader. In his essay on Malik,
Naipaul quotes from fragments of a novel
left to posterity by its author, whom the
Trinidadian authorities hanged on conviction
for two murders (he had probably
committed others) in Port of Spain
in May 1975. Malik is his own protagonist
barely disguised; most of the passages
are egocentric reports put in the mouth of
the Englishwoman narrator, whose interest
is gushingly sexual. Describing the
main character’s house, the lady sees “a
gigantic bookshelf Shakepeare [sic] Shaw
Marx Lenin Trotsky Confucius Hugo.”⁵⁰
She notes of the man that “he not only
have [sic] the books but actually reads and
understands them I was absolutely bowld,
litteraly.”⁵¹ Ahmed’s literary sallies resemble
Malik’s, although Naipaul gives them
a slightly less sub-literate cast. The viewpoint
is the same, that of a female outsider
smitten by the misunderstood loner.

The Malik-Ahmed amalgam resembles
Conrad’s character pattern of the criminal
cum revolutionary. A creature of ressentiment,
Ahmed automatically assumes his
own diminutive status in the perception
of others and habitually feels compelled
to protest, as Gentleman Jones might say,
that he is “not ordinary” or is “a person
to be reckoned with.” Malik-Ahmed also
exhibits Jones’s moody alternation between
sleepy inanition over long periods and violence
in bursts. Malik killed two members
of his inner circle whom he falsely
suspected of having betrayed him; he also
murdered a confused, middle-class American
girl, Gale Benson, who had come to
Trinidad attracted by the aura of counter-
cultural vulgarity and radical chic.
In Guerrillas, Ahmed kills Jane, closely
modeled on Benson, while incorporating
additional meaningful references. To the
details of Jane’s killing, I will return.

In Under Western Eyes, Conrad subtly
but insistently underscores the revolution’s
theosophical atmosphere. In Guerrillas, Naipaul
links Ahmed’s machinations with an
outbreak of degenerate religiosity in the
slums and towns of the island nation. This
mixture of social disintegration and ressentiment,
abetted by pseudo-religiosity and
a politicizing rhetoric of retribution, produces
the politico-Dionysiac frenzy on the
island. Ahmed’s notion of politics appears in
the placards that ornament the drive of his
compound in the hills outside the island’s
capital city: “THRUSHCROSS GRANGE
/ PEOPLE’S COMMUNE / FOR THE
LAND AND REVOLUTION / Entry
without prior permission strictly forbidden
at all times / By Order of the High Command,
/ JAMES AHMED (Haji).”⁵²

Ahmed’s foil, Peter Roche, points out
to his live-in lover, Jane, that the term Haji
denotes “a Muslim who’s made the pilgrimage
to Mecca, but Jimmy uses it to
mean ‘mister’ or ‘esquire.’ “⁵³ Ahmed has
in fact not made the Haj, so his adoption
of the etiquette is a fraud; yet the gesture
does possess significance: it seizes cannily
enough on the non-Western, non-Christian,
hence counter-normative value of
Islam as a symbol pour épater les bourgeois.
No doubt but that Islam’s reputation as an
aggressive military and religious movement
also appeals to Ahmed, the self-dubbed
“High Command” on his premises. The
moniker “Thrushcross Grange” derives of
course from Charlotte Bronte’s Wuthering
Heights, one of the few books that Ahmed
has read, or tried to read, and to which, during
his English sojourn, his flatterers have
evidently made reference, suggesting that
they saw their Trinidadian guest-celebrity
as Heathcliff. “PEOPLE’S COMMUNE”
hints at Mao, while the invocations of
land and revolution recall themes of Castro’s
Cuban utopia. Ahmed’s placard-pronunciamento
thus reverberates with similar broadsides
visible all over the island, especially
in the poor neighborhoods of the capital
city: “Basic Black,” “Don’t Vote,”⁵⁴ “I’m
Nobody’s Slave or Stallion,”⁵⁵ and “After Israel
Africa,”⁵⁶ the last sometimes shortened to
“AIA.” Roche thinks of them as merely
“semi-political.”⁵⁷

