Fallen from Disgrace: Tales of Disillusion in Amiri Baraka’S

FALLEN FROM DISGRACE: TALES OF DISILLUSION IN AMIRI BARAKA’S

DUTCHMAN AND V. S. NAIPAUL’S GUERRILLAS

Tamar C. Osborne

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of

The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, Florida

December 2014

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Dr. Sika Dagbovie, who has been both patient and supportive throughout the many variations and iterations of this project. I would also like to sincerely thank Dr. Raphael Dalleo for his steadfast devotion and mentorship throughout all of my scholarly endeavors at Florida Atlantic University.

Additionally, special thanks are extended to Dr. Julieann Ulin for her many insights and suggestions. Lastly, I would like to acknowledge the support of my friends and colleagues; most notably, those who compassionately endured this process with me:

Marvin Jean-Gilles and Erin Kiley.

iv ABSTRACT

Author: Tamar C. Osborne

Title: Fallen from Disgrace: Tales Of Disillusion in Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman and V. S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas

Thesis Advisor: Dr. Sika Dagbovie-Mullins

Degree: Master of Arts

Year: 2014

Despite radical differences in their political commentary, Amiri Baraka and V.S.

Naipaul’s literary careers have obsessively centered on the divided Self of the colonized artist. Esther Jackson argues that Baraka’s “search for form” becomes “symbolic of a continuing effort to mediate between warring factions within the perceiving mind” (38).

Similarly, many critics have interpreted Naipaul’s grave manifestos as the outpourings of a writer disenchanted with his own past and national identity. For Selwyn Cudjoe,

Naipaul’s work is “reflective of a man who failed to discover any psychological balance in his life” (172-173). This thesis analyzes how Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman and V.S.

Naipaul’s Guerrillas engage with various fairy tale conventions in order to narrate the colonized victim’s divided Self. These narratives ultimately function as anti-fairy tales, revealing the black protagonist’s accursed position in the symbolic order.

v DEDICATION

This manuscript is dedicated to my mother, who has always strived to make my life more enchanting and fulfilling than any of the fairy tales we ever read.

FALLEN FROM DISGRACE: TALES OF DISILLUSION IN AMIRI BARAKA’S

DUTCHMAN AND V. S. NAIPAUL’S GUERRILLAS

I. INTRODUCTION ...... 1

When Dreams Become Nightmares ...... 3

White Woman as ‘Ab/Objects’ in Black Literature ...... 6

Constructing Black Manhood Through White Illusions ...... 9

Chapter Summaries ...... 9

II. AMIRI BARAKA’S RADICAL CULT OF THE DEAD: AN ANALYSIS OF DUTCHMAN’S ROMANTIC DIMENSIONS ...... 13

Dark Semiotics of Clay’s Identity ...... 16

Re-fantasizing Power ...... 19

Competing Narratives ...... 25

III. PLAYING WITH FIRE AND FANTASY IN V.S. NAIPAUL’S GUERRILLAS: THE TALE OF PRINCE JIMMY AND THE “WHITE RAT” ...... 31

Once Upon A Time…in the “Wasteland” ...... 36

Playing the Exotic Prince: Jimmy-Heathcliff ...... 39

Competing Narratives: Massa Roche’s Fairy Tale Ending ...... 48

IV. CONCLUSION ...... 53

Authorial Ties ...... 54

WORKS CONSULTED ...... 57

I. INTRODUCTION

On behalf of the fantasies organizing white hegemony, the white woman has been hailed the quintessential “light of the world” (Dyer 44).1 Though “the fair sex” is a term for women in general, it has been used exclusively to refer to the absolute purity, morality, and beauty of white women, thus demarcating women of color as either invisible or antithetical to the feminine ideal. According to Marina Warner, blondness and beauty are synonymous in Western myth and fairy-tale, the one exception being

Snow White, who is dark-haired, but then has the name and complexion to be acclaimed,

“the fairest of them all” (365). In spite of these allurements, the archetypal role of white women is one haunted with extreme objectification. Kate Davy argues that the role of white women in literature has been to foster individualism in white men while denying it to themselves, revealing a construction of white womanhood that allows white women to

“signify” and “enact” whiteness “without inhabiting the subject position reserved for white men” (197). Like other marginal groups, white women are denied subjectivity in order to “form the constitutive domain of the subject” (Butler 3).

The necrophilic fantasies so often conveyed in fairy tales help to establish the patriarchal order by making deathlike white femininity seem like a romantically desirable fate. Snow White, the paragon of white femininity, is endowed with a complexion so pale

1 In his chapter entitled “The Glow of White Women,” Richard Dyer argues that white women are bathed in and permeated by light: “It streams through them and falls on to them from above. In short, they glow” (122). While describing Eva from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe writes, “it was late in the afternoon, and the rays of the sun formed a kind of glory behind her, as she came forward…with her golden hair and glowing cheeks” (401). 1

that her Prince (opportunely) mistakes her for a corpse. In Richard Dyer’s deconstructive study of whiteness in visual culture, he concludes: “to be really, absolutely white is to be nothing…to be nothing is to be dead” (78-81). Accordingly, the Brothers’ Grimm account of “Little Snow White” overtly equates whiteness with death and desire. Having assessed his fair beloved as an object to be priced and possessed, the necrophilic Prince implores: “I will give you whatever you like to ask for it.” When the dwarves fail to oblige, the Prince orders: “I beseech you to give it to me, for I cannot live without looking upon Snow White” [emphasis added] (Grimm 7). Though presumed dead, Snow

White’s spectral whiteness is revealed to be more than skin deep; she is deprived the agency to control her own body and fate throughout the entire tale. As Dyer suggests, to be relinquished of all fleshly matters “may lead one to wonder if one is a subject at all”

(207). Despite popular appeal, fairy tales reinforce a social order that grants subjecthood to white men alone.

In “Outing Whiteness,” Kate Davy similarly deconstructs white womanhood, describing it as a “phantasm” functioning “in the service of white control and supremacy”

(213). As mentioned above, Snow White becomes the Prince’s desired object only after her unsullied womanhood is embalmed and elegantly displayed in a glass coffin.2 Such deathlike passivity is idealized in a white patriarchal order, which regards male identity as being defined and validated through its possession of the subdued female body. In

“The Subjection of Women,” Stuart Mill writes: “All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected to them, not a forced slave but a willing one” (1089). The doll-like idealization of white women renders them as little more than

2 Disturbingly passive, Snow White “dies” repeatedly throughout the narrative. The evil stepmother’s murderous schemes always result in the princess’s near-death (Snow White is revived each time by the seven dwarves). 2

“willing” objects in a society dominated by white men. Though feminist theorist, Marilyn

Frye, concedes that “whiteliness” helps repress the white woman’s “low status as woman,” she maintains the view that “a white woman’s whiteliness is deeply involved in her oppression” (126). For Prince Charming, Snow White’s deathlike “whiteliness” subdues her, even as it exalts her.

When Dreams Become Nightmares

This thesis covers two works that linger outside the margins of the Western patriarchal canon—beyond illusory fantasies of pure, chaste, “before-the-fall” white womanhood (Davy 212). In Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman (1964) and V. S. Naipaul’s

Guerrillas (1975), the “phantasm” of white womanhood is appropriated in the “service” of black control and supremacy. Dyer writes: “the white male spirit achieves and maintains empire; the white female soul is associated with its demise” (67). Persecuted by fantasies of black revenge and Western romance, the black male protagonists in these works perceive the white woman as their ideal victim and lover. Lula, Dutchman’s haunting white heroine, tells Clay right from the start: “I’m nothing, honey, and don’t you forget it” (Baraka, Dutchman 19). Beth McCoy observes that “Lula is designed to be

Dutchman’s most visible, but not the most substantial, player” (55). Naipaul’s Jane, suggestively described as, “very white,” “characterless,” and even “half-dead,” also manifests as a specter of absence (Guerrillas 28, 81). When Roche, her former lover, criticizes her empty-headedness, she casually remarks: “Perhaps I don’t have a point of view” (Guerrillas 32). By embodying both physical and spiritual shallowness, Lula and

Jane signify the archetypal role of white women in Western fairy tales.

However, although Lula and Jane (at times) dutifully perform the role expected of them, they also actively deconstruct notions of sacred white womanhood. These heroines are fallen, decadent, and markedly abject. As a result, Dutchman and Guerrillas ultimately function as “anti-fairy tales,” a term coined by André Jolles to describe modern re-workings of fairy tales in which the redemptive, happy ending is “violated”

(qtd. in Tatar 179). In Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, Michele Wallace writes: “America had made one point painfully clear. As long as the black man did not have access to white women, he was not a man” (30). Clay and Jimmy heed this virile vision of black manhood by appropriating the gendered conventions established in

Western fairy tales, narratives that characteristically endorse the subjugation of white maidens. Lula and Jane, however, are not easily seized and subdued. Despite her romantic airs of self-sacrifice, Lula nevertheless executes her role as the castratory white femme fatale, while Jane unmans her lovers with the “inviolability” of a “prostitute”

(Naipaul, Guerrillas 94, 117).

According to feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, the “woman” stands “bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer, not maker of meaning” (15). Baraka and Naipaul manipulate this patriarchal convention by depicting Lula and Jane as antagonistic (rather than passively silent) bearers of meaning. The symbolic operation described by Mulvey fails for Clay and

Jimmy because the white hegemonic order represented by these female characters has denied them their very manhood. Regarding Lula’s dubiously symbolic role, Baraka writes: “she does not represent anything—she is one. And perhaps that thing is America,

or at least its spirit” (Home 213). For black men, the American spirit is a haunting and castratory force. Because Clay and Jimmy are bound to the same symbolic order that oppresses women, their attempts to “live out” their “fantasies and obsessions” through linguistic command tragically fail (Mulvey 15).

Forbidden the white males formulation of manhood, Clay and Jimmy remain tragic child-heroes, protagonists inexorably condemned by the racial dimensions that foreground these works. Drawing from Jolles, Wolfgang Mieder describes anti-fairy tales as “cynical or satirical reactions to traditional fairy tales” in which the child-hero’s conflict is grimly unresolved due to modern “sociopolitical issues” and “economic worries” (50). In such counter-narratives, the child-hero’s helplessness and alienation is only “intensified” in the tale’s conclusion (Tatar 179). According to Neil Ten Kortenaar,

“many men have written on Jane’s blank sheet, and Jimmy’s ambition is to write on

Jane’s whiteness himself” (328). Jimmy’s designs, however, are repeatedly undermined and erased by Roche, the pitiful white male who nevertheless stands as the delegate of white patriarchy and Western paternalism. In Dutchman, the overruling white male is absent but eerily remains a threatening force. Wearied by his disillusionment, Clay ultimately decides that he’d rather play the “fool” as opposed to challenging the white patriarchal order (Baraka, Dutchman 37).

