It was Thomas Munk who put this creed into practice. Isn’t it remarkable that it’s possible to describe a series of events and a particular individual’s character by transcribing fragments from a literary work? It wasn’t reality that allowed a novel to be understood, it was a novel hinting at a reality that for years had been incomprehensible.
There’s something lonely and perverse in the abstraction of reading books, and in this case it had been transformed into a life plan.
It made me recall the readers of the I Ching who decided their actions based on the book. It was as if Munk had found, within literature, a path and a character that would define his clandestine activities. A reader of novels who seeks meaning in literature and then enacts it in his own life. Bovarism was the term for the power humans have to conceive of themselves as something other than they are and create for themselves an imaginary personality. The word comes from Emma Bovary, the character from Flaubert’s novel. Jules de Gaultier (Le bovarysme, 1906) expanded the definition, applying it to the delusions that individuals concoct about themselves. In a society that controls the imaginary and imposes the criteria of reality as norm, Bovarism must proliferate in order to strengthen humanity and safeguard its illusions.
My old friends in Buenos Aires had done the same thing: they read Guerrilla Warfare: A Method, by Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and climbed the mountain. They read What Is to Be Done? by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Lenin, and founded the proletarian party; they read Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and became Peronists. They read Mao Tse-tung’s Works and immediately announced the start of the protracted people’s war.
But Munk was more radical still. In the wasteland of the contemporary world, without illusions or hopes, and where there are no longer powerful social fictions or alternatives to the status quo, he—like Alonso Quijano—had chosen to believe in fiction. He was a kind of Quixote who first reads novels furiously and hypnotically, and then sallies forth in order to experience them. But he was even more radical, because his actions weren’t only words as in Don Quixote (and what’s more, Cervantes had taken the precaution that he wouldn’t kill anyone, the poor Christ), but rather had become real events.
In Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, Razumov, the double agent, a truly Kafkaesque character, is listening to a heroic Russian revolutionary in exile, who tells him: “Remember, Razumov, that women, children, and revolutionists hate irony, which is the negation of all saving instincts, of all faith, of all devotion, of all action.” Did he read fiction seriously?
The decision to change one’s life: that is the grand theme in Conrad. In Lord Jim, the hero, who in a moment of cowardice had jumped from his capsizing ship, decides to alter the past and make himself into a brave man, just like Jay Gatsby, who buys a mansion on the bay and throws parties, trying to seduce the woman who abandoned him years before. Changing the past, becoming another person, ceasing to be a professor and becoming a man of action. Just like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, the intellectual, a reader of Nietzsche, who out of pure despotic willpower creates an empire from nothing in the gloomy landscape of the Congo: the empire of evil.
I went out into the street in such excitement that I went straight up to Orion and started telling him about what I’d discovered. We were sitting on the bench, under the trees. He moved around incessantly; maybe he had bedbugs biting him, maybe he too had a Conradian restlessness—who was he, after all? My only friend in exile. He listened to me, resignedly and attentively (although from time to time he did turn on the radio, which loudly sounded off the news and the weather report), until suddenly he said, in a low voice, with a few very well-constructed phrases mixed in with other confused and scattered words, “You have to shake off the police.”
I spent several days turning over Conrad’s books, but instead of writing an essay I decided to act, and I consulted Parker. “It’s true,” he said, “in 1984 Munk told his family that he’d read that Conrad novel a dozen times over the course of the years.” The FBI, for their part, had confirmed that Thomas Munk checked into the hotels he used as bases for his attacks as Conrad or Konrad, and he’d also signed as Kurtz, and in Missouri he’d registered as Marlow. Furthermore, they confirmed that the initials on the bombs (FC) resembled the signature (FP) from the bombs in the novel.
Dr. David Horn, a literature professor at Harvard and an expert in forensic literature, after examining the documents for the trial that was being prepared, had testified to “his evident use of fiction to help him make sense of his life.” According to Horn, he evidently imagined himself as the character in a great story. The printed word was his universe.
He had acted with the supposition that no one would notice the relationships between that book and his life. And so, for me, the key was that Ida had found him out while reading Conrad because she already knew Thomas Munk. What was their relationship? Had she known? Guessed? Only if she’d known Thomas Munk and followed his trajectory could she have discovered Tom’s tracks in the novel. Had they met during their years at Berkeley, she as a graduate student and he as a professor? Very possible, according to Parker. There was no clear information in the FBI files, only overlapping dates. And why hadn’t they posited any theory about Ida’s death? If I wanted to find an answer, I’d have to go to California and interview Thomas Munk myself.
It was August then, and I had to give my lecture