Naipaul uses his character Harry da
Tunja (the sole redeemable persona in the
novel) to make pithy, if not quite analytical,
comments on the developing conditions
of the island. Da Tunja tells Roche,
“There are a lot of mad people in this
place,” adding that “it’s a damn frighten
ing thing.”⁵⁸ Da Tunja describes an incident
involving himself, his friend Sebastien,
and a street beggar: “When he reach
us he stop in the road, he raise his hand
and point at me and he say, ‘You! You is a
Jew!'”⁵⁹ When Roche guesses that the man
“was probably drunk,” Harry says: “But
what the hell does it mean to him? What
kind of funny ideas are going around this
place?”⁶⁰ Discussions by Roche, da Tunja,
and others about Ahmed use similar terms
to those applied to the social milieu:
“mad,”⁶¹ “dangerous,” and able “to create
chaos.”⁶² Meredith Herbert, a local politician,
remarks that Ahmed’s “dynamic,” as
Jane calls it, eventuated in England in “rape
and indecent assault” and “will take him to
the same end here.”⁶³ Ahmed, like the inebriated
anti-Semite, requires a scapegoat
to provide actual and convenient form for
his pent-up hostility and confusion, his
unbearable sense that the world ought to
correspond to his wishes but does not. He
will discover one.

It is during a visit to da Tunja’s seaside
house that da Tunja, Roche, and Jane witness
a strange ceremony on the beach:

[While] radios played the reggae
[they saw] men and women gowned
in black or red rang bells and chanted,
facing the sea . . . a black-gowned
man, standing up to his waist in the
sea, ringing a bell with one hand,
holding a little raft steady with the
other hand, a blindfolded woman in
a pink chemise beside him, with a
lighted candle in her hand . . . . A
fat, barefooted woman, with three
elderly women attendants in white,
was preaching, shouting, chanting . .
. . She looked down at the beach; she
seemed to be addressing someone
stretched out there, for whom, from
her gestures, she continually spread an
imaginary rug or sheet . . . . A blindfolded
group was being prepared for
a walk out to the sea. [Others] stood
and swayed as though infected by the
rhythm of the bells and the stamp of
the six blindfolded marchers . . . .⁶⁴

An American preacher on an evangelical
mission to the Caribbean contributes to
the disorientation. Roche’s housekeeper,
Adela, attends his meetings: “He say that
Israel is in her glory and the power is now
on the Ni-gro people. He ask us . . . to
hold hands and to pray hard, so that every
man would heal his neighbor.”⁶⁵ Like his
model, Malik, Ahmed seeks rather to
create a synthetic cult around himself as
charismatic and anointed “savior.”⁶⁶ In
the early 1970s, Naipaul writes, Trinidad
was “moving towards revolution.”⁶⁷ Elsewhere:
“Political life in the newly independent
island was stagnant; intellectuals
felt shut out by the new men of the new
politics; and American Black Power, drifting
down to Trinidad, was giving a new
twist to popular discontents.”⁶⁸ Rioting
in fact broke out in Port of Spain, but the
police kept it from spreading. When Malik
returned to Trinidad in 1971, despite having
missed the disturbance, he claimed
to have been its leader in absentia. In the
would-be insurrectionist’s imagination,
“Negroes existed now only that Malik
might lead them.”⁶⁹ He came home not
only as a Muslim but as an explicit anti-
Semite who had written to the Kuwaiti
ambassador to Great Britain complaining
about the Jews: “We must get them off our
backs.”⁷⁰ He also railed against the Chinese,
accusing them of imprisoning Trinidadian
girls in brothels. He consulted fortune-
tellers. At his trial, one witness spoke
of the “atmosphere of violence”⁷¹ within
Malik’s commune on the outskirts of Port
of Spain. But Malik’s violence belonged
to his glamour—it exerted the attraction
that brought Gale Benson to him—and
took some of its charge, at least, from the
ambient racial suspicion and ressentiment of
island society.

Naipaul recreates all this in the novel.
Ahmed’s commune—a fake—finds support
in guilt-motivated largesse from
island businesses. Roche works for one,
Sablich’s, which has donated tractors and
farm equipment. The machinery stands
among the scruffy acres rusting, rather like
the abandoned machinery in the Outer
Station in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Amidst the general lassitude and decay,
Jane notices “human excrement laid in
two places”⁷² on a vegetable garden pathway.
The commune merely serves Ahmed
as a convenient headquarters from which
he maintains contact with gangs in the city
and in which he hides himself with the
slum boys who bunk in a barracks and pose
as agricultural trainees. When the police
kill a popular gang leader, Ahmed fans
the resultant ire and succeeds in fomenting
what looks like a general social revolt.
As authority breaks down, placards appear
praising Ahmed as “the Arrow of Peace.”⁷³
Herbert’s prediction seems to have come
true. The dream of blood has broken free.

