Hope this microphone works. If you have to listen to me I hope you can hear me. Once before at a gathering of a learned society, seeing an upright gadget before me, I talked with extreme care directly into it for half an hour, moving neither to the right nor to the left, only to find as I went down from the platform that it was a lamp.

I may as well begin by confessing that I make this report somewhat selfconsciously. For one thing, I am pensively aware that it is my last report to you as Director of the Foreign Language Program. But in addition I seem to have acquired some notoriety as a scolder of language teachers, and it's a nice question whether I should stay in character or make my valedictory a flattering if slightly insincere performance. Some of my good friends have warned me that language teachers, like professional educators, are unusually sensitive to criticism, and they have advised that, while honesty is supposed to be the best policy, I need not be too generous with it. Beyond this wellmeant counsel my own natural impulses are to close four years of work for the advancement of language study in America by having all foreign language teachers as my friends. I put only one thing ahead of such advice and such impulses, and that is the good of the cause for which I shall continue to work until next summer, and on which it is now my duty to report candidly.

William Faulkner is a poet—not a philosopher, nor an essayist, nor a businessman who writes articles for Harper's. Many readers have been baffled and annoyed and have even hated Faulkner personally because his novels have always demanded critical, curious reading. As an artist, he speaks through form. As a novelist, he has always exercised the privilege and the gift of symbolic discourse. If Faulkner were a philosopher, he would perhaps be more systematic about arranging and ordering his meanings. But he is an artist whose genius is for meaningful form rather than formal statement; his meaning, therefore, is legitimately diffuse, complex, and resistant; and the sensitive reader enjoys a continuous awareness of the multiple meanings of his form. Through form the artist interprets or criticizes the world in which he lives; through form the reader senses the artist's philosophical outlook on the world. The philosophical assumptions that underlie Faulkner's novels and largely determine their distinctive “shape” do not come to us as direct statement. As with most original artists, Faulkner's most deeply felt ideas are manifest in his symbols and his imagery; they are implicit in his peculiar and much maligned sentence structure, and in the experimental and complex structural patterns he gave to such remarkable books as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Requiem for a Nun, and Absalom, Absalom! One can defend successfully, I think, the proposition that when Faulkner has spoken in the novel as philosopher or essayist or sectionalist he has failed. When he attempts debate, as he does in parts of Intruder in the Dust, his voice is ordinary, in some respects shrill and small. He is angrier, indeed despairing, in Sanctuary; but Sanctuary, for all its weaknesses, is a novel superior to Intruder in the Dust because it more consistently dramatizes and restrains and diffuses its despair through form. In the bitterest of his early novels, As I Lay Dying, the “outrage” is beautifully restrained and patterned into art, with no hint anywhere of the direct voice of argument or rationality that we hear with the later Gavin Stevens of Intruder in the Dust and Requiem for a Nun. Darl and Addie Bundren (As I Lay Dying) are poetic and persuasive; Gavin Stevens and the recreated Temple Drake (Requiem for a Nun) are prosaic, literal and dull.

The Pun, Addison notes, is “a Sound, and nothing but a Sound.” Lamb elaborates: a pun “is a pistol let off at the ear”; it has, he says, “an ear-kissing smack with it.” But the position is not entirely sound; like “The Echo,” a poem which Hood rejected, it “will not answer.” Any hearing on the pun must first admit the pun effect, which precedes analysis and shows that we distinguish the pun semantically, not aurally. The sound is only echo to the sense, and through reflection we conclude that the pun effect is a function of multiple meaning. But even the best pun, whatever that may be, when it must be explained fails to elicit those unusual noises which are the punster's usual reward; the pun effect, it seems, results from some kind of greatly accelerated or simultaneous perception of multiple meanings. Psychology is here deeply involved—for any kind of meaning perception is singularly difficult to analyze—and such tangled affairs are most wisely avoided. A more reasonable approach lies in study of the conditions permitting and the significance attending this curious and characteristic phenomenon; for the pun effect hints at larger matters.

Since the second world war, journalistic critics and generalizing cultural pundits have been pointing out to us that serious French literature is headed, on the one hand, toward an eventually sterile period of realistic despair, and, on the other, toward an intensification of difficult writing characterized by a kind of supreme indifference to audience on the part of the creator. Examples to prove their point are not lacking. There would seem to be, however, at least one other trend in recent French writing which, although owing something, perhaps, in the way of formation or occasion for reaction to the two types mentioned, falls not at all into such categories. For lack of a better name, and in order to avoid painful jargon, this literature might best be called a literature of Things.

For the last ten years, the elementary courses (first two semesters) in foreign languages at the University of Texas have comprised five contact hours per week. They carry four semester hours credit in accordance with the well-known formula, 1 hour/week: 1 semester hour credit; 2 laboratory hours/week: 1 semester hour credit. Coincidentally, beginning in 1946, drill sessions were provided, in French and Spanish, for oral-aural practice outside of class. The oral-aural emphasis became then the established procedure. When, in 1952, the three departments of foreign languages (Germanic, Romance, Slavic) moved into their new building, Batts Hall, the new facilities made possible further development.

It Is a paradox that James Joyce, exemplar of the artist-as-exile, was one of the most domestic of modern writers—“very much a family man, a devoted husband, a good father, and a loyal son.” For Stephen Dedalus, the artist as young man, the artist as family man would have seemed a contradiction in terms. The true artist, Stephen insisted, must free himself from allegiance to home and family as well as country and church. The paradox is no problem for those critics who, dissociating Joyce from his fictional counterpart, consider Stephen less a portrait than a parody of the artist and his theory of art one that Joyce either never took seriously or eventually rejected. If, however, the testimony of Joyce's brother and others who knew him in Dublin may be accepted, the young Joyce was a good deal like Stephen in situation, manners, and temperament; and the ideas on art and artist which appear in Joyce's early essays and notebooks are virtually the same as those expounded by Stephen. This is not to say that the Joyce who wrote A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses is identical with the Joyce-Stephen presented in the novels. Between the time depicted and the time of writing occurred several events, including his elopement with Nora Barnacle in October 1904, which changed the artist's outlook. Yet, if Joyce looked back on the foibles of his youth with amused detachment and described them with irony, he was ready to admit the relationship between author and hero. “Many writers have written about themselves,” he said to Frank Budgen, “I wonder if any of them has been as candid as I have.”

Most of the critical writing on L'Etranger has been focused on the world view or philosophy that it expresses. This is certainly legitimate, especially since Camus himself sees the novel as an incarnation of “a drama of the intelligence.” As a result, however, some of the formal and imaginative aspects of L'Etranger have been neglected, with the further result that the full meaning of the novel has remained hidden. On the surface, L'Etranger gives the appearance of being an extremely simple though carefully planned and written book. In reality, it is a dense and rich creation, full of undiscovered meanings and formal qualities. It would take a book at least the length of the novel to make a complete analysis of meaning and form, and the correspondences of meaning and form, in L'Etranger. My purpose here is less ambitious. I should like first to take up aspects of the novel that have not yet been studied sufficiently, principal among them (and in this order), the use of time and structure as thematic devices, myth, names, patterns of character and situation, and symbols, and then, in conclusion, to use the knowledge gained as the basis for an explication of the meaning of the novel as a whole. Frequent and fairly lengthy references will be made to others of Camus' books, simply because the novel is incomprehensible except in the context of all his works; it is hoped that what may appear to be digressions will be justified by the light they throw on the novel.