An Interview with Thomas Fuller: Part 1: The Classical World
There's a passage in Thomas Fuller's new book (The Classical World, a Novel of Ideas, summer 2018, IFSF Publishing) in which he invokes Aristotle's, "we should act as if we're immortal."
Mr. Fuller's novel treats the present time as classical, as if the past must be validated by the future in order to be considered history, as his narrator travels with a small retinue through the southern extremities of what is now known as Italy, with momentary stops in Wyoming, Iceland, and Rome. A reader of The Classical World in its primitive form wrote of it, "If Heraclitus had a great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandson he'd undoubtedly think and write like Thomas Fuller."
Mr. Fuller wrote the book over a four-year period following the publication of his first novel, Monsieur Ambivalence. As his publisher, aware of his love affair with both privacy and secrecy, I persuaded him to agree to an 'interview', submitting a list of questions via email to Mr. Fuller about his new project and related subjects and recording his responses:
Q: So, congratulations on the book! It's quite something.
A: Thank you, I guess.
Q: Can you provide a snap-shot of The Classical World?
A: Well, rereading and rewriting it--and it was reread and rewritten seven times--getting it ready for publication, I came to see it as a book that will be best appreciated by those who suffer A.D.D. I'm seriously afflicted with the disease, so much so I've come to see it as a blessing, and it was only on my final reading of the book that I was able to see what I'd been doing with it as a writer...
Q: There certainly is a lot of playing around with 'time' in the text, and with 'identity'. The playfulness is palpable, in terms of plot, characterization, forward motion, but the playfulness is offset by some tremendous philosophical considerations--what is love, what is truth, what is justice...was that pursposeful?
A: Asking questions, specifically asking precise moral questions that have been asked for thousands of years and really have no answer, was always the heart of the book. Insofar as there is a plot, and I think there is, I really trust that the intelligent reader will suss it out, it's to ask a question and to follow it toward an answer, knowing you'll never quite get there, to the answer that is. One of the preliminary sub-titles to The Classical World was, A Novelogue of Ideas; in other words, the narrative is presented as a sort of travel guide, not such a novel idea as it turns out, considering that Cervantes, Laurence Sterne, even Rabelais deployed the same control technique. And it's a good one, it enables the people in the novel to eat and drink well, see things they haven't seen, be surprised as only true travelers can be surprised, and perhaps even take time to dwell on their moral condition.
Q: It may be the most quietly moral book I've ever read.
A: Well, I borrowed from the best. You've already noted the invocation of Aristotle's, 'we should act as if we're immortal', and the book is full of these kinds of considerations for better or worse. In a way I'm trying to follow the thread from the primitive to the organized, to Christianity for instance. Not that Aristotle's 'Christian' but imagine if his little gem was printed on banners and hung on light posts along the boulevards of our major cities! I think it would have an effect, I really do, upon our cultural behavior, as would the Golden Rule if applied. Thoughtlessness is our current crime, and thoughtlessness leads to kind of heartlessness, the kind of moral stupidity currently governing so many of our social and political actions.
Q: The main character in the novel doesn't always behave correctly! In fact, he engages in what some might call at least slightly aberrant sexual activity and, maybe even more objectionable, walks out on his best friend in a foreign country in the midst of their trip together to Rome.
A: He has deep psychological problems, no question. The difference, however, from other many characters who populate contemporary fiction, is that he's not only aware of his flaws but that he thinks about them, he tries to think them through, from their origins to their effects on others, if not to some conclusion then at least to a place of some self-awareness. At a time when introspection of any sort seems a lost art, and perhaps punishable by law, our hero has decided to live a moral life by asking questions and being attentive to answers even when there are none. I've tried to portray him as almost heroic, somewhere between noble and vain.
Q: The book's opening scene takes place in Wyoming, then moves to Iceland, hardly places a reader might connect with the classical world?
A: Physical location is certainly a determinant but according to leading astrophysicist's there's no scientific proof that time exists, so why can't Wyoming or Iceland or an island in the Pacific be part of the classical world if the classical world must be assigned a specific time-line? For awhile I was using Philippe Perrone's words as an epigram--"An air-conditioned dark space is always the space for fiction"--as a sort of signal to readers that anything can happen here. Perrone's statement now seems a little obvious, heavy-handed, dour even and I've since replaced that epigram with a beautiful piece of language from Thomas Bernhard, the late Austrian.
(To be continued)