Like Conrad’s Jones and his model,
Malik, Ahmed vacillates between vegetable
inanition and homicidal outrage.
Roche notes that “Jimmy is easily bored.”⁷⁴
Ahmed again resembles the revolutionaries
in Under Western Eyes in finding the
justification for his destructive deeds in
visions, never fixed in their details, of a
vast rectifi cation of injustice. Like de Barral
in Chance, he sees himself as entitled
to “privilege and splendor”⁷⁵ and unfairly
barred from it. One other important component
contributes to Naipaul’s picture of
the sociopath and ties him to his context.
This is Ahmed’s sexual psychosis, which
has, in fact, its prefiguration in Conrad—
for example in the plausible homosexual
bond between Jones and Ricardo and in
Ricardo’s rapacity toward Lena, or in the
fact that the chief revolutionary plotter in
The Secret Agent (1907) seeks cover in London
as a purveyor of cheap pornography
to sailors. For Conrad, a callous violence
is hardly separable from a callous attitude
toward sexual expression. But Naipaul’s
world has advanced farther into corruption
than Conrad’s, and its quality of perversion
shows a difference. Ahmed’s homosexual
liaison, a slum boy named Bryant,
frequents “interracial sex-films”⁷⁶ popular
among the lower classes. When Jane
involves herself sexually with Ahmed for
the first time, she notices in his bedroom
“two paperback books” printed on “cheap
paper curling in the heat,” one of them
displaying “a pornographic cover” next
to which sits “a shallow round jar of some
cream.”⁷⁷ Ahmed craves “the hard stuff.”

Naipaul merges the pornographic
theme with the quasi-religious, the cultic,
theme by means of the ubiquitous music
of the island—reggae—blasted around the
clock from portable radios. Naipaul calls
its chief characteristic “rhythmic throb.”⁷⁸
Nor should readers forget that Ahmed has
previously committed “indecent assault.”
Elsewhere Naipaul indicates Ahmed’s fascination
with rape. “The story of the rape
of a white girl at the beach by a gang”⁷⁹
moves him deeply, if ambiguously. Sex and
violence belong together in the “Haji‘s”
behavioral repertory. Sexually obsessive,
he sees through Jane immediately. Like the
actual Gale Benson, Jane wanders through
life “adrift, enervated, her dissatisfactions
vague, now centering on the world, now
on men.”⁸⁰ She has tacked, so to speak,
promiscuously from lover to lover and, in
her psychological and political confusion,
finds Ahmed exotic. The erotic perversions
in Guerrillas fit coherently in the pattern
of a social crisis.

Ahmed has miscalculated his opportunity.
The riots he has urged to erupt—in
the belief that general retributive violence
would deliver him his crown—spend
themselves in random killings, looting,
and arson until American soldiers arrive
in helicopters to restore order from the
outside. It is a classic Deus ex machina but
one that has happened often enough in the
actual world. Ahmed now must face the
fact that he is “washed up.”⁸¹ For one who
has likened himself to “a bronzed god,”⁸²
and who eagerly wants both “to make an
impression” and “display himself,”⁸³ failure
can hardly appeal. Worse, his sexual
encounter with Jane ended up a fiasco.
“Do you always make love in your Mao
shirt?” she asks, after his few seconds.⁸⁴

Eschatological and sexual defaults thus
humiliate Ahmed. He falls back on his
erotic bond with Bryant, the unwashed frequenter
of sex-films. Ahmed says to Bryant,
after Jane has snubbed the boy during
her first visit to the commune, “I’ll give her
to you.”⁸⁵ Give, as though he held peremptory
license over another. In effect, Ahmed
promises an offering. The cultic implication
cannot be set aside. Once again, Naipaul
translates from the actual details of Malik’s
homicidal career. Of Gale Benson’s role
in Malik’s commune, Naipaul notes that
she “wore African-style clothes and had
renamed herself Halé Kimga,”⁸⁶ an anagram
of her own name and that of her
commune lover, Hakim Jamal, a lieutenant
to Malik. “White, secure, yet in her
quiet middle-class way out-blacking them
all: Benson could not have been indifferent
to the effect she created.”⁸⁷ Naipaul
sees in Benson’s role-playing “the great
uneducated vanity of the middle-class
dropout.”⁸⁸ When Malik’s plans go awry,
his ire naturally alights on Benson.

