A brief "prologue" in Martin Riker's The Guest Lecture, informs us that the entire scene of the novel takes place in "a dark hotel room somewhere in middle America," where a man, woman, and child lie on a "single king-sized bed." The woman is awake, and "inside her head, things are busy." Indeed: "A lecture is about to begin."
It would seem that we are being prepared to find out what is going on "inside" the protagonist's head, to encounter her in the process of thinking. And literally there is no physical action depicted in the novel outside of this character's ruminations both about the lecture she is scheduled to deliver the following morning and about the course her life has taken that has brought her to this particular moment. But we do not experience what amounts to an existential crisis the protagonist--Abby, an economics professor--is enduring as the processing of thought but instead as a fully articulated and dramatized account of the circumstances of her life, along with numerous passages in which she, for example, explicates the economic theories that have preoccupied her career. While Abby's story is not related as a chronologically continuous narrative (it develops associatively, in a way that is consistent with the movement of thought), most readers would likely find it a fairly recognizable sort of episodic first-person narrative.
Riker's purpose, then, is not to represent the operations of human thought, its "flow." Few novels, in fact, actually do manage to capture the act of thinking, at least in any consistent or sustained way. The mental phenomenon we call "thought" is, arguably, only partially verbal, and doesn't always occur in full-phrased sentences. Some writers have of course attempted to produce a version of this unprocessed cerebration in prose--most famously in the "stream of consciousness" technique whereby thought is approximated through discontinuous and unpunctuated language--but the success of this technique in leaving an impression of greater realism by introducing an internal perspective on narrated events led to the conflation of a literary strategy with the actual reality of thought. "Stream of consciousness" is unavoidably artifice, no less a device for creating specifically literary effects than any other figuration of language. Nevertheless, what was at first a modernist innovation in storytelling influenced many subsequent writers (and critics) to value psychological realism above all, leading to the widespread believe that the capacity to go inside human consciousness is one of the distinctive attributes of fiction among all other narrative arts.
Fiction may well be able to create the illusion of representing a character's mental state, but then creating illusion is one of the defining presumptions of fiction to begin with, so making the reader accept that a story's devices are providing access to "thought" is finally just one sort of illusion the writer hopes to produce. Moreover, The Guest Lecture demonstrates, it seems to me, that human thought is of value to writers for its content, not the form in which it might be expressed. To get the latter "right," even if it were possible to do so, might count as an achievement of documentary realism, but this in itself is not an achievement of literary art. Such art could indeed be made from a character's internal reflections and ruminations, but not simply by recording them. And in The Guest Lecture Martin Riker does not endeavor to record the thoughts of his insomniac protagonist, despite presenting us with a narrative situation in which thinking is precisely what she seems to be doing. The novel gives form to this thinking, but it is the aesthetic form that converts the raw materials of experience into the artfulness of literature.
Most immediately on Abby's mind is the lecture on John Meynard Keynes she has been invited to give the following morning, but this impending event seems to have brought her to a crossroads of sorts, an occasion that unavoidably compels her to contemplate where she has arrived, in both her personal and professional life, and to determine what comes next. The most immediately troubling problem she faces is that she has recently been denied tenure at her university and is uncertain if she still has--or wants--an academic career. We learn the circumstances of her plight: although she is a specialist on the life and thought of Keynes, instead of writing a conventional academic tome on her subject she wrote a more personal, general-interest book based on an essay she published online that attracted a wider audience. Not surprisingly, the senior (mostly male) faculty in her department did not regard this effort altogether kindly and declared her work unworthy of tenure. The speech she will be giving is for a popular organization, not an academic one, so that it looms, perhaps, as a portent of whatever scholarly relevance she will manage to retain following on from this debacle.
Keynes plays a larger role in the realization of Abby's story than as just the subject of her intellectual interests. The novel's formal conceit mirrors the mnemonic device that Abby uses to memorize her speech: associating each of the parts of the speech with a room in her house and then visiting each of the rooms in the appropriate order. Thus does Abby take us on a tour of her home, but accompanying her on the tour is none other than the ghost of John Meynard Keynes, who acts also as a kind of advisor to Abby as she tries to sort through not just her feelings about Keynes's legacy but also her general crisis of confidence in herself. In keeping with Abby's generally favorable view of Keynes as a historical figure, the ghostly version of him seems a rather jolly nice fellow who counsels Abby in her winter of discontent--but of course he is a projection of Abby's distressed imagination, so he is presumably fulfilling the role for which he has been invoked in the first place. As an economist, Abby is most interested in Keynes's optimistic speculations about economic prosperity in the future, perhaps reflecting her need to believe in her own future.
Abby needs a good dead of encouragement, as her sense of self-worth, while understandably damaged by her recent setback, seems always to have been fragile. Working in a male-dominated field, she has further isolated herself professionally by concentrating on Keynes as rhetorician rather than the hard date of economics (or even the economic theories for which Keynes is most remembered). She earnestly wants to belong to the world of serious intellectual discourse, but although her deliberations on various ideas (scattered throughout the novel) show that she is entirely able to hold her own in this world, she also has chosen an approach that emphasizes the direct incorporation of personal experience in academic writing. Abby struggles with these self-created dilemmas: she knows that her intellectual project is valid, but she also berates herself for failing to get official endorsement of her efforts.
Abby's mingling of the personal and the analytical is reflected in the sleepless reverie producing the account we are reading. She interrupts her rehearsal of the presentation she is to give, and her exchanges with Keynes, to recall important episodes from her past, those which played an important role in determining her direction. Many of these episodes end in disappointment or loss, for which predictably enough Abby often blames herself. She seems relatively content in her marriage to her sleeping husband, Ed, although she confesses that part of Ed's appeal is that he is reflexively supportive of her, which in her insecurity she badly needs. These very insecurities, however, make Abby not just the victim of an unwelcoming system but a recognizably imperfect character with whom we can all feel a vicarious sympathy. Her struggle to reconcile herself to her situation is really the only plot in the novel, but we do find ourselves compelled by her predicament: will she ultimately overcome her self-doubts and be able to move on?
It might still be accurate to say that the source of our interest in the novel's protagonist lies in the depth of her thinking, although this is not conveyed through direct exposure to it as depicted thought. Instead the author exteriorizes the substance of that thought in the form he has devised and the at times anxious but always articulate voice he has given the character. He has, in short, transformed thinking into writing. It is not the sort of writing that attempts to replicate the manner of thinking itself but instead shapes and organizes it into a manifest aesthetic order. If this gives us a first-person narrator speaking cogently to us about her life experiences, her narrative has more of the characteristics of a lucid dream than of waking reality, while at other times it blurs the distinction between narration and critical exegesis. In its way, perhaps it models the hybrid blend of imagination and intelligence that Abby will likely continue to practice in her writing as part of her new professional identity.
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