Real Cities with Imaginary Prose About Them: An Interview with Thomas E. Kennedy - Interview

Literary Review, Summer, 1999 by Susan Tekulve

But when you come down to it, the only really critical thing about a fiction is that it has to be interesting. Interior or exterior, the fiction has to flame our imagination or we will chuck it aside. The drama can be rich in action, but it call equally well be in the language--in fact where else can it be in a fiction?

Many of the stories in Unreal City seem to test the boundaries of reality. The protagonists are Jully drawn, emotionally true, but they face strange, unreal conflicts. For instance, Murphy not only feels trapped in a bad marriage, but he must also deal with a battered angel in his basement. What are the advantages of not limiting your characters to realistic settlings and conflicts?

Realism, of course, is not reality but only another sort of illusion--one that pretends that the story being told is, as Goethe mentioned in defining the short story form, about real people that you just never really heard about, events that never made the newspapers. But in fact, the reality we associate with journalistic reports or with "realistic" fiction tends only to show the surface of human behavior and thought in attempting to depict the aspects of human existence it is dealing with.

I try to allow my imagination to dictate the boundaries of reality in the fictional worlds it empowers me to create. Sometimes, by breaking loose from the sheerly factual type of writing, we can touch other levels of reality than the quotidian. Why does Murphy have an angel in his basement? That angel was the image from which the entire story sprung. Gladys Swan and her Jungian analyst friend, one sunny afternoon as we sat in the sunlight in a Danish cafe drinking schnapps, said to me, "We have talked it over and decided you should kill your angel." Why they said that or what they meant I do not know, but the statement caused an immediate image to appear in my mind of an angel, miserable and frightened, cowering in a basement. When I sat down later to work with it, Murphy appeared, then the other characters in the family. Then the story revealed itself to me--a story about a man systematically destroying his angelic counterpart in order to enable himself to live an absurd life in an absurd world. Yet we do not know whether that is a good thing or a bad thing finally; has he brought himself down to earth in order' to embrace human love? Or has he cut himself free of divinity to sink into a pit of absurdity?

A funny footnote to that story. I did a reading and signing at a college in Chicago earlier this year, and a young woman came up to me and asked, "What did they do with the angel's body?" Such a literal embrace of the absurdity principles of my story--in a way as though it was literal reality--that I was dumbfounded; I hadn't an answer for her. But within three days of that question I had written another story, "Angel Body," which was about what happened to the angel's body, how moving men came and wrapped it in a carpet and delivered it to a young woman named Lauren (the name of the girl who asked the question), dumped it on her living room floor--so the problem was hers now. Something further developed in the writing of that very short piece.