Her execution, on January 2, 1972,
was sudden and swift. She was held
by the neck and stabbed and stabbed.
At that moment all the lunacy and
play fell from her; she knew who she
was then and wanted to live. Perhaps
the motive for the killing lay only in
that: the surprise, a secure life ending
in an extended moment of terror.⁸⁹

Malik’s power agenda sprang, as Naipaul
says, “from an almost religious conviction
that oppression can be turned into
an asset, race into money.”⁹⁰ He expressed
these yearnings in his endless self-centered
scribbling. In the murder of Benson, the
“dream of blood” tries desperately to stave
off its imminent dissolution in a recalcitrant
reality: Benson has become a scandal,
the sign of an order that Malik’s fantasies
cannot touch and that therefore mocks him
intolerably. It is the same with the fictional
Ahmed’s murder of Jane, certainly one of
the most horrifi c homicides in literature.

Jane has decided to leave the island.
She fully understands Ahmed’s double
humiliation and her own contributing role
in it; casualness is simply the way she has
always treated men. Incredibly (except that
the model is Benson’s slavish attitude to
Malik), she decides to visit Ahmed on her
way from The Ridge to the airport. Contemplating
a sexual au revoir, Jane allows
Ahmed to lead her to his bedroom. Once
she sheds her clothes, Ahmed forces her to
the bed and demonstrates what “indecent
assault” means. Naipaul makes it clear that
for Ahmed, sexual liaison entails aggression
and dominance—and the recompense
of perceived diminution; his libido
demands a ritual degradation of the intolerable
offender and is itself a calculated
offense. This is not the end of it. When he
has violated and intimidated her, he coerces
her to walk from the house with him to
see Bryant. “Bryant and I are not friends
now,”⁹¹ he says, referring to an estrangement,
stemming from Ahmed’s previous
liaison with Jane. Asking in a menacing
voice whether Jane has “a nice house in
London,”⁹² Ahmed leads his victim to a
bare field where Bryant is waiting:

He cried, “Jimmy! Jimmy!”
Jimmy locked his right arm about
Jane’s neck and almost lifted her in
front of him, pulling back the corners
of his mouth with the effort,
and slightly puffing out his shaved
cheeks, so that he seemed to smile.
He said, “Bryant, the rat! Kill the rat!”
Her right hand was on the arm swelling
around her neck, and it was on
her right arm that Bryant made the
first cut.
The first cut: the rest would follow.
⁹³

Many elements combine in this ritualistic
scene, with the victim being led to
the preordained place of slaughter: ressentiment;
nihilism; sacrifice; murder as the
revenge of the humiliated and the culmination
of what Roche calls Ahmed’s “little
power game.”⁹⁴ The setting symbolizes
the evil nullity of the deed: “No shade,
the bush laid waste, the land sterile.”⁹⁵
Nor will the victim’s blood fructify the
sterility. Ahmed’s killing of Jane puts the
crimson patent on a sequence of rebellious
fantasies.

III

Ahmed and Bryant are culpable in the murder,
but are others entirely free from culpability?
I have urged that if Conrad were the
documenter of colonialism, then Naipaul,
as his successor, would be the documenter
of post-colonialism. Yet the second half of
the assertion requires modification. Naipaul
seems to document a second colonialism
culturally far more devastating than the
first. The clue to understanding this second
colonialism lies in two things: first, in the
existence of the flatterers who, in the case
of Malik, convinced a petty criminal that
he was a revolutionary leader and so sent
him back to Trinidad assured of his messianic
role in a Manichaean war between
blacks and whites; second, in the existence,
among Western elites, of a pervasive rebellion
against all order—often tending toward
what Naipaul calls the dream of blood.