Regarding Clay and Jimmy’s unconsummated dreams, my project primarily focuses on the white woman’s role as “object of contention” between the white and black man (Zahlan 91). Black nationalist, Eldridge Cleaver, writes: “I don’t know just how it works…but I know that the white man made the black woman the symbol of slavery and the white woman the symbol of freedom…men die for freedom, but black men die for

white women, who are the symbol of freedom” (160). Evidently, Cleaver knows exactly how it works, for his formulation explains how the forbidden white woman becomes inextricably linked to the black male’s existential desires. As a result, the forbidden white woman has become an integral figure in African American discourse, particularly in seminal works regarding black manhood (Native Son, Invisible Man, Soul on Ice,

Dutchman). In his essay “American Sexual Reference: Black Male,” Baraka seeks to release black men from the illusory spell of white women, stating: “What makes this imagined détente between black and white attractive to the black man is usually his belief that he has actually transcended his social history, and entered a world of pure light … through contact with a beatified decadence” (Home 226). Baraka’s deconstruction of the

“light of the world” is dramatized throughout Lula’s nightmarish performance. Naipaul’s

Jane, the bohemian liberal whom he grossly associates with the abject, is similarly configured as an anti-heroine According to Cheryl Griffith, “Naipaul’s deep hostility towards the woman reaches a horrifying climax in Guerrillas” (98). Jane is essentially an irredeemable figure. Despite radical differences in their political views, these authors both enter a black discursive tradition that renders the white woman as abject. Lula and

Jane can be read as modern versions of the duplicitous white witch.

White Woman as ‘Ab/Objects’ in Black Literature

As one would expect, the white woman’s more saintly qualities are distorted in the imaginations of those afflicted by her mythic reputation. According to Calvin

Hernton: “The Southerner had to create a symbol, an idea of grace and purity” to atone for “the inhuman treatment of (at the time) nearly six million black people. Sacred white womanhood emerged in the South as an immaculate mythology to glorify an otherwise

indecent society” (qtd. in Klotman 98). Though this myth has certainly been fixed into the American psyche, the image of “sacred white womanhood” appears radically different in most African American texts. According to Anna Chupa, the “oppression and hopelessness” of black life gives birth to the “antithesis” of the ideal “White Goddess”

(25). In African American and Caribbean folklore, the archetype of white womanhood manifests as a haunting femme fatale, who not only embodies death, but also brings it.

Tellingly, the white mistress in Alice Walker’s Meridian is known as a bewitching “route to death, pure and simple” (103). Beth McCoy writes: “In the American cultural imaginary…a white woman in material or theoretical proximity to a black man means that some death, literal and/or figurative, is imminent” (55). In black mythos, the destructive force of the archetype is transcribed into the real experiences of black men.

The castratory white femme fatale arouses both desire and repulsion. Anna Chupa explains, “despite the horror and ugliness of her negative aspect, [she] is irresistible because her erratic nature mirrors the powerless anger so ingrained in the broken identities of the people around her. She is self-hatred personified and romanticized” (15).

The black man and white woman’s mirrored relationship can be attributed to their peculiar form of marginality—both have access to power but remain nonetheless subjected to the white patriarchal order. For Shelly Jarenski, the black man and white woman stand as the “visual objects of America's racial and sexual fantasies” (86).3 In the first chapter of Invisible Man, the narrator experiences conflicting emotions of desire and dread when he is confronted with a “stark naked” and heavily rouged blonde. He also

3 Black women desired but are not cast as so. In the American typological narrative, black women are rendered violable and accessible in opposition to sacred white womanhood. Moreover, Mary Helen Washington asserts: “the Black Woman was not permitted the dubious distinction of being feminine” (xviii). 7

becomes conscious of their mutual subjection to the white male gaze:

The hair was yellow like that of a circus kewpie doll, the face heavily

powdered and rogued, as though to form an abstract mask, the eyes hollow

and smeared a cool blue, the color of a baboon’s butt…I wanted at one

and the same time to run from the room, to sink through the floor, or go to

her and cover her eyes and the eyes of others with my body…to caress her

and destroy her, to love her and murder her. (Ellison 19)

In this scene, the narrator ineptly performs male privilege by defining himself against the rouged white woman, ultimately realizing that they are both spectacles for white male entertainment. Klotman writes: “should there be any confusion about the symbolic role of the blonde female, the obscene manipulation of her passive body by the ‘gentleman’ of the town…Ellison adds a special touch: she has an American flag tattoed on her belly, just below her navel” (99). Although the narrator can sympathize with her violent objectification, she remains a symbol of America, and thus represents his own destruction. The narrator is conflicted between wanting to protect the woman from the objectifying male gaze, and also wanting to punish her for her relation to the dominant order that has simultaneously objectified him.

While describing the peculiarly specific nature of repression, Freud writes, “those objects to which men give their preference, that is, their ideals, originate in the same perceptions and experiences as those objects of which they have most abhorrence, and that the two originally differed from one another only by slight modifications” (91).

Freud’s reasoning here helps to illuminate the strangely paradoxical portrayal of white

women in African American and postcolonial fiction. At times they are irresistible and doll-like, other times, repulsive and aggressive.

Constructing Black Manhood Through White Illusions

Fairy tales are shaped by the hegemonic concerns and fantasies of white men and

Clay and Jimmy are inexorably caught in the language of white patriarchy. Though they desire black revenge, these characters can only identify themselves through an illusory white identity. Clay thinks of himself as Baudelaire while Jimmy Ahmed enthusiastically identifies with the romantic hero, Heathcliff (he has even named his Black Power commune “Thrushcross Grange”).4 Furthermore, like the white men they emulate, Clay and Jimmy both try to impose the image of the suffering heroine onto their white female lovers. These works are about power and language, but more specifically, they are about black men who attempt to make words serve them through the symbolic order of Western fairy tales. By subverting romantic conventions and the Western canon itself, Baraka and

Naipaul render the ghastly fairy tale (ending) of the colonized black man.

Chapter Summaries

My Chapter 2, “Amiri Baraka’s Radical Cult of the Dead: An Analysis of

Dutchman’s Romantic Dimensions,” analyzes Clay’s highly literary attempt to impose himself within the (white) patriarchal order. Scholars have long observed the play’s mythical structure, generally focusing on Baraka’s dark appropriation of the Edenic myth. Yet, despite Dutchman’s heavy symbolism, there has been considerably less scholarship devoted to Baraka’s employment of various romantic and fairy tale

4 According to James Wilson, the romantic hero is a literary archetype that refers to a character that has been rejected by society and has the Self as the center of his/her existence (246). After being accused of rape, Jimmy is rejected by the London society that once embraced him and returned to “the bush to rot”—where he spends his nights lamenting his failures (Naipaul, Guerrillas 73). 9

conventions. Much of Lula’s seemingly nonsensical speech (at times frenzied—other times dreamily distant) is indicative of the play’s fairy tale proportions. Jungian scholar,

Jutta von Buchholtz, equates the powerful “abstractions” in fairy tales to the “images and actions in dreams,” suggesting that both serve as blueprints for deeper meaning” (6). Lula constantly speaks in abstractions, much like the witches and tricksters in fairy tales

(supernatural figures that foster transformation).5

By signifying the tragically insane white witch, Lula merges two traditions: black mythos and Western fairy tale. Lula’s imagined rendezvous with Clay evokes common fairy tale images and racial myths. Romantically narrating her “chronicle,” Lula states:

“And with my apple-eating hand I push open the door and lead you, my tender big-eyed prey, into my…God, what can I call it…into my hovel” (Baraka, Dutchman 24). With hands “dry as ashes” that seduce Clay into her “hovel,” Lula’s script actively draws images from our cultural and collective unconscious. Dianne Weisgram notes that Clay’s death signifies the “archetypal American nightmare” (216). By figuratively castrating her

“big-eyed prey,” Lula evokes the ritual lynching of black men in the whimsical language of fairy tales (Baraka, Dutchman 24).

Besides addressing the ways in which Baraka’s play manipulates classic fairy tale conventions, I also evaluate Lula’s role as the abject heroine. Throughout the play Lula cruelly attacks Clay’s whitewashed identity, encouraging him to reject white patriarchal discourses that seek to destroy him. However, despite her abject empowerment, Lula is ultimately “phantasm” functioning in the service of white supremacy. When Clay

5 Rebellious and duplicitous, the trickster’s foolery often causes the collapse of the old social order, allowing the rise of the new. The trickster becomes an unlikely cultural hero by exposing repressed contents to the light of consciousness and allowing for their reintegration (Knox 66). Like the (trickster) snake in the Garden of Eden, Lula uses manipulative language to provoke Clay’s radical black consciousness and thus undermines the white patriarchal order. 10

abandons his violent black rage for the security of “words” and fantasies, Lula diabolically expels him from the symbolic order.

Chapter 3, entitled “Playing with Fire and Fantasy in Guerrillas: The Tale of

Prince Jimmy and the ‘White Rat,’” evaluates the ways in which Jimmy Ahmed’s dreams and fantasies are tragically dictated by fairy tales and gothic romance. Written nearly a decade after Dutchman, V.S. Naipaul’s novel reveals a world long fallen from grace. The

Brothers’ Grimm cynically note that fairy tales take place in remote past, “a long time ago, when wishing was still of use” (Tatar 71). Jimmy’s modern world specifically condemns such dreamlike possibilities for the black man. Though Jimmy tries to construct his life into “satisfying narrative,” his supervisor, Roche (the novel’s representative of white patriarchy), elusively undermines all of Jimmy’s crude aspirations. Like Dutchman, Naipaul’s postcolonial novel narrates the black male protagonist’s transition from naïve fancy to grave disillusionment. Therefore, this chapter particularly addresses Jimmy’s failure in relation to Clay’s.

The critical scholarship surrounding Guerrillas tends to center on Naipaul’s unfavorable treatment of Jane, “the first woman to receive such elaborate treatment in

Naipaul’s works” (Griffith 98). However, this chapter focuses more specifically on the more literary aspects of the novel. In doing so my analysis primarily engages with Anne

Zahlan’s essay, “Literary Murder: V.S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas” and Neil Ten Kortenaar’s essay, “Writers and Readers, The Written and the Read: V.S. Naipaul and Guerrillas.”

Zahlan evaluates the novel’s “impertinent liberties” with the English canon, writing: “the book’s characters are dead, zombies in decomposing bodies …Guerrillas rebels against the English novel” (103). Also interested in the novel’s literary motifs, Neil Ten

Kortenaar writes, “the characters in Guerrillas struggle over whose narrative will contain them all” (327). These readings consider the authorial theme that resonates throughout the novel, particularly in regard to each character’s role as writer. Roche has written a

“visionless” memoir about his experiences in South Africa. Jimmy is working on a memoir about his political failures. And Jane is an editor for the same publishing company that employs both Jimmy and Roche. My analysis engages with these secondary texts but focuses more specifically on the ways in which Jimmy tries to manipulate the symbolic order of fairy tales. Jimmy’s memoir jumps back and forth between his own first person prose and that of a woman (clearly based on Jane) named

Clarissa. Jimmy envisions himself as Prince Heathcliff as he constructs Jane after Samuel

Richardson’s long-suffering heroine, Clarissa. Jimmy uses Clarissa’s perspective to glorify his actions, but ultimately the white order even deprives of his delusions.

