Part 3, Interview with Thomas Fuller, Monsieur Ambivalence

(The conclusion of our interview with Thomas Fuller, author of Monsieur Ambivalence, a post literate fable. Jean-Pierre Bezoux, an early reader of the book, says "Fuller makes something wonderful here, out of almost nothing: the attempt to sit quietly in a room alone for at least one hour. That he does so in a small village in the middle of France makes it all the more remarkable". (IF SF PUBLISHING, illustrated, 257 pp.$15).

Q: The title and the character--we know him only as Monsieur Ambivalence--is both playful and serious, obsessed but amusued by his obsession.

A: Yes, when I was writing I often imagined him walking through the village humming Booker T. and the M.G.'s "Green Onions" to himself while philosophizing.

Q: The photographs give the book a visual dimension. Some of them seem to correspond to the story and some of them seem almost disembodied from it, that is, to belong only to themselves...is that fair?

A: Right on, brother! Give credit to the photographer--who allows me only to reveal that she is a woman but otherside prefers anonymity--and to the designers of the book, Tom Ingalls and Kseniya Makarova. The Ingalls team is really quite remarkable. They're able to design books that honor the form as an object of beauty without the kind of preciousness that plagues so much of small press design and publishing. They understood the vibe of Monsieur Ambivalence perfectly--that the human perspective is always that of the tourist, wherever one is and whatever one is doing. In this sense, there's no such thing as a 'familiar' landscape and everything reamins strange and new, the way it's probably meant to be.

Q: Why are there so many shifts in time and place in the course of the book, to the degree that a reader might not know whether he is in America or in France?

A: Monsieur Ambivalence has real problems with time, with what time is and how best to use it. I think the 'shifts' as you call them are an attempt to present a certain psychological honesty, and how that honesty produce certain physiological disorientations.

Q: Ambivalence is uncertainty, isn't it?

A:  Yes and no...our hero is trying to find a third way, a middle path perhaps, after having been trapped most of his life in the Either/Or dynamics of western civilization. Asking question after question and becoming, after a time, almost accustomed to the idea of living with uncertainty, with what he doesn't know, will never know, is his method of operation.

Q: Is he a happy man, is he fulfilled?

A:  Monsieur Ambivalence is a master surgeon of the male ego. He's at a point in his life where he's realized he's used his ego to its max, and he can afford to rip it out and look at it for the good it's done him, and the bad. It took him to where he wanted to be--a place in France, time to think and to enjoy his life, what he "thought he wanted," as a poet friend of mine puts it--but his ego is an enemy to his new pursuit.

Q: Helena, the central female character, seems to allow him his ambivalence, in fact is the one who names him, "Monsieur Ambivalence". Why toward the end of the book does he asks her not to call him that?

A:  She knows everything he doesn't know, and she knows it at ground-zero.  When I say she "knows" I mean that she conducts her life almost completely without anxiety, to even enjoy what others would call uncertainty, and to live much more natural manner than Monsieur Ambivalence, who struggles so mightily with himself. When he finally reaches a point where there's a glimmer of self-knowledge, he naturally bristles at the name, perhaps thinking that concept of self Helena's so discerningly identified will hold him back from the self-discovery he's committed to.

Q: Do you think Pascal himself tried to sit in a room quietly for one hour by himself, as he advised in Pensees and as Monsieur Ambivalence attempts?

A: God no! He had far too much other fun stuff to do.

Q: Do you believe in Pascal's notion?

A: Absolutely. Think of it from a simple probabailty standpoint, which is the way Pascal would have thought about it--that if the majority of human beings learned to sit quietly in a room by themselves for at least one hour there would certainly be less strife in the world. I think it's the blueprint for the great international disarmament program that's so needed by the world right now. You can read the book--and I hope people do read it this way--as Pascal being a major character. He's such an interesting figure. He starts as a scientist at a time when man was on a scientific binge in the Greek sense, looking outward at things to really know what they are, and ends his life in a contemplative religious order at a time when enlightened, progressive thinking is going more inward. Pensees wasn't written as a book, it was assembled from writing Pascal left behind, which I really like.

Q: Still and all, Monsieur Ambivalence knows how to have fun, doesn't he?

A: He certainly does. I wanted to make that clear. This isn't agonizing soul-searching, St. John of the Cross wandering in the desert, it doesn't belong to that lit genre. Our hero, and he was conceived as a hero, likes good French bread and wine, the French countryside, becomes real friends with people in the village. His experience proves that close observation of self and of others provides great entertainment.

Q: Someone who read the book said to me, "it's the study of a man who's accepting himself for the first time" Do you think that's fair?

A: That's a good reading. I've also heard the book described as an 'x-ray of a man's soul.' I don't really know if I, Thomas Fuller, believe in the notion of a soul but if there is such a thing as a soul Monsieur Ambivalence certainly has one, and this book is its portrait.

The interviews with Thomas Fuller were conducted by Brooks Roddan , August 17 and 18, 2013. This is the final interview in a series of three.