In tracing the roots of Malik’s “Black
Power Murders in Trinidad,” Naipaul
cites Conrad’s short story “An Outpost
of Progress” (1897) as an analysis of “the
congruent corruptions of colonizer and
colonized, which can also be read as a parable
about simple people who think they
can separate themselves from the crowd.”⁹⁶
He also makes a bold, but careful, assertion
about Gale Benson who “as shallow
and vain and parasitic as many middleclass
dropouts of her time . . . became as
corrupt as her master; she was part of the
corruption by which she was destroyed.”⁹⁷
Naipaul condemns “those who helped to
make Malik” and “those who continue to
simplify the world and reduce other men—
not only the Negro—to a cause.”⁹⁸ The
category includes “people who substitute
doctrine for knowledge and irritation for
concern,” “revolutionaries who visit centers
of revolution with return air tickets,”
and “people who wish themselves on societies
more fragile than their own.”⁹⁹ The
exportation to the former colonies of exacerbating
ideologies serves the ideologues,
who can stir passions and then go home,
but hardly those to whom the doctrinemongers
appeal. In an essay on “Power”
(1970), Naipaul writes that a people who
“have seen themselves as futile, on the
other side of the real world,” will inevitably
“want something more than politics,”
which is what comes, as a practical matter,
with independence; “like the dispossessed
peasantry of medieval Europe,” they will
yearn for “crusades and messiahs.”¹⁰⁰

A Malik or an Ahmed resembles an Iranian
mullah by ambition and an American
criminal—a Charles Manson, say—by his
behavior. The eponymous term “guerrilla”
is at stake in the comparison. A
diminutive, Naipaul’s use of it emphasizes
the implied limitation in the “little
warrior’s” struggle, his vanity, his striking
out against a neurotic certainty of his own
moral dwarfi shness. Ahmed is not the
only guerrilla in the novel. Jane makes a
leitmotif of “the wrongness of the world”
and likes to say that the established order
should “go up in flames.”¹⁰¹ She believes
that she “has never exercised choice”¹⁰²
and exhibits a “casual, instinctive cruelty
toward people with whom she [is] not
concerned.”¹⁰³ Roche fares little better.
He embodies liberal guilt, as exemplified
by his having accepted the job of corporate
welfare agent channeling wealth from
Sablich’s enterprise to Ahmed’s “Grange.”
By the time he can say to himself, with reference
to Ahmed and everyone connected
with him, “I loathe all these people, I hate
the place,”¹⁰⁴ the evil has already run its
course. Herbert asks him during a radio
interview, “Didn’t you ever think that
Thrushcross Grange was a cover for the
guerrillas?”¹⁰⁵

Naipaul repeatedly stresses the unoriginality
of Third World radicalism. In the
1960s and 1970s, the rage was for “Black
Power,” already an import, which in Trinidad
and Jamaica catered to “the old apocalyptic
mood of the black masses,” offering
“rage, drama . . . revolutionary jargon,”¹⁰⁶
but led to nothing constructive. Some of
the worst race riots in history took place
in Jamaica under the demagogic leadership
of Prime Minister Michael Manley in
the early 1970s. While race politics meant
“Cuba and China,” it also meant, “drinking
holy water, eating pork and dancing.”¹⁰⁷
The mixture of the politically tendentious
with the collectively delirious could hardly
be more pronounced.

Naipaul has spoken of “Our Universal
Civilization,” and has described
himself as a grateful participant in and
beneficiary of it. This civilization, Naipaul
says, takes the form of “a particular
type of society [that] has a certain degree
of commercial organization [and] certain
cultural or imaginative needs . . . .
[a]nd it has the means of judging the new
things that are offered”¹⁰⁸ to it, whether
from within or without. “And if I have
to describe the universal civilization I
would say that it is the civilization that
both gave the prompting and the idea of
the literary vocation; and also gave the
means to fulfi ll that prompting.”¹⁰⁹ One
characteristic of the universal civilization
is that it cherishes its own past, not
uncritically, but assiduously. It conserves
and contemplates. The universal civilization
thus resists “philosophical hysteria.”¹¹⁰
Naipaul explains how he formed the idea
of the universal civilization. It was not, he
says, “until eleven years ago, when I traveled
for many months in a number of non-
Arab Muslim countries to try to understand
what had driven them to their rage.
That Muslim rage was just beginning to
be apparent.”¹¹¹ In a typically controversial
remark, Naipaul describes how the fundamentalist
variety of Islam had “abolished
the past”¹¹² in places, like Iran, where it
had come to power. “And when the past
is abolished . . . more than the idea of history
suffered. Human behavior, and ideals
of good behavior, could suffer.”¹¹³

It is not merely revivalist Islam, however,
that flails against the settled past: it is
any form of antinomian rebellion—Muslim,
communist, and nihilist. Each of
these sees life through the distorting red
of its sanguine vision. Each would suspend
the hard-earned order of inherited society
to impose the libido of some savior or messiah
bloodily on the world.