II. AMIRI BARAKA’S RADICAL CULT OF THE DEAD:

AN ANALYSIS OF DUTCHMAN’S ROMANTIC DIMENSIONS

That moment she was mine, mine, fair, Perfectly pure and good: I found A thing to do, and all her hair In one long yellow string I wound Three times her little throat around, And strangled her. No pain felt she; I am quite sure she felt no pain. – Robert Browning, “Porphyria’s Lover”

Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman (1964) opens with a twenty-year-old black male named

Clay, seated upon a New York subway train. Gazing “idly” through his window, Clay notices a “woman’s face” staring at him. The initial stage directions immediately objectify the image that will become Lula: “When it realizes that the man has noticed the face, it begins very premeditatedly to smile” [emphasis added] (4). “Idle again,” Clay returns to his magazine, but within moments, mysteriously “sees the woman hanging there beside him” from a subway strap; “he looks up into her face, smiling quizzically”

[emphasis added] (4-5). The play ensues with Clay and Lula’s artfully played power dynamic, which Baraka conveys by raising various romantic conventions from the dead.

Emerging as a specter of absence, Lula tells Clay right from the start: “I’m nothing, honey, and don’t you forget it” (19). In Matthew Rebhorn’s analysis of Dutchman’s gender politics, he notes that Lula uses her “masochistic white femininity” to activate

Clay’s “abusive, virile, subjectivity” (797). However, despite Lula’s airs of self-sacrifice,

her agency in declaring her nothingness simultaneously undermines the patriarchal order that she subversively adheres to.

Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue, “Porphyria’s Lover,” opens with a

“sullen” male sitting passively as he observes the object of his desire, Porphyria, with a mix of fear and wonder. Like Lula, Porphyria’s entrance is rendered supernaturally—she

“glide(s)” into the Lover’s small cottage, shutting out the ominous storm (6-7).

Composing the scene as the “dominant partner,” Porphyria blazes a fire in hopes of arousing her recalcitrant Lover back to life (Maxwell 999). As the Lover observes

Porphyria, he neurotically muses over her agency and “vainer ties” until her murmurs of affection assure him that she is possessed by him alone: “Be sure I look’d up at her eyes/

Happy and proud; at last I knew/ Porphyria worhipp’d me” (Browning 24, 31-33).

Longing to preserve this intimate “moment” forever, the Lover suddenly strangles

Porphyria to death with her own “yellow” hair (Browning 39). With Porphyria transformed into a doll-like corpse, the Lover becomes the active partner for the first time in the poem: “I warily oped her lids” and “propped her head up as before/ Only, this time my shoulder bore/ Her head, which droops upon it still” (Browning 44-49). The poem ultimately narrates the transfer of power from Porphyria to the nameless Lover who has

(ritualistically) murdered her. No longer having to look “up at her eyes,” the Lover is pleased to see her “smiling rosy little head” drooping lifelessly upon his own shoulder.

The monologue chillingly ends: “And thus we sit together now…And yet God has not said a word!” (Browning 58-60). With the Lover’s crime seemingly sanctioned by God, the white patriarchal order is restored.

Although Dutchman follows a similar pattern, Clay’s fantasy of ritualistic murder is never actually consummated. Juxtaposing these narratives, which both signify fairy tale tradition, reveals how Dutchman functions as an anti-fairy tale. Clay’s verbal attack, “I could murder you now. Such a tiny ugly throat,” remains only a threat at the end of the play (Baraka, Dutchman 33). As Dianne Weisgram observes, “[Clay] does not really hurt

Lula at all; instead he pours out three pages of rhetoric” (225). Like Browning’s disturbed narrator, Clay equates power with speech and therefore specifically targets Lula’s

“throat.” As he pushes Lula against the seat, Clay rages: “You telling me what I ought to do…Well, don’t! Don’t tell me anything!” (Baraka, Dutchman 34) Baraka’s play and

Browning’s dramatic monologue both convey the breaking down of power primarily through their characters’ command of language.6 Significantly, in the first half of

Browning’s monologue, the Lover struggles to assume a subject position: “She sat down by my side/ And called me. When no voice replied/ She put my arm about her waist”

(Browning 14-16). The Lover’s silence is phrased passively to emphasize his absolute lack of agency. Clay, too, remains passive throughout majority of Baraka’s play. Rebhorn notes that Clay’s responses are “clipped and often monosyllabic” until Lula incites his

“virile” black masculinity—which he expresses during his powerful (and lengthy) monologue (801).

Though Clay indeed victimizes Lula by slapping and pushing her, his radical domination is ultimately short lived. Clay wearies, succumbing to his role as the “fool” in the Western drama that condemns his subjectivity (Baraka, Dutchman 37). Conceding to

6 Browning’s narrator remains nameless because he has derived his very subject-hood from Porphyria’s lifeless body and is therefore only identified through his intimate relation with Porphyria. Similarly, Dutchman’s title refers to Lula’s relentless curse; she is the Flying Dutchman, doomed to sail the “flying underbelly of the city” (Baraka, Dutchman 4).

white master narratives that deny black manhood, Clay states: “Ahhh. Shit. But who needs it? I’d rather be a fool. Insane. Safe with my words, and no deaths, and clean, hard thoughts, urging me to new conquests” (Baraka, Dutchman 35-37). In the end, Clay remains inexorably caught in the language of white patriarchy, no longer daring to disturb the white symbolic order. According to Rebhorn, “the black masculinity at stake here is a damaging, destructive re-staging of the citational predecessor” (810-11). In a society that grants subjecthood to white men alone, Clay’s attempts to re-stage white patriarchal fantasies, tragically fail.

Dark Semiotics of Clay’s Identity

Considering the intensity of Dutchman’s racialized gender politics, it should come as no surprise that Baraka declares that the play is really about “the difficulty of becoming a man in America” (Baraka, Home 213). For Clay, this difficulty is manifested in Lula’s abject womanhood, which seems only to validate his manhood by virtue of terrorizing it. The abject, according to Julia Kristeva, “is neither subject nor object;” rather, it is something that “disturbs identity, system, order” (particularly the symbolic order) (1-4). Since our identity and stability as subjects are derived from the stability of the objects to which we attach ourselves, the abject by its very nature poses a threat to our subjectivity. In the patriarchal conventions of fairy tales, white women are neatly configured as doll-like objects, made to foster rather than threaten, male subjecthood.

Lula, however, represents the “ambiguous” and “composite” nature of the abject: she is dually sadist and masochist, active and passive, black and white, male and female, everything and nothing (Kristeva 4). She troubles meaning by transgressing boundaries and deconstructing notions of “whiteliness.” For Rebhorn, Lula’s fluid gender and racial

performances signify the tradition of blackface minstrelsy; he explains, “Lula constructs an image of herself as powerfully phallic” by metaphorically “blacking up” (807). With her phallic black identity, Lula uncannily conjures up Clay’s most taboo desires and makes them her own. She reveals: “You tried to make it with your sister when you were ten. But I succeeded a few weeks ago” (Baraka, Dutchman 9).

Although critics generally recognize that the play is about the making (and unmaking) of Clay’s subjecthood, Lula’s role in this process as the abject white heroine has not been significantly explored. Reading Lula as the abject heroine highlights the ways in which Baraka’s drama functions as an anti-fairy tale. Such counter-narratives generally emphasize the “negative” motifs already structured in traditional fairy tales in order to more realistically reflect the “problems of modern society” (Mieder 50).

According to Maria Tatar, the hero of the fairy tale “is an illegitimate child, the offspring of a union that is, if not illicit, at least mysterious or problematical” (73). As an African

American, Clay is the “offspring” of violent race relations between blacks and whites in

America. Aware of this history, Lula menacingly insults Clay’s illegitimate relationship to white patriarchy: “And why’re you wearing a jacket and tie like that? Did your people ever burn witches or start revolutions over the price of tea? Boy, those narrow-shoulder clothes come from a tradition you ought to feel oppressed by” (Baraka, Dutchman 28).

Lula actively deconstructs the white order, while also projecting its hate. Baraka proposes that revolutionary drama “should stagger through our universe correcting, insulting, preaching, spitting craziness…a craziness taught to us in our most rational moments”

(“Revolutionary Theatre” 1). In Dutchman, Lula manifests as a figure of destruction,

“insulting” and “spitting craziness” for the sake of provoking Clay’s black rage and consciousness.

Drawing from Kristeva’s formulation of the abject, Leisha Jones notes that

“abject beings are pushed beyond the margins of subject-hood” but unlike objects, “they may also push back” (63). As the abject, Lula troubles Clay’s identity formation and the patriarchal order that he disastrously adheres to. Having been indoctrinated with white hegemonic fantasies, Clay attempts to pacify Lula’s erratic behavior by reciting the mantra of white femininity: “Hey, what was in those apples? Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest one of all? Snow White, baby, and don’t you forget it” [emphasis added] (Baraka, Dutchman 30). Clay’s seemingly playful banter ends with an authoritative “linguistic command.” By imposing the image of Snow White, Clay attempts to restore Lula’s dubious state of whiteliness. According to Mulvey, “the determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure,” which is then “styled accordingly” (19). Clay’s fantasy formulation is disrupted, however, because Lula (by her very nature) challenges the meaning instilled by power structures and master narratives.

The poisoned apple that preserves Snow White’s chastity by subduing her into a deep sleep, serves a deconstructive purpose in Baraka’s play by means of exposing Lula’s abject femininity. Tellingly, Clay evokes his allusive command the moment Lula’s ravings become most vulgar and abject: “Come on, Clay. Let’s do the nasty. Rub bellies.

Rub bellies” (Baraka, Dutchman 30). Though Lula is certainly antagonistic, her effort to liberate Clay by encouraging him to “push back,” complicates readings that solely regard her as the castratory white femme fatale.7

7 According to Leslie Sanders, Lula goads Clay “into a demonstration of his manhood so that metaphorically she can castrate him more precisely” (146). 18

Re-fantasizing Power

The black man and the white woman were not supposed to have any connections, even in anybody’s wildest fantasies. – Amiri Baraka, “American Sexual Reference: Black Male”

As the abject heroine Lula desires to “free” Clay from the power structures that condemn and confine him. She romantically muses: “We’ll pretend the people cannot see you. That is, the citizens. And that you are free of your own history. And I am free of my history. We’ll pretend that we are both anonymous beauties smashing along the city’s entrails [she yells as loud as she can] GROOVE” (Baraka, Dutchman 21). Lula fashions her own fairy tale that invites Clay to the realm of the abject as her companion, in opposition to the “citizens” of white patriarchy. The imagery of the city’s bowels further indicates Lula’s embraced expulsion from the symbolic order. The train functions as a liminal territory, which ultimately expels Clay for daring to disturb the white order (the train’s white passengers are all implicated when they willingly help Lula remove the body). Even Lula’s sudden exclamation of the word “groove” reflects the state of abjection. In Lynda Barry’s self-described “autobifictionalography,” she explains: “the groove is so mysterious. We’re born with it and we lose it and the world seems to split apart before our eyes into stupid and cool. When we get it back, the world unifies around us, and both stupid and cool fall away” [emphasis added]. Kristeva describes one’s confrontation with the abject realm in similar terms: “Deprived of the world, therefore, I fall in a faint…in that thing that no longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything, I behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders: fainting away” (4).8 Both concepts, the groove and the abject, signify the deconstruction of “the

8 After Clifton’s death, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man regards the people of Harlem differently, realizing that they too were living “outside the groove of history” (335). 19

world.” Barry renders “cool” as a construct that falls away once when one enters into the groove. Lula conveys similar feelings when she mocks Clay for commanding her to “be cool,” which she takes as another expression of his assimilated identity construction: “Be cool. Be cool. That’s all you know” (Baraka, Dutchman 31). Lula desires Clay’s black rage, not his cool façade.

