Thomas Fuller Interview, Part 6
Fuller seems hungover, perhaps a bit woozy after watching the NBA finals the night before with a group of male friends, but agrees to sit down and talk, but only after he's had coffee and a piece of fruit, his morning ritual.
Q: Both your novels, Monsieur Ambivalence and now The Classical World, have a strong graphic presence, in which the text is punctuated by visual images. I'm wondering if this 'move' was part of your original intention or if it was a response from a designer assigned to design the books?
A: You're correct to call it a 'move' and while I was the one who suggested that Monsieur Ambivalence be accompanied by photographic imagery, it was the designer, Kseniya Makarova, who read the book very carefully and responded so adroitly to the text. When I saw what she'd done with the black-and-white photographs she'd been given--how artfully she'd bounced the images up against the prose--I decided to use the same strategy with The Classical World, but in its case with color. And Christopher Jordan of Ingalls Design did a masterful job of visually interpeting the text with a series of color collages.
Q: A critic might cite this as a weakness...that the writing itself isn't enough on its own.
A: A good picture is a naturally talented poet. Why wouldn't a writer want to amplify his or her writing with the help of a poet?
Q: Well, I'm pretty sure that your hero Laurence Sterne didn't make use of graphic imagery.
A: Au contraire. The original five volumes of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, for instance, were illustrated by William Hogarth, who also provided illustrations for Cervantes, Swift, and Henry Fielding. One of my favorite Hogarth's is Beer Street and Gin Lane, two prints he issued in 1751 depicting the evils of the consumption of gin in contrast to the merits of drinking beer. There are certain things that pictures can do that words can't.
Q: So there's a long history of verbal structures being augmented by visual imagery?
A: Most certainly. And I address the situation in the beginning of The Classical World. May I read to you from the book?
Q: Certainly!
Fuller picks up The Classical World, opens to Part One, and begins to read:
So, is a picture better than a word?
A picture's far more natural; there's real physics with an image, and heft that a word just can't achieve; furthermore, pictures are far more adapatable to change...
Q: So why not just make a book of pictures? I mean, you could have just photographed your narrator/hero as he traveled through Italy, with a caption here and there indicating where he was and what he was thinking, couldn't you have?
A: I like to believe that language awakens things, and that literature is a kind of food.
The 'Professore' reading from The Leopard, Lampedusa's great novel, in Palermo, Sicily, as depicted in The Classical World, Part Two, page 122.