NOTES

1. V. S. Naipaul, Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among
   the Converted Peoples (New York: Vintage, 1999), 201.

2. Joseph Conrad, Victory (New York: Signet, 1991), 76.

3. Ibid., 77.

4. Ibid., 77.
5. Ibid., 77.
6. Ibid., 78.
7. Ibid., 76.
8. Ibid., 213.
9. Ibid., 87.
10. Ibid., 213.
11. Ibid., 206.
12. Ibid., 220.

13. Ibid., 204.
14. Ibid., 85.
15. Ibid., 282.
16. Ibid., 79.

17. Ibid., 285.
18. Ibid., 285.
19. Ibid., 286.
20. Plato, Gorgias, trans. W. Hamilton (New York: Penguin,
    1971), 87.

21. Ibid., 89.
22. Joseph Conrad, Chance (New
    York: Penguin, 1974), 290.

23. Ibid., 313.
24. Ibid., 298.
25. Ibid., 306.
26. Ibid., 304.
27. Ibid., 306.
28. Ibid., 307.
29. Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (New York: Signet,
    1987), 79.

30. Ibid., 22.
31. Ibid., 112.
32. Ibid., 153.
33. Ibid., 152.
34. Ibid., 12.
35. Ibid., 14.
36. Ibid., 22.
37. Ibid., 181.

38. Ibid., 180.
39. Raymond Aron, “The Future
    of Secular Religions,” in The Dawn of Universal History,
    trans. B. Bray (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 179.

40. V.
    S. Naipaul, Among Believers (New York: Vintage, 1982),
    53.

41. Ibid., 55.
42. Ibid., 55.
43. Ibid., 55.
44. Ibid., 55.
45. Ibid., 55.
46. Ibid., 55.
47. V. S. Naipaul, Beyond Belief
    (New York: Vintage, 1998), 212.

48. Ibid., 171.
49. V.
    S. Naipaul, “Michael X and the Black Power Killings
    in Trinidad,” in The Writer and the World (New York:
    Knopf, 2002), 141–42.

50. Ibid., 182.
51. Ibid., 182.
52. V.
    S. Naipaul, Guerrillas (New York: Vintage, 1990), 6.

53. Ibid., 6.

54. Ibid., 3.
55. Ibid., 103.
56. Ibid., 165.
57. Ibid.,
    100.

58. Ibid., 132–33.
59. Ibid., 126.
60. Ibid., 127.
61. Ibid., 23.

62. Ibid., 137.
63. Ibid., 137.
64. Ibid., 116–17.
65. Ibid., 113.
66. Ibid., 33.
67. Naipaul, The Writer and
    the World, 166.

68. Ibid., 166.
69. Ibid., 169.
70. Ibid.,
    170.

71. Ibid., 148.
72. Ibid., 14.
73. Naipaul, Guerrillas,
    182.

74. Ibid., 203
75. Ibid., 64.
76. Ibid., 30 & 181.
77. Ibid., 159.

78. Ibid., 175.
79. Ibid., 60.
80. Ibid., 43.
81. Ibid., 186.

82. Ibid., 33.
83. Ibid., 15.
84. Ibid., 74.
85. Ibid., 85.

86. Naipaul, The Writer and the World, 143.
87. Ibid., 143.

88. Ibid., 143.
89. Ibid., 143.
90. Ibid., 189.
91. Naipaul, Guerrillas, 236.

92. Ibid., 238.
93. Ibid., 238.
94. Ibid., 110.
95. Ibid., 237.
96. Naipaul, The Writer and
    the World, 190.

97. Ibid., 190.
98. Ibid., 190.
99. Ibid.,
    190.

100. “Power to the Caribbean People,” (New York
     Review of Books 15, No. 4, 1970): 135.

101. Guerrillas,
     95.

102. Ibid., 93.
103. Ibid., 131.
104. Ibid., 155.
105. Ibid., 208.

106. Naipaul, The Writer and the World, 136.
107. Ibid., 136.
108. Naipaul, “Our Universal Civilization,”
     (originally a speech at the Manhattan Institute,
     10/30/90) in The Writer and the World, 506.

109. Ibid.,
     506–07.

110. Ibid., 513.
111. Ibid., 507.
112. Ibid., 509.
113. Ibid., 509.