Throughout the play Lula signifies a variety of femme fatales, each indicative of her role as the abject heroine. Kristeva explains, “what is abject…draws me toward the place where meaning collapses” [emphasis added] (2). As a Siren-like figure, Lula haunts the “flying underbelly of the city,” an underground setting that not only signifies her state of abjection, but also allows her to draw men to the chaotic depths of existence. Stacey

Keltner explains: “Abjection resists the coherent, seemingly stable meaning characteristic of the symbolic experience, which relies on an already constituted subject and already constituted object—or, more simply, a world. Abjection is, in this sense, extraterritorial— literally, outside the world” (44). Looming through Baraka’s subterranean landscape,

Lula provocatively draws black men outside of the symbolic experience.

However, this characterization also associates Lula with discourses of death.

According to Felipe Smith, “black men responded to the myth of the black rapist with a counter narrative of the white seductress, who, Siren-like, lures unwary black men to their death in her unending search for human sacrificial victims” (78).9 According to

Erich Neumann’s negative schema of “The Great Mother” archetype, figures of “fatal enchantment,” such as Circe, Medusa, and Lilith serve a transformative function and are therefore dually associated with life and death (83). For Clay, Lula’s whiteness inherently

9 Manifested in this chimerical figure, are the real white women who feigned rape when caught “dangerously” close to black men. 20

marks her as a figure of “fatal enchantment” but it is worth noting that Baraka particularly associates Lula with the legendary seductress, Lilith. With her “apple-eating” hand and “long red hair hanging down her back,” Lula not only resembles medieval iconography of Lilith but also enacts her archetypal role. Dianne Weisgram notes: “Lula is a composite Eve-Lilith, the original evil woman” (217). In most accounts of the myth,

Lilith, Adam’s “rebellious” first wife, is expelled from the garden for refusing to submit to the patriarchal order but returns as the Serpent who instigates Adam and Eve’s fall from grace (Biggs 13-24). Like Lilith, Lula refuses to take part in her oppression and thus longs for Clay to accompany her expulsion from the symbolic order. Lula-Lilith offers consciousness by means of her own forbidden fruit. She states: “eating apples together is always the first step…Would you like to get involved with me Mister Man” (Baraka,

Dutchman 22).

Besides her fantasy formulations, Lula’s deconstructive agenda is revealed through her constant play with language. Much of her seemingly meaningless ravings exhort her abject endeavor to liberate Clay. Shortly before provoking Clay’s violent monologue, Lula freestyles her own blues number that voices her subversive (though derogatory) agenda. The stage directions read: “[Lula] begins to make up a song that becomes quickly hysterical. As she sings she rises from her seat…Each time she runs into a person she lets out a very vicious piece of profanity” (Baraka, Dutchman 30). Lula’s song characteristically resists the coherent structures of language: “Yes. Yes. Son of a bitch, get out the way. Yes. Quack. Yes. Yes. And that’s how the blues was born. Ten little niggers sitting on a limb, but none of them ever looked like him […] and that’s how the blues was born” (Baraka, Dutchman 30). Lula’s frenzied lyrics allude to a

Confederate song titled “Ten Little Niggers,” which “surfaced” in two distinct genres: minstrel shows and children’s nursery rhyme books. The song was circulated in order to maintain the racist ideology of black inferiority (Andersen). Tiffany Andersen argues:

“the song connected the white-constructed definition of nigger to the black man’s consciousness.” As such, the nursery rhyme disturbingly narrates the unfortunate deaths of ten black men:

Ten little nigger boys went out to dine; One choked his little self and then there were Nine. Nine little nigger boys sat up very late; One overslept himself and then there were Eight. ………………………………………………………… Two little nigger boys sitting in the sun; One got frizzled up and then there was One. One little nigger boy left all alone; He went out and hanged himself and then there were None.

Lula signifies this absurd master narrative only to encourage Clay to challenge white constructs that threaten black manhood—particularly through discourses of death.

Notably, the final line in the lullaby absolves blame from the white society that has ritualistically lynched the last one left.

Enraged at Clay’s refusal to join her song and dance, Lula yells: “You middle- class black bastard…Get up and scream at these people. Like scream meaningless shit in these hopeless faces.” Growing exceedingly hysterical, she continues: “Expanding smells of silence. Gravy snot whistling like sea birds. Clay. Clay, you got to break out. Don’t sit there dying the way they want you to die” [emphasis added] (Baraka, Dutchman 31).

Besides evoking random images of abjection, Lula warns Clay to reject the white

patriarchal fantasies that seek to destroy him. Her command, “don’t die the way they want you to die” connects directly to her earlier allusion to “Ten Little Niggers.” Lula

(like her name suggests) attempts to coax Clay through her own distorted lullaby. Her bluesy lullaby signifies discourses of death only to transform them.

In “Porphyria’s Lover,” the speaker’s rhythmic tone remains disturbingly consistent throughout the entire monologue, a strategy that seemingly lulls the reader into complacency. Lula’s manipulation of language is also deceptively coaxing. She writes her death and draws Clay in. Nearly enchanted, Clay urges Lula to “go on with the chronicle” (Baraka, Dutchman 24). By doing this, she takes control of the narrative (her narrative), therefore complicating Clay’s attempts to write her death with his own hands.

Lula begins by scripting her imagined rendezvous with Clay. She masterfully draws Clay in with her storytelling, despite how flighty and nonsensical her plotline is:

Lula. Now you say to me, “Lula, Lula, why don’t you go to this party with

me tonight? It’s your turn, and let those be your lines.

Clay. Lula, why don’t you go to this party with me tonight, Huh?

Lula. Say my name twice before you ask, and no huh’s.

Clay. Lula, Lula, why don’t you go to this party with me tonight?

Lula: I’d like to go, Clay, but how can you ask me to go when you barely

know me? (Baraka, Dutchman 17)

Above, Lula takes complete control of their romance, acting as playwright and director.

Yet, Lula’s “pageant” strangely develops into her own death fantasy—a distorted discourse of deathlike white femininity (Baraka, Dutchman 37). She also renders Clay as her Prince--a distortion of the convention. She refers to him as “My Christ. My Christ,”

suggesting that he is her savior whom she hopes will redeem her from her curse. For

George Adams the title is also an “exclamation of disgust” (56). Though her narrative signifies the archetypal white heroine, the fact that she controls the narrative deconstructs this tradition.

Playing the part of Juliet, Lula tellingly reenacts Shakespeare’s famous fairy tale about two star-crossed lovers. According to critic George Adams: “Because of the ingrained racism of Lula’s white society, the normal love-hate relationships have become perverted and murderous, hence the violent and perverse orgasm of Lula and Clay by means of her sundering phallic knife” (57). Lula’s identification with Juliet speaks to the play’s interracial liaison and murder. Moreover, Mulvey explains how the woman’s passivity maintains the illusion of male power. Lula wills her own death and thus disrupts white hegemonic illusions. Susan Brownmiller suggests that there is “a deep belief…that our attractiveness to men, or sexual desirability, is in direct proportion to our ability to play the victim…women live the part of the walking wounded” (333). Lula stages and performs her masochistic victimhood throughout the play in order to serve her own deconstructive purpose. Throughout the play Lula morbidly wills her own death.

Kristeva explains that the abject is “a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles…a friend who stabs you” (4). Lula rehearses her death, bestowing Clay with the role of the dark Prince:

Lula. And you’ll call my room black as a grave. You’ll say this place is

like Juliet’s tomb.”

Clay. [Laughs] I might.

Lula. I know. You’ve probably said it before.

Clay. And is that all? The whole grand tour?

Lula. Not all. You’ll say to me very close to my face, many, many times,

you’ll say, even whisper, that you love me.

Clay. Maybe I will.

Lula. And you’ll be lying.

Clay. I wouldn’t lie about something like that.

Lula. Hah. It’s the only kind of thing you will lie about. Especially if you

think it’ll keep me alive.

Clay. Keep you alive? I don’t understand. Morbid. Morbid. You sure

you’re not an actress? All that self-aggrandizement.

(Baraka, Dutchman 26-27)

The scene playfully evokes common fairy tale imagery. She imagines Clay crouched down near her lifeless body, whispering the magical words that will awaken her from her deathlike existence. But the problem for Clay is that Lula controls this symbolic operation. It is significant that this scene occurs directly after Lula has informed Clay that their entire encounter has been, and will continue to be, about his manhood (Baraka,

Dutchman 25-26). Lula manipulates this classic patriarchal fairy tale convention, leaving

Clay confused and powerless, rather than secure and validated. Clay attempts to impose the image of Snow White onto Lula but she instead identifies with Juliet, a figure who resolutely takes her own life.

Competing Narratives

Despite Lula’s aggressive agency throughout the play, Clay’s own misogynistic agenda reveals the play’s volatile power struggle. Clay and Lula’s motivations differ, but

they both seek to disturb the symbolic order by subverting discourses of power. Despite

Clay’s bashful and naïve demeanor, his patriarchal agenda is formidably decadent. With her uncanny awareness, Lula states in scene one: “You’re a murderer, Clay…You know goddamn well what I mean” (Baraka, Dutchman 21). By imposing the image of Snow

White (the paragon of deathlike femininity), Clay not only reveals his desire for Lula’s submission, but also his desire for her death. In doing so, Clay reifies the necrophilic fantasies that pervade much of white patriarchal literature. According to Elisabeth

Bronfen, “the eighteenth century marks an increase in necrophilia” when “love and death came together until their appearances merged” (86). Clay’s identification with the French romanticist, Baudelaire, is significant because it further associates Baraka’s “great would- be poet” (Dutchman 35) with the macabre European tradition known as the “romantic cult of the dead” (Castle 131). Writing in the nineteenth century, Baudelaire modernized this tradition by incorporating existential themes regarding the self and other.

Matthew Rebhorn notes that Baraka’s black masculinity “not only exhibits notable ‘macho’ traits, but also depends for its definition on being directed against those

‘colonized’ subjects who are also abjectified by dominant society” (800). Clay’s identification with Baudelaire not only indicates his devotion to Western fantasy, but more specifically, his desire to kill Lula through a ritualistic convention (power through discourses of death). By validating his manhood through Lula’s abject female body Clay signifies one of Baudelaire’s “most influential” poems, entitled “Une Charogne” (Tsur).

The poem details a memory of the speaker walking with his beloved and seeing a corpse, which he then romanticizes to gory and sublime detail:

Do you recall the thing we saw one time, my own, One summer morning fair and fresh: The pathway turned and there, upon a bed of stone, A great hulk of decaying flesh, Its legs upthrust to mock female lubricity, Seething and sweating its pollution, It’s open belly, cynically and carelessly Venting a gaseous corruption? ……………………………….. And God in heaven gazed upon this splendid corpse, Luxuriating like a flower. The horrid stench had almost felled you in the gorse, So overwhelming was its power. ………………………………… --And yet, you will become this very sort of ordure, This self-same, stinking putrefecation, You, starlight of my eye, the sun of my good nature, You, my angel and my passion! (Baudelaire 65-69).

