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Instant Karma
Interview with Mark Swartz
Interview with Mark Swartz
How autobiographical is Instant Karma?
SWARTZ: Much of the novel is devoted to what David Felsenstein discovers in the library and how he interprets it, so of course I spent a lot of time in the library poring over obscure books. You could say I was reading over David’s shoulder. And since Instant Karma is a diary novel, it was hard to resist raiding my own diaries for raw material. Like him, I had just left graduate school and was desperate to find ways in which my education could illuminate everyday life.
But you never thought about blowing up the library.
SWARTZ: Certainly not. I don’t have a violent bone in my body. My theory is that bookish people have less trouble talking about violence and devastation because they’ve read so much about it; they have the vocabulary. Furthermore, gentle people are evidently more apt to write about mayhem. I just saw Norman Mailer give a reading, and he was reminiscing about Henry Miller, whose books are filled with horrors and brutal acts even though he was by all accounts a tender and kindhearted soul.
Are all the books you cite for real?
SWARTZ: Yes, even all the texts describing the benefits of magnetotherapy and Nicolas Notovich’s Life of Saint Issa, a chronicle of Jesus’ teenage years in Kathmandu. The only false documents are the library newsletter and the film I describe titled The Lord’s Prayer.
You wrote this novel in the mid-1990s. Were you looking at how artists and authors were addressing terrorism.
SWARTZ: Don DeLillo’s novel Mao II came out in 1991. He’s our greatest literary explainer of terrorism, and in fact I purposely kept his books out of Instant Karma, because for me his fingerprints were already all over it. Gregory Green exhibited his "Suitcase Bomb" sculptures in the at Feigen art gallery in Chicago in 1995, although, interestingly, the work that got him arrested was his display of fake LSD. And then of course there was the Unabomber.
Do you think there’s a difference between how it would have been received then, if it had been published, and how it will be received now, in the wake of September 11?
SWARTZ: Domestic terrorism was less scary and more romantic with the Unabomber as mascot. He committed atrocious crimes, but the idea of him writing a manifesto to justify his actions struck a chord with me as a writer, even though his ideas were ridiculous. Today, the mention of terrorism justifiably provokes fear and panic that far outstrips the Unabomber’s wildest dreams. I’d like to say there’s a difference between one kind of terrorism and the other, but then you get into impossible questions of where to draw the line. Hurting people to make a point is wrong.
Do you expect readers to have sympathy for David Felstenstein?
SWARTZ: I know I do. Sure, he’s creepy, like a lot of people you see in the library. And dangerous. But he’s got a sense of humor and an inkling of his own absurdity, which makes his sincere devotion to artistic and spiritual matters hopefully a little more tolerable. His extreme self-consciousness allows you to witness notions as they arise and then as they get squashed. David knows there’s no "Buddhist overthrow" on the horizon. He knows it’s crazy to walk around with a magnet on your head and to keep books in the freezer. I hope you get the feeling that he knows his final act is crazy, too.
Does he go through with it?
SWARTZ: The ending is ambiguous. If you read what he writes in his diary, he seems to be going through with it, but the very existence of the diary, of Instant Karma, means that it never went up in flames after all. But then again it’s a work of fiction, so anything’s possible.
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