Luke Kennard: “Even in the worst situations, there’s usually something funny”
Luke Kennard on Black Bag: Finding the Absurd in a Struggling Artist’s Monologue
From a Footnote to a Novel
Bharatmorningnews.com – Kennard’s path to writing Black Bag began not with a grand artistic vision but with a passing glance at a psychology essay on attraction theory. Buried in a footnote of that essay sat a description of an original experiment conducted in 1967. Kennard had been reading the piece purely out of idle curiosity, yet the novel seized his attention almost immediately. What drew him in was not the experiment’s intended purpose—measuring how audiences react to a performance—but rather the figure of the out-of-work actor compelled to portray the character of Black Bag. That displaced performer became, for Kennard, a doorway into questions that had been nagging at him: what does it mean to remain committed to one’s craft in a twenty-first-century landscape where artistic labour feels neither valued nor encouraged? The frustrations of being a writer, an actor, or any kind of maker in an era that offers little institutional support for such pursuits—these were the threads he wanted to pull.
One Long Monologue, One Long Experiment
The resulting novel reads as a single, extended theatrical monologue delivered by a frustrated writer-actor who has not achieved the life he once dreamed. Kennard describes the writing process itself as analogous to running a psychology experiment: setting up a scenario, observing what unfolds, and recording the results. The structure was deliberately unlike anything he had produced before. The case-study framework gave him a scaffold for narrative discovery, even though the entire apparatus existed only in his own mind.
Isolation in the Age of Infinite Connection
The book is populated with monologues on the purpose of life, voiced by a struggling artist. Kennard acknowledges that these passages speak directly to a paradox of our moment: we are more digitally linked than any prior generation, yet simultaneously more severed from the immediate communities that once anchored daily life. Global connectivity across cultures and borders is, in his view, genuinely extraordinary. What troubles him is the trajectory of social media, which has turned every individual into an isolated performer—each person constructing a self that must appear special, must outshine the next person in the feed. The communal and the collective have eroded, and Kennard notes that separation makes us less powerful, which is precisely why the architecture of isolation has been so effectively promoted.
To dramatize this, one character in the novel is a moderately successful influencer who streams video to a million followers daily and yet feels lonelier than the narrator. Hundreds of thousands of voices reach him every day, and he remains profoundly alone.
Academia as Performance
When the narrator observes that “academics could be as bad as actors,” Kennard confirms the line was deliberate, though not meant as an insult to his own institution. He situates the campus novel within a tradition stretching back to the 1950s, naming Kingsley Amis and, most famously, David Lodge—an academic at Birmingham, the very university where Kennard teaches. His interest was not in satirising university management; whatever administrative upheavals occur, institutions persist through the people who teach within them and make the work feel worthwhile. What interested him was the competitive, sometimes unpleasant drive that mirrors the theatre: the willingness to knock others down in order to advance.
To a degree, he argues, most jobs are a species of performance. Whether delivering a lecture or staging a soliloquy, the practitioner seeks to instil conviction in an audience. The other lecturers the narrator encounters, even those genuinely committed to their disciplines, share that performative hunger.
“Even in the worst situations, there’s usually something funny.”
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