The abject corpse is described as shameless, vulgar, with “legs upthrust” (much like

Lula’s frenzied vulgarities). The male speaker shockingly ends the poem by stating that this will be the fate of his beloved. Significantly, it is also a poem noted to be about

Baudelaire’s Haitian lover (Tsur). The poem is about his desire for his beloved to transform into this corpse (to be made abject—the corpse is the ultimate form of abjection) so that she may only survive in his own oeuvre. It also expresses his desire to validate his manhood through her dead body.

Clay however, does not fulfill the fantasy of his literary mentor and is consequently expelled from the symbolic order. For Sherley Williams, “the world in

which Clay moves is revealed as a shadowy world filled with images and illusions…which can only bring death” (138). Similarly, Beth McCoy explains: “a white woman in material or theoretical proximity to a black man means that some death, literal and/or figurative, is imminent” (55). For the black man the white woman not only embodies death but also brings it; therefore, Baudelaire’s necrophilic-patriarchal operation can only destroy rather than foster Clay’s already troubled manhood.

According to Rebhorn, Clay constructs black masculinity through the “othering” of white femininity: “Clay abjectifies Lula, elevating his own sense of identity through demeaning hers” (802). Clay’s language is reminiscent of Baudelaire’s macabre tradition and his penchant for alliteration: “They’ll cut your throats, and drag you out to the edge of your cities so the flesh can fall away from your bones, in sanitary isolation” (Baraka,

Dutchman 36). But Clay’s Baudelarian fantasy also fails because Lula has already fantasized her own death. Moreover, Clay does not maintain his power over language.

Clay’s final monologue conveys his fleeting power. Clay ascribes to the fantasies and illusions of the white hegemonic order and thus imagines himself as “Baudelaire,” though in Lula’s words, he’s “just a dirty white man” (Baraka, Dutchman 19, 31). When

Clay states: “let me bleed you loud whore,” he is specifically targeting Lula’s abject womanhood (Baraka, Dutchman 35). Clay regulates his power through the misogynistic language of white patriarchy. According to Rebhorn, Clay’s “speech is metaphorically complex” and “metaphysically erudite” (801). Clay also tells Lula “If I’m a middle-class fake white man…let me be. And let me be in the way I want” (Baraka, Dutchman 34).

Though Clay expresses his radical black machismo, he also reveals his own troubling attachment to white patriarchal society. Clay imagines himself as the future leader of the

black people when he states: “Just let me bleed you…a whole people of neurotics, struggling to keep from being sane. And the only thing that would cure the neurosis would be your murder” (Baraka, Dutchman 35). Clay is asserting that black liberation depends on the abjectification of white women. But despite this conviction, Clay ultimately resigns himself to the European model of art and individualism: “My people’s madness. Hah! That’s a laugh. My people. They don’t need me to claim them. They got legs and arms of their own. Personal insanities. Mirrors…Let them alone” (Baraka,

Dutchman 36).

Clay’s individualistic ethos, a product of his Western acculturation explicitly opposes Baraka’s collective vision of black solidarity. In “The Revolutionary Theatre,”

Baraka writes: “our theatre will show victims so that their brothers in the audience will be better able to understand that they are the brothers of victims, and that they themselves are victims, if they are blood brothers” (3). Baraka thus uses Clay’s antiheroic demise to reveal the deadly alternative awaiting black men who remain tragically devoted to white patriarchal fantasies and individualistic ethics, rather than violent political action. Clay’s romantic ideals and devotion to Western individualism ultimately mark his death. Though

Baraka recognizes the integral role of the artist in the development of black consciousness, he emphasizes that the black artist’s vision should critically address the collective needs of black people. His seminal poem, “Black Art,” encourages black people to achieve solidarity through a blend of polemical art and direct political action:

“We want ‘poems that kill’…We want a black poem. And a/ Black world” (The Dead

Lecturer 19, 48-49). His poem “Wailers” further promotes this collective vision. By evoking the revolutionary Bob Marley, Baraka sets his vision of black solidarity beyond

the United States, recognizing the shared oppression of black colonized societies. The poem’s constant repetition of the pronoun “we,” opposes the individualistic ethics expressed by Clay: “Wailers. We Wailers. Yeh, Wailers. We wail, we wail” (The Dead

Lecturer 5-6).

III. PLAYING WITH FIRE AND FANTASY IN V.S. NAIPAUL’S GUERRILLAS:

THE TALE OF PRINCE JIMMY AND THE “WHITE RAT”

When a perverse scenario can no longer protect a love object, when illusion can no longer suffice and gives way to delusion, that perversion most clearly slips into psychosis.” – Carl P. Eby, Hemingway’s Fetishism

In the closing lines of Baraka’s manifesto, “The Revolutionary Theatre,” he prophesies that his “anti-Western” theatre, “now peopled with victims, will soon begin to be peopled with new kinds of heroes…not the weak Hamlets debating whether or not they are ready to die for what’s on their minds” (Home 215). He declares: “Clay in

Dutchman, Ray in The Toilet, Walker in The Slave, are all victims,” though “in the

Western sense they could be heroes” (Home 210). Clay is tragically murdered and expelled because he resigns himself to Western fantasy rather than insurrectionary violence against the white female (the surrogate target for the unattainable white male).

Naipaul’s disturbed romanticist, Jimmy Ahmed, however, emerges as Baraka’s new kind of hero, a black man no longer content with white hegemonic fantasies and antiheroic meditations.

In “The Curse of Marginality: Colonialism in Naipaul’s Guerrillas,” Hana Wirth-

Nesher writes: “the colonized native male who has been humiliated by colonialism has only one kind of power left—his greater physical strength to overpower the female”

(542). Like Clay, Naipaul’s Jimmy Ahmed hopelessly uses words to serve his fantasies and obsessions, though Jimmy specifically uses a pen to shape his life into a “fairy story”

(Guerrillas 18). As the illegitimate child of British colonialism, Jimmy’s heroic fantasies are dictated by motifs and figures drawn directly from fairy tale and British literature. But when “the charm” of authorship wears off and Jimmy is confronted with “the emptiness about him,” he horrifyingly seeks salvation through ritualistic murder (Guerrillas 69).

The narrator foretells Jimmy’s “slip into psychosis” relatively early in the novel: “he had a vision of darkness, of the world lost forever…words, which at some times did so much for him, now did not restore him to himself. He was a lost man, more lost than he was as a boy” (Guerrillas 48). No longer supported by his words and delusions, Jimmy and his political follower, Bryant, hack his sacrificial lover, Jane, to death—the act that Clay only evokes during his macho exhortation.

Clay, Baraka’s “great would-be poet,” climactically proposes murder over metaphor. Imagining that Lula’s death will cure the “personal insanities” of the black race and his own “neurosis,” through a ritualistic cleansing, Clay fires: “just let me bleed you, you loud whore, and one poem vanished” (Baraka, Dutchman 36). But Clay (like his creator) is above all, an artist. Having spewed all of his metaphorical threats, Clay wearily avows to remain “safe with [his] words, and no deaths” (Baraka, Dutchman 35).

Consequently, Lula stabs him with the literal as opposed to symbolic thrust of her own castratory knife. Like the neurotic Prince Hamlet, Clay dies anti-heroically. But although

Jimmy Ahmed actualizes Baraka’s virile vision of black manhood, he neither secures black solidarity nor the psychic harmony that he so desperately desires. This is because

Naipaul’s work essentially condemns what Wallace has described as, Baraka’s “fiercely romantic” vision of black manhood (34). According to Wallace: “Jones as others like him, would take the prototype of man as warrior, as conqueror blind to the rights of all

but himself…and use it as the English settler had used a similar form of macho to place the American continent at his feet” (65). Playing the role of “conqueror,” Jimmy enacts the misogynistic violence rooted in colonial narratives and fairy tales; Jimmy’s appropriations are both monstrous and futile.

Naipaul shares Wallace’s contempt towards the black macho’s “colonial mimicry”; and thus, much of Guerrillas can be read as a biting satire of Black Power machismo (The Return 194). In his non-fiction collection, The Return of Eva Peron,

Naipaul ridicules colonized subjects for reproducing an “unreal world of imitation” that depends on the “mimicry” of white patriarchal fantasies (194). In the “Author’s Note,” he acknowledges the “obsessional nature” of his collected reports, which all center on the

“degenerate” and “half-castrated” machismo of formerly colonized men; he claims, “the themes repeat, whether in Argentina, Trinidad, or the Congo” (148). Regarding the

Argentine macho, Naipaul writes: “For men so diminished there remains only machismo…But machismo is really about the conquest and humiliation of women…it is the victimization, by the simple, of the simpler” (149). Naipaul’s biting commentary is reconstructed in his fiction. Casually assessing Jimmy’s English mementos, Jane concludes: “Jimmy was a diminished man” (27).

Despite her own marginality, Jane inexorably represents the colonial world that has deprived Jimmy of his manhood—and Jimmy is therefore bent on her subjugation.

S.W. Perera explains: “Initially, Jane is the privileged, white liberal who makes demands from Jimmy, yet at the end she is not only murdered brutally, but is deprived of her identity and self respect” (40-41). Both Clay and Jimmy harbor the torment/anguish expressed by Baraka’s speaker in “Agony as of Now”: “I am inside someone/ who hates

me. I look/ out from his eyes… Love his/ wretched women” (The Dead Lecturer 15). The

“wretched” white women in these texts are integral to both characters’ ideation of black consciousness and manhood (like the narrator in Invisible Man, these black protagonist experience the conflicting desire “to lover her and murder her”). As a white woman in

Jimmy’s vengeful “fairy story,” Jane’s ultimate disgrace and victimhood becomes increasingly imminent. After her first sexual encounter with Jimmy, Jane prophetically reflects: “I’ve been playing with fire” (Guerrillas 96).10 Jimmy’s sadistic sexual fantasies are actualized during their second encounter. According to Wallace, Baraka’s vision of black manhood encouraged black men to “seize” white women rather than “grovel” for them (Black Macho 34). Acting as Baraka’s new kind of hero, Jimmy horrifyingly consummates this decree.

However, once Jimmy has seized and sacrificed Jane as his colonial victim, he is shocked to discover that the act does nothing but solidify his own spiritual death. The ritual fails because Jane symbolizes the white order that has already been deeply ingrained within his identity. According to Jeffrey Robinson, “Jimmy’s battle with Jane is simultaneously a battle with loved and hated aspects of himself…to which he can relate only by a perversion of an act of love” (75). The necrophilic transfer of power that is related in Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” is not granted in this postcolonial anti-fairy tale.11 Porphyria’s death allows the Lover to project his fantasy onto her doll-like form; only then, does he perceive her affection in positive terms: “again/ laughed the blue eyes without a stain…her cheek once more/Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss”

10 Marilyn Frye declares: “whiteliness does not save white women from the condition of woman” (126). Jane is endangered specifically because of her white womanhood.

11 With Porphyria returned to a state of whiteliness, the speaker’s fragile subject-hood is restored. Jimmy isn’t permitted such pleasant lunacy. 34

(Browning 44-48). Jimmy, on the contrary, is left without power and such pleasant delusions. In despair, he realizes that Jane’s dying eyes “had taken everything away with them” (Naipaul, Guerrillas 278).

The novel’s disturbing ending suggests that the black man, “diminished” by colonialism, has no feasible vision of manhood to achieve (Naipaul, The Return 152).

The colonized black man is made and unmade by indoctrinated fantasies of power and persecution. The Return of Eva Peron includes the reported details of Michael X, the deranged activist who is later reconstructed in Naipaul’s biting representation of Jimmy

Ahmed. Naipaul portrays Michael X as a figure of failure and absurdity: “the militant who was only an entertainer, the leader who had no followers, the Black Power man who was neither powerful nor black” (The Return 23). Yet, even though Naipaul renders

Michael X as a fool and villain, he also recognizes Michael’s victimhood as an individual caught in a system of illusions. Jack Beatty writes:

[Naipaul] is obsessed with the corruptions of powerlessness, not of power.

His great subject is the imperialism of Western moral styles and jargon in

the poor countries…He writes about petty men with petty illusions…and

he writes about them fiercely…In his fiction this absolute lucidity is offset

by his sympathy for the characters, by his awareness that the avalanche of

history is bearing down on them [emphasis added]. (36)

Michael X dies ignominiously under the gallows but Jimmy Ahmed’s fictive demise is perhaps even more hopeless. In the novel’s closing, Jimmy remains alive, but the narrator affirms, “his desolation was complete” (Naipual, Guerrillas 279).

Reading the disturbed Jimmy Ahmed as Baraka’s “new kind of hero” exposes the perverse romanticism of Black Power machismo. In Rebhorn’s analysis of Dutchman’s gender politics, he argues that Baraka’s conception of black manhood “constantly reveals its own shaky foundations” (802). Naipaul reveals these “shaky foundations” particularly through Jimmy’s psychosexual relationships. In killing Jane, Jimmy attempts to assert his manhood and reject his identification with white society; however, Jane’s death also solidifies his relationship with Bryant, the black slum youth whom Jimmy adopts as lover and political follower. By placing Jimmy’s interracial and homosexual desire at the center of his black power ideology, Naipaul mockingly deconstructs the racialized machismo advocated by black nationalistic movements. Regarding the sexual politics of the Black Power Movement, Robert Reid-Pharr writes: “it is within this intellectual tradition that one sees the question of the essential impurity” and “perversity” of the

African-American community (14). In hopes of relieving the “perversity” of his political oppression, Jimmy neurotically constructs his life into a “satisfying narrative” (Kortenaar

326). But Roche, the overruling white male, remains subtly in control, despite all of

Jimmy’s designs. Though emasculated by his experience as a political prisoner, Roche nevertheless has the last word. Jimmy

Once Upon A Time…in the “Wasteland”

When Jane enters Jimmy’s home, replete with gaudy English furniture, she states:

“I see you have a duplicating machine.” Jimmy responds (with feeble pride),

“Secondhand from Sablich’s…more like last hand.” As Jimmy provides Jane with a copy of his memoir, Roche tellingly states, “that’s the fairy story” (Naipaul, Guerrillas 10).

Reading on, Jane “found that it soon became what Roche had said: a fairy

story…ungrammatical and confused, about life in the forest, about the anxieties, dangers, and needs of isolated men” (Naipaul, Guerrillas 11). Struggling to imagine her place in the story, Jane muses: “Later…in London, this visit to Thrushcross Grange might be a story. But now, in that hut…the light and the emptiness outside and the encircling forest, she felt she had entered another, complete world” (Naipaul, Guerrillas 11). Though the novel takes place in the tropical setting of Trinidad, Naipaul’s choice to render the island as an eerie “wasteland” further emphasizes the novel’s anti-fairy tale dimensions

(Naipaul, Guerrillas 43). Despite having faced his own victimization, Roche takes every opportunity to demean Jimmy. By labeling Jimmy’s political memoir, “a fairy story”

(though aptly so), Roche immediately undermines Jimmy’s fragilely constructed identity.

Fragments of Jimmy’s unstable prose are included within the novel, in which the narrative voice shifts from Jimmy’s, to that of an Englishwoman named Clarissa.

Jimmy’s constructed female voice serves as a fantasy representation of Jane, the

“inviolable” white woman that he longs to dominate through this symbolic operation

(Naipaul, Guerrillas 117). Naming his female narrator after Samuel Richardson’s infamously violated heroine (who dies in the course of the novel) helps Jimmy envision

Jane’s own victimization through a classic narrative of domination. Moreover, he constructs Clarissa for the sole purpose of validating his troubled manhood. From her constructed perspective we learn that Jimmy is “not black, but a lovely golden colour, like some bronze god” (Naipaul, Guerrillas 39). Anne Zahlan notes that Clarissa is “a crudely class-conscious woman who exists only to be obsessed by him” (100). Jane, on the other hand, is distracted by the absurdity of Jimmy’s appearance. She notes that the black power leader, “close up, looked distinctly Chinese”—the result of his mixed racial

background. The omniscient narrator reveals that Jane had been expecting someone more

“Negroid” to suit her fantasy (Naipaul, Guerrillas 18).

Clarissa also represents Jimmy’s particular fascination with fairy tales; she is the ideal suffering heroine. According to Elisabeth Bronfen: “it is widely recognized that much of the appeal of Clarissa comes from motifs drawn from romance and fairy tale:

Clarissa is literally ‘a damsel in distress,’ her Uncle Antony’s house, where the family threaten to imprison her is ‘moated’”(8). Similarly, H. D. Traill writes, “the sufferings of

Clarissa are those of an imprisoned princess in a fairy tale” (qtd. in Bridgwater 559). In fact, Clarissa is perhaps the most masochistic heroine of all time. Ian Watt notes that she

“begins wishing she were dead in her first epistle” (115). Tellingly, she has a dream in which the villainous rake, Lovelace, buries her alive in dirt; Jane meets a very similar end in a pit outside of Jimmy’s commune (Richardson 342).12 Besides fantasizing about death, Clarissa spends hundreds of pages vigorously arranging her own funeral. Watt writes: “to devote nearly one third of the novel to the heroine’s death is surely excessive”

(216). Her family and friends “never saw death so lovely before” (Richardson 1398). In the article, “Courting Death: Necrophilia in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa,” Jolene

Zigarovich associates the novel with the “the cult of the beautiful dead,” a European tradition that idealized images of the deceased (112).

Like Clay, who evokes Snow White in an effort to bend Lula to his will, Jimmy constructs Jane as a violated heroine for the sole purpose of nurturing his tormented manhood. Jeffrey Robinson observes: “As a writer, [Jimmy] produces fantasy that is obviously auto-erotic in the sense that he is trying to excite himself sexually but also in

12 Gale Benson, Michael X’s white female victim, was actually buried alive. The autopsy found inhaled dirt in her lungs. 38

the sense that it is meant to reinforce a certain image of himself” (75). However, neither

Jane nor Lula willingly play the role expected of them. Jimmy is initially troubled by what he perceives as Jane’s threatening “inviolability” (Naipaul, Guerrillas 117).

As one would expect, Jimmy cannot maintain his neurotic craftsmanship. Anna

Zahlan explains: “In constructing a fantasy Other to reflect the fantasy self her yearns to force into existence, Jimmy creates also the necessity for an actual sacrificial victim…the referent that threatens the dream reality must be destroyed. For Clarissa to live, Jane must die” (100). Jimmy’s reverence for classic fairy tales does not impede him from distorting them. He signifies the Clarissa narration to construct Jane’s actual murder, but does not offer Jane the same “exquisite corpse” as Richardson’s virtuous heroine (Zigarovich

114). Jane is grossly hacked to death and disfigured: “Sharp steel met flesh. Skin parted, flesh showed below the skin, for an instant mottled white, and then all was blinding, disfiguring blood, and Bryant could only cut what had already been cut” (Naipaul,

Guerrillas 278). Jimmy is interested in writing himself into the canon but he also subverts and manipulates it in order to serve his fantasies of revenge. He ultimately learns that he isn’t afforded such freedoms.

Playing the Exotic Prince: Jimmy-Heathcliff

Despite these parallels, Jimmy isn’t quite the aristocratic rogue that Lovelace is.

Naipaul’s postcolonial novel alludes to many works in the British canon, but there are significant reasons for Jimmy’s identification with Heathcliff. Jimmy’s identification with Heathcliff has much to do with his ‘exotic’ racial identity, but also his desire for revenge and power. Hana Wirth-Nesher describes Heathcliff as “the swarthy male slum child excluded from English society who takes revenge by acquiring the properties of

those who snubbed him” (535). Jimmy’s identification with Heathcliff is also indicative of his colonial heritage. Wirth Nesher explains: “Having acquired his literacy under

English rule, Jimmy’s literary tradition is the English novel, through which he clearly traces his own cultural past (537). Jimmy’s English acculturation tragically subjects him to the “avalanche” of white illusion that secure his ruin.

The novel’s constant allusions to Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre further emphasize Jimmy’s fairy tale aspirations. Marthe Robert argues that the fairy tale is essentially a condensed novel in that both narrate the protagonist’s “desire to overcome the circumstances of his/her birth” (qtd. in Haase 693). Jane Eyre and Heathcliff are both orphans who struggle with their illegitimate ties to the British upper class (Jane is marginalized by her viciously proud cousins while Heathcliff is treated with contempt for his dark gypsy-like skin). According to The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and

Fairy Tales:

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte and Jane Eyre by Charlotte

Bronte…have a fantastic fairy tale feel, even as their literary mode is a

heightened, gothic realism. These novels are good examples of how

novelists may work from fairy tales even in a so-called realist mode. In

their themes of work, bondage, freedom, and love, Wuthering Heights and

Jane Eyre also relate to fairy tales…Scholars have written about both

novels’ relationships to particular fairy tales, including Bluebeard and

Cinderella variants, among others. (Haase 693)

Naipaul’s engagement with these classic tales not only conveys Jimmy’s tragic acculturation, but also exposes his own authorial manipulation of the British canon. By

configuring Jane and Roche as satirical inversions of their Victorian predecessors,

Naipaul further indicates the novel’s anti-fairy tale dimensions. Jane, who floats around from man-to-man seeking adventure, lacks the noble autonomy of Jane Eyre. Likewise,

Roche pitifully lacks any of Edward Rochester’s libertine bravado. While playing a

“game” in which each member of the group shares their “one wish,” Roche confesses: “I would like to have the most enormous sexual powers.” Jane responds, “that would solve nothing” (Naipaul, Guerrillas 166). Jane’s castratory remark is suggestive of her role as the abject heroine.

Naipaul takes great measures to associate Jimmy Ahmed with Emily Bronte’s gothic romance. Wuthering Heights is essentially about a dark outsider who maddeningly tries to enter the white (aristocratic) order through his own ghastly designs. Significantly, when Heathcliff first enters Thrushcross Grange, Nelly immediately constructs a narrative for him. In hopes of cheering up the “sulking” Heathcliff, Nelly proudly declares: “You’re fit for a prince in disguise. Who knows but your father was Emperor of

China and your mother and Indian queen, each of them able to buy up…Wuthering

Heights and Thrushcross Grange together?” (Bronte 48). Though just a young man,

Heathcliff absorbs this narrative and obsessively endeavors to achieve it. As the son of a

“Chinee man” in a former British colony, Jimmy is also attracted to this narrative. He imagines himself as a “prince in disguise” (Naipaul, Guerrillas 30).

Jimmy Ahmed inscribes his identification with Heathcliff through Clarissa’s constructed perspective. Jimmy not only identifies with an illusory white male identity, but also substantiates this constructed identity through a white female voice. Below,

Clarissa imagines the day that Jimmy is finally honored and validated:

He’s the leader they’re waiting for and the day will come, of that I’m

convinced, when they will parade in the streets and offer him the crown,

everybody will say then, “This man was born in the back room of a

Chinese grocery, but as Catherine said to Heathcliff, ‘Your mother was an

Indian Princess and your father was the Emperor of China,’ we knew it all

along,” and that was in the middle of England mark you…They will see

him then like a prince, with his gold color. (Naipaul, Guerrillas 57)

What is most telling about this passage is that Clarissa-Jimmy’s allusion to Wuthering

Heights is marked by error. Catherine never constructed Heathcliff’s fantasy; it was

Nelly, Catherine’s servant.13 The cold joke is meant to emphasize the absurdity of

Jimmy’s designs; he wants to establish his princely subject-hood in a tradition that he hasn’t entirely mastered.

The title ‘Prince’ is perhaps another example of the ways in which Jimmy integrates Black Power and the Black Islamic tradition with Western fairy tales.14

Malcolm X has been reverently described as “our shining black prince” (Davis). Jimmy’s absurd mimicry of Malcolm X and other black Islamic leaders is revealed early in the novel when Jane questions Roche about the strange sign outside of Jimmy’s commune.

The sign reads:

13 In the scene, Nelly has just finished cleaning up Heathcliff (a task that Catherine is unlikely to have had—considering her status), and thus comments on his potential as she observes his features (Brontë 43).

14 Formerly Leroi Jones, Baraka changed his name to Imamu Amiri Baraka. Imamu, meaning “spiritual leader,” was later dropped. Interestingly, Amiri Baraka means “blessed Prince.” 42

THRUSHCROSS GRANGE

PEOPLE’S COMMUNE

FOR THE LAND & REVOLUTION

By Order of the High Command,

JAMES AHMED, (Haji)

Responding to Jane’s confusion, Roche states: “a haji is a Muslim who’s made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Jimmy uses it to mean ‘mister’ or ‘esquire.’ When he remembers, that is” (Naipaul, Guerrillas 13). This conversation takes place before Jane is given the chance to read Jimmy for herself, and thus Roche’s belittling appraisal immediately frames her perception of the diminished leader. Although Jimmy’s appropriations are perhaps more foolish than subversive, Roche’s repeated efforts to write over Jimmy’s constructed identity is far more damaging.

The passage also conveys Naipaul’s biting commentary on corrupt Black

Nationalistic figures (like Elijah Muhammad). Jimmy Ahmed envisions himself as the long awaited “Prince” of the “good-for-nothing natives”—his nationalistic dreams are self-serving (Naipaul, Guerrillas 43). Despite his Western individualism, Clay genuinely envisions Lula’s murder as a redemptive-ritualistic act for the sake of the black race; however, Jimmy’s motives for murder are solely derived from his own “personal insanities” (Baraka, Dutchman 35). Jimmy tellingly writes: “Everybody wants to fight his own little war, everybody is a guerrilla” (Guerrillas 87). Despite his role as leader of the people, Jimmy’s psychosexual motives supersede any mention of the social dynamics of his work.

Moreover, it is absurd that Jimmy imagines himself as the savior of the black people through an illusory white identity. Wirth-Nesher notes Jimmy’s pathological double-consciousness: “[Jimmy] projects a self that exists only as it is reflected in the eyes of the arbiters of civilization, and he writes in the voice of one of its representatives,

Clarissa” (537). This passage below also tellingly reveals Jimmy’s corrupt animosity towards his people:

They say he was born in the back room of a Chinese grocery, a half black

nobody…but I can see that he is a man of good blood, only someone of

my class can see that, to me he is like a prince helping these poor and

indigent black people, they’re so shiftless no one will help them, least of

all their own. (Naipaul, Guerrillas 71)

Jimmy’s constructed heroine also reveals his deep insecurities about his mixed race identity. Jimmy tells Roche: “I’m a hakwai Chinee…it’s the Chinese for nigger. They have a word for it too. And that’s what they thought I would be” (Naipaul, Guerrillas

30).

Roche rejects any notion that Jimmy identifies with Heathcliff, subtly forbidding

Jimmy’s hopes of constructing any form of Selfhood—whether an illusion or not. During the drive to Jimmy’s commune, Jane curiously asks Roche about the name, Thrushcross

Grange. Initially Roche responds by correcting Jane’s pronunciation but then proceeds to demean what he perceives as Jimmy’s superficial fancies: “I don’t think Jimmy sees himself as Heathcliff or anything like that. He took a writing course, and it was one of the books he had to read. I think he just liked the name” (Naipaul, Guerillas 11).

Jane’s Role as the Abject Heroine

Jane, Roche’s mistress and Jimmy’s sometimes-lover, emerges as a subversion of sacred white womanhood. Both Peter Roche and Jimmy Ahmed refer to her “physical gracelessness” at different times in the novel (Naipaul, Guerrillas 94). Moreover, images of female bodily waste are heavily repeated throughout Guerrillas. Before Jane meets her death, Jimmy states: “it smells of dirty cunt” (277). According to Cheryl Griffith, Naipaul

“characterizes the white woman as the flesh and for him flesh is repulsive…it is in

Guerrillas that the themes of woman and the excremental vision are integrated” (96).

Jane is constantly associated with bodily abjection and thus Griffith argues that Jane is

“carnally humiliated by anal rape” because the “diseased flesh belongs to the anal level of existence” (104). During their first sexual encounter Jane is the aggressor and Jimmy feels himself unmanned by the alarming “speed” of her advances: “he feared he was losing the moment again. He felt isolated by her indifference and began to fear that he was losing her as well” (Naipaul, Guerrillas 91). Jane threatens both men with her liberated sexuality. And thus, Naipaul repeatedly associates her with bodily abjection.

Below, Jane is described as intimidating Roche with her control over her menstruating body:

She threw herself backward…opened her legs, raising her feet up against

the wall, and inserted what Roche now realized was the tampon she held

in her hand…it had been done so swiftly…Roche was recovering from

what he had seen, Jane had pulled up her pants and trousers and without a

word to him, had gone out. (Naipaul, Guerrillas 146)

Though Roche is only observing Jane from a distance, he is so disturbed by her movements that he is temporarily paralyzed. Elizabeth Grosz writes:

Can it be that in the West, in our time, the female body has been

constructed not only as lack or absence but with more complexity, as a

leaking, uncontrollable, seeping liquid; a formless flow; a viscosity,

entrapping, secreting: as lacking not so much or simply the phallus, but

self-containment—not a cracked or porous vessel, like a leaking ship, a

formlessness that engulfs all form, a disorder that threatens all order?

(203)

Jane’s threatening “formlessness” is emphasized throughout the novel. Jane is ultimately threatening because she is indefinable/unreadable. Jimmy muses: “her face was the puzzle; he hadn’t been able to remember it, and now he thought he saw why. It seemed characterless, soft, without definition; it could become many faces” (Naipaul, Guerrillas

65).

The first extensive description of Jane comes from Peter Roche who likens his lover to a sea anemone

waving its strands at the bottom of the ocean. Rooted and secure, and

indifferent to what it attracted. The dragon lady, infinitely casual,

infinitely unconsciously calculating, so indifferent to the body, so

apparently willing to abuse it, and yet so careful of the body, so careful of

complexion and teeth and hair. (Naipaul Guerrillas 15-19)

Roche’s mythic imagery of female sea monsters is indicative of his primal resentment towards Jane’s uncontrollable femininity.

Regarding the Argentine “macho” of the Peron administration, Naipaul writes:

“his conquest of a woman is complete only when he has buggered her…So diminished men, turning to machismo, diminish themselves further, replacing even sex by a parody”

(The Return 155). Kevin Foster explains: “The symbolic triumph embodied in this act, dishonors women, but it also serves to demean its perpetrators…thus the last refuge of the downtrodden, the only means to express their virility and positive self-identification, turns out to be a form of castration” (175). Jimmy brutally rapes Jane right before murdering her. Considering Jimmy’s complete “desolation” at the close of the novel, it is likely that his diminishment and spiritual ruin began the moment he seized Jane. The narrator reveals: “he took desolation with him; and he left desolation behind” (Naipaul,

Guerrillas 223).

Yet, despite Jane’s aggressive sexuality, she also distinctly signifies masochistic white femininity. Jimmy states: “As soon as he seen the fright in her face…he knew it was going to be alright” (Naipaul, Guerrillas 28). Jimmy reveals that he is specifically attracted to Jane’s pain: “I don’t notice hair. I don’t notice clothes. What I felt about you I felt as soon as I saw your eyes. They looked as they look now. Half screaming” (Naipaul,

Guerrillas 67).

Moreover, Jimmy spits into Jane’s mouth instead of offering her the classic fairy tale kill kiss:

He held her face between his hands, jammed the heels of his palms in the

corners of her mouth, covering her almost vanished period spots,

distending her lips. He covered her mouth with his; her lips widened and

she made a strangled sound; and then he spat in her mouth. She swallowed

and he let her face go. She opened her eyes and said ‘That was lovely.’

(Naipaul, Guerrillas 236)

According to Imraan Coovadia, “Jane’s sexuality works at cross-purposes to her feminist convictions (56). When she rejects a “left-wing journalist,” leaving him “exposed and vulnerable,” she is slapped “so hard that her jaw jarred… then she discovered to her dismay and disgust that she was moist” (Naipaul, Guerrillas 43). In many ways, particularly her bohemian and sadomasochistic tendencies, Jane parallels Dutchman’s

Lula.

Competing Narratives: Massa Roche’s Fairy Tale Ending

As I’ve mentioned previously, Roche subtly controls Jimmy’s real-life narrative throughout the novel. In doing so, Naipaul reveals his tragic vision of black manhood.

Towards the end of the novel Roche is called in for a radio interview to discuss his book

(an autobiographical account about his political exile). However, the interviewer,

Meredith, immediately begins to divert the discussion to Roche’s managerial relationship with Jimmy Ahmed. Meredith asks: “did it ever occur to you that the Thrushcross Grange commune was a cover for the guerrillas?” Roche responds, “I believed in the gangs”

(Naipaul, Guerrillas 243). Roche’s statement brings ruin to the already chaotic island but it also reduces Jimmy’s political commune to meaningless gang life. Though Jimmy has certainly failed as a Black Power leader, there is absolutely no evidence in the text that he is associated with the city’s gangs. In fact, Jimmy spends majority of his time ruminating about Jane and Bryant. Roche subjects Jimmy to his master narrative, which reduces all black men to gang members.

With the island in turmoil, Jimmy sits fearfully at his writing desk. The epistle he is writing is somber—it’s practically a suicide letter. The epistle represents Jimmy’s steadfast desire for old-fashioned Englishness, though his contempt has intensified. The letter opens: “Hello Marjorie…I can see you holding this between your slender well- manicured fingers, you wouldn’t believe you use toilet paper and other things”

(Guerrillas 262). Here, again, Jimmy deconstructs the sacred cult of white femininity.

But despite his contempt, Jimmy allows himself to be most vulnerable with the woman he is writing (she is apparently a past lover). His foreboding death letter is extracted below:

I sit in the peace and stillness of this tropical night to pen these words to

you…I want you to know that you were right, what you prophesied is all

coming true, I am dying alone and unloved and I will die in anger, no

other way is possible now. That is a bad way to die, and Marjorie I feel

death is close to me tonight, I can hear it in the tropical stillness, fitfully

broken by the occasional hoot of an owl…When we were children and you

heard an owl at night you stuck pins in the wick of a lamp to keep death

away from the house, but I don’t think it stopped the coffins coming.

(Guerrillas 263)

Jimmy’s dismal tone and imagery is indicative of the romantic-epistle tradition. It is also indicative of the novel’s anti-fairy tale elements; their childlike fancies cannot stop

“coffins coming.” Yet despite his poetic language, the letter also displays significant punctuation errors. Despite his vigorous attempts to emulate the British tradition,

Jimmy’s colonial mimicry remains illegitimate, rather than mastered. Tellingly, Jimmy’s

composed death letter is immediately followed by Jane’s murder. Jimmy decides that

Jane, “the white rat” must be sacrificed, but his death letter suggests that he knows that their lives are somehow connected (Naipaul, Guerrillas 278). His imagined death is followed by Jane’s physical death, which is then followed by Jimmy’s desolation.

According to Perrera: “Jane ‘offers’ herself as a sacrifice at the end of the novel, she takes upon the sins of the white world” (39). Jane, too, seems intuitively aware that her last meeting with Jimmy will be an ominous one. The couple is psychically connected much like Clay and Lula who presume to be a “corporate Godhead” (Baraka, Dutchman

24).

While Jimmy holds Jane by the neck in the act of murder, he becomes strangely united with her dying body. The narrator informs us that “he scarcely felt the neck; he felt only his own strength, the smoothness of his own skin, the tension of his own muscles

…and as he felt her fail a desolation began to grown on him. And then there was nothing except desolation” [emphasis added] (Guerrillas 238). With Jane’s destruction, Naipaul presents us with a union more uncanny and disturbing than the filiation between Clay and

Lula. For Naipaul, the radical black male’s quest towards self-actualization is ultimately one of self-destruction.

Ironically, Jimmy’s spiritual desolation finally liberates him from illusions. He is aware that with Jane dead and that he has nothing left but darkness. When Roche finds that Jane has been raped and murdered by Jimmy Ahmed, he collects her passport and identification and flushes them down the toilet. Roche, not Jimmy, is the one that truly erases Jane’s existence. Moreover, Roche does not even acknowledge Jimmy’s murderous act. He creates his own delusional narrative that masterfully undermines

everything Jimmy has done. After Jane’s death, Jimmy desperately calls Roche for help, stating: “you must come, massa…They’ve left me all alone” (Naipaul, Guerrillas 290).

Roche responds with caustic Western paternalism:

You’ll have to stay where you are, Jimmy. It isn’t safe for you to be out

these days, Jimmy. You know that. There are police roadblocks

everywhere…I think you’ll find that they will be particularly interested in

you. Do you understand? I’m leaving you alone. That’s the way it’s going

to be. We are leaving you alone…Jane and I are leaving tomorrow. Jane is

in her room packing. We are leaving you here. Are you hearing me?

Jimmy? (Naipaul, Guerrillas 290)

Having assessed the fresh pit of dirt outside of Jimmy’s commune, Roche has already confirmed Jane’s murder. But rather than acknowledge Jimmy’s symbolic act, Roche simply pretends it never happened, covering it up with his own delusional master narrative, He writes over Jimmy’s designs. And thus, Jimmy’s subversive antics and appropriations are tragically foolish. He calls Roche “Massa” as “a joke,” but in the end,

Roche masterfully dominates both Jimmy and Jane’s real-life narratives. After Roche’s paternalistic diatribe, Jimmy responds simply with “massa”—the very last word of the novel. Absolved of his fantasies and delusions, Jimmy realizes that calling Roche

“massa” was never a subversive act. Roche, the overruling white male ultimately controls the narrative, and Jimmy meekly submits.

Warning those who pathologically deny the black man’s humanity, James

Baldwin writes, “people who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that

innocence is dead turns himself into a monster” (1713). Though Guerillas conveys an even more tragic vision of black manhood than Baraka’s Dutchman, the novel’s ending also implicates the depraved delusions of the white patriarchal order. In “American

Sexual Reference: Black Male,” Baraka similarly denounces white men for being estranged from reality. He states, “they are the ‘masters’ of the world…so they can devote most of their energies to the nonrealistic, having no use for the real…they have no other place in the world” (Guerrillas 216, 233). Both Baraka and Baldwin prophesy that the avalanche of illusions will ultimately come bearing down on pathological white men.

Naipaul’s anti-fairy tale exorcises such self-deceptions.

IV. CONCLUSION

You see, I began at a time when the world was beginning to change. Empires were withdrawn and I had the kind of childish faith that there was going to be a reorganization of the world. That it was going to be all right. – V.S. Naipaul, Vogue

In the epigraph above, V.S. Naipaul reflects back on his naive “faith” in a redemptive social order. Having experienced the collapse of British imperialism, young

Naipaul imagines his formerly colonized society enchantingly restored with the rise of the new. Naipaul later confesses that he always been “fighting a hysteria” that plagued him as a child: “the old fear of extinction…of being reduced to nothing, of feeling crushed” (Michener 105). Naipaul’s fear is grimly manifested in the closing lines of

Jimmy Ahmed’s narrative. Confronted with the failure of his symbolic act, Jimmy

Ahmed is ominously “crushed” and “reduced to nothing.” Roche’s paternalistic narrative eliminates all possibility of childish fairy tale redemption. In his chapter “Doom and

Despair: The Eternal Condition of Colonial People,” Selwyn Cudjoe argues that much of

Naipaul’s oeuvre is reflective of the author’s personal crisis and “neurotic fear” of Self

(179). Despite their political differences, the agony and hysteria of the divided Self stands as a major theme in both Baraka and Naipaul’s work. Dutchman and Guerrillas, narratives with profound psychosexual dimensions, each project the haunted personal narrative of its creator. As Naipaul affirms, “Fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally” (Naipaul, The Return 67).

Authorial Ties

Clay and Jimmy imagine the symbolic act of murder as the key to alleviating their anxious, divided Self. Clay proclaims that Lula’s sacrifice will cure the “personal insanities” and “neurosis” of the disenfranchised black race (Baraka, Dutchman 35).

Naipaul’s Jimmy Ahmed murders Jane in hopes of rejecting his identification with white society once and for all. Clay and Jimmy’s symbolic ideations are executed through rhetoric and various literary designs. Considering the deeply personal nature of these works, I suggest that Baraka and Naipaul are performing the same neurotic operation as their characters. For many critics, Clay is expelled from the symbolic order because he tragically engages with the white woman’s seductive fantasies. Lula tellingly remarks:

“eating apples is always the first step” (Baraka, Dutchman 27). However, as I discuss in

Chapter 2, Clay’s cynic individualism is more directly linked to his demise: “My people’s madness. Hah! That’s a laugh. My people. They don’t need me to claim them” (Baraka,

Dutchman 35). In killing off Clay, Baraka conceivably rejects his own (former) individualistic ethics as a Beat poet. Werner Sollors explains: “While it is generally accepted that Clay is a Baraka projection and spokesman, Lula, too, expresses many of

Baraka’s ideas in Baraka’s own language. Clay and Lula are not merely depersonalized, absurd, two-faced social symbols, but are also endowed with elements of their creator’s self (123). If Lula and Clay both function as polarized aspects of their creator, it is intriguing that Baraka allows Lula to live as opposed to Clay. This is likely because Lula is configured as a (abject) polemical figure, much in line with Baraka’s own radical politics. In the play’s closing, Lula callously moves on to her next victim, another whitewashed black male.

In “The Revolutionary Theatre,” Baraka declares that characters like Clay must die in order to erect new kinds of heroes. It is worth noting that Baraka constructs

Dutchman during a liminal period in his life, a time directly preceding his Islamic name change and his severed ties with Greenwich Village. Clay’s expulsion marks the period in which Baraka rejects his former identity. Maria Tatar notes that although many fairy tale plots “have a happy ending…they also have a habit of translating phobias and fears into palpable physical presences rather than incarnating wishes and desires” (Tatar 71). In

“Black Militant Drama,” George Adams writes, “the more fully a work embodies the psychic act of repression, the more painful that work will be and the more anxious…the more a given play is a landscape of our mind, the more important and threatening it will seem, respective of its other values” (108-109). Baraka’s Dutchman exposes the repressed “phobias and fears” of black men, but is also specifically reveals the anxieties of its creator (Tatar 71). In an interview, Baraka himself reveals the strangely unconscious manner in which he composed Dutchman:

When I wrote that play Dutchman, I didn’t know what I had written. I

stayed up all night and wrote it, went to sleep at the desk and then woke

up, and looked at it and said "what the [f---] is this?" And then put it down

and went to bed. (Laughter.) Some things you know absolutely what

you’re saying, you’re absolutely clear. Bang, it’s an idea you want to

express. Sometimes though you can’t limit your mind by what you

know… you just open your mind to where it wants to go to, which you

don’t know at the time, but if it’s legitimate, you’ll find out what you’re

saying. (Baraka “Advice to Young Writers”)

Much of Dutchman’s uncanny abstractions seem to be drawn from the cultural and collective unconscious—though particularly, his own unconscious. Dutchman manifests as a script of Baraka’s haunting repressions, an unconscious narrative that strives for his own psychological balance. Ardent Black Nationalist, Askia Muhammad (Roland

Snellings), has criticized some of Baraka’s dramas as projections of his own “hang ups” and “love-hate affairs” with “whites” (Peavy 168). Though I would never reduce

Baraka’s rich literary career to personal “hang ups,” I see the unconscious dimensions of the play as being indicative of Baraka’s own child-hero quest for psychic balance.

Perhaps a similar operation occurs in Guerrillas. Cudjoe’s analysis focuses particularly on Naipaul’s relationship to Malik X. He writes: “The killings in Trinidad precipitated a violent response in Naipaul. After all, the society that produced Malik had also produced Naipaul. Both men had come from Trinidad…they went to sister schools…deserted their societies at an early age, and married women their mothers disliked” (169). However, Naipaul draws a distinct line between himself and Malik X, imploring his reader: “Don’t associate me with Malik. We may have come from the same country but most certainly we are not cut from the same cloth” (Cudjoe 170). Cudjoe argues that Naipaul’s request only further reveals his affinity to the deeply disturbed leader. Jimmy Ahmed is Naipaul’s fictive version of Malik X (and Naipaul himself claims that “fiction never lies”). Naipaul sublimates his own fears and anxieties as a colonized victim throughout Jimmy Ahmed’s anti-fairy tale. Jimmy suffers so Naipaul won’t have to.

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