 Today, in world literature, we turn to a selection of literature of Europe. We look at Lawrence and Wolfe from Great Britain, at James Joyce from Ireland, at Franz Kafka from Czechoslovakia, and at Albert Camus from France. When Allied diplomats met in Paris to formulate what would become the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, there was reason for optimism. They hoped to heal what had been broken by the First World War. Instead, historians often used this day to mark the beginning of the Age of Anxiety in the West. The First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, these events were to weaken optimism in Europe and North America. As the French poet Paul Valerais wrote, doubt and disorder are in us and with us. European writers well articulated this climate of doubt. In the 19th century, novelists had written in the voice of all-knowing narrators, omniscient voices such as Charles Dickens, who controlled as they wrote. Now in the 20th century, writers adopted a point of view that was individual. Virginia Wolfe and James Joyce, for example, used stream of consciousness techniques to convey both rational and irrational interior monologues. Lawrence conjured up forbidden sensuality as a savior of an industrialized landscape in which the individual was in danger of losing authenticity. Kafka portrayed the hopelessness of the individual who was crushed by irrational hostile forces in Camus articulated questions of absurdity and human freedom. In this lecture, I try to define the ways these authors expressed anxiety in the first half of the 20th century. The storm has died away, and still we are restless, uneasy, as if the storm were about to break. Almost all the affairs of men remain in terrible uncertainty. We think of what has disappeared, we are almost destroyed by what has been destroyed. We do not know what will be born, and we fear the future, not without reason. In this lecture, I attempt to provide an overview of European literature in the first half of the 20th century by looking at what I believe are representative authors. Significant in this discussion is that the doubt and uncertainty that accompanied the modern age were there at the outset and remain with us today. We begin our overview with Great Britain's DH, Lawrence. In novels, short stories, and poetry, DH, Lawrence expressed the opposition between nature and civilization, between instinct and rationalism, between the pastoral world of the country and the urbanized world of the city. He wrote about the dreary landscape of the coal mining districts in England, about the deadening influence of gentility and the social world of those for whom cash was not a problem. He wrote about possessiveness and its destructive powers. As added out to these deadening aspects of 20th century life, he wished for a world in which men and women communicated with each other in ways he believed to be authentic. Although we need to state here that we may not believe these ways to be valid. Women, as we'll find, are often associated with convention and repression, men with animal vitality. Lawrence wished for an existence in which the natural world was something not seen through a carriage window, but experienced firsthand and allowed to yield healing powers. Born the fourth of five children to a coal miner, David Herbert Lawrence lived in Eastwood, a mining town near Nottingham, England. The tension between his schoolteacher mother and his father in the life they led is depicted in Lawrence's novel, Sons and Lovers, published in 1913. A good student, Lawrence won a scholarship that allowed him to attend Nottingham High School. He became a teacher, a painter, a poet. He traveled widely, finally to Mexico, where he identified in Native American culture the simplicity and vitality he found lacking in modern life. The search for simplicity and vitality are found in the short story The Horse Steal His Daughter. In the story we have a description of Lawrence's portrayal of erotic passion, the kind of topic and treatment that shocked his contemporary audience. In this short story, Mabel Pervin, a rather short, sullen woman of 27, as Lawrence describes her, is on the brink of a futureless life. With her three brothers, she faces bankruptcy of her father's horse-trading business. Lawrence writes and asks us to listen for a moment to this scene as the story opens. The three brothers and the sisters sat around the desolate breakfast table, attempting some sort of dulcetura consolation. The morning's post had given the final tap to the family fortunes, and all was over. The dreary dining room itself, with its heavy mahogany furniture, looked as if it was waiting to be done away with. The paragraph demonstrates Lawrence's mastery of mood, the attitude of the author toward the subject, as it is exhibited in the physical and emotional setting. The scene of foreboding and doom is laden throughout the story and is used to suggest deadly qualities that life may have. Enter young Dr. Jack Ferguson. From his office window, he watches Mabel as she walks slowly and deliberately toward the pond. Then into the pond, gradually moving deeper into the water. Running over the wet and sodden fields, he moves into the foul, earthy water of the pond and carries her out of the pond. Do you love me? She asks, as she regains consciousness, Lawrence writes. He stood instead at her, fascinated. His soul seemed to melt. Down together in the house where he has carried her, he becomes a maize, bewildered, afraid. He's never thought of loving her, yet he doesn't have the power to break away. By the end of the story, they're together, drawn into one by their baptism into life. So is this a European fairytale? Is Mabel Pervin a version of Cinderella, complete with her three broody siblings, the exact number prescribed in all stories by the brother's grim and drawn by Disney? Is Dr. Ferguson Prince Charming? Or is this sleeping beauty in which Mabel travels through the valley of death to come to life? Or is this a story of a fantasy, of a European narrative, a piece of fiction created by homophobic male? Well, there are fairytale elements here, and it is true that Lawrence's visions of relationships does not conform to those in which women have equality and freedom. How do we choose? To begin, I don't think we're obliged to choose. The story does indeed have fairytale elements. As Keith Cushman has demonstrated in his 1980 book about Lawrence's short stories, and Mabel is depicted with no option other than marriage. But it is also true that the horse stealer's daughter is four more than a fairytale. It is a telling of a story, and it's magic. And Lawrence provides a narrative that is powerful in moving and measured. And if we believe that Mabel should have had opinions other than marriage, if she could have had options in her life, we're correct there, too. Her life is filled with sadness and doom, characteristics of a world well known by the coal-minded sun. In this story, Lawrence demonstrates the power of spontaneous exchange, the ways that the senses can generate experience that is valid by being free of rational intellectual restraints. Indeed, it is a testament to the craft of Lawrence that reading this story is not the same as summarizing it. That is, the story, as the critic F. R. Levi has pointed out in 1956, is not melodramatic. The classic perfection of the tale and its simple human certainty is bound up with its remoteness from anything in the nature of cliche, Levi has wrote. We should ask after reading the story why women had such prescribed roles. We should ask whether Lawrence's view of women was valid. We should even wonder why Lawrence, during the period of the First World War when the story was published, demonstrated a lack of nationalistic patriotism. But in all of this, we should also be mindful of the craft that is the story, of the treatment of the redemptive power of love, a love that the woman did not expect to find and the doctor strongly resisted. Craft is that for which Virginia Woolf does best known. Craft is indicative of her best work. The general intellectual climate, pessimism and doubt that prevailed at the end of the First World War was captional literature and novelist developed techniques to capture these new realities. The limited, hyper-vigilant point of view that is termed stream of consciousness is used by Virginia Woolf for novels such as Jacob's Room, 1922, Mrs. Dalloway 1925 and The Waves 1931, and in the short story at hand, The Mark on the Wall. What is the technique called stream of consciousness? The great American philosopher and psychologist William James coined the term in his Principles of Psychology published in 1890. James used the term to describe the ebb and flow of thoughts in the waking mind. In literary criticism, the term stream of consciousness describes narrative techniques that present multifaceted flows of rational, inter-rational thoughts and impressions uninhibited by grammar, a syntax, or logical transitions. The best way to see how stream of consciousness works is to read a passage. Here's a paragraph from The Mark on the Wall. But for that mark, I'm not sure about it. I don't believe it was made by a nail after all. It's too big, too round for that. I might get up, but if I got up and looked at it, 10 to 1, I shouldn't be able to say for certain because once a thing's done, you never know how it happened. Oh, dear me. The mystery of life, the inaccuracy of thought, the ignorance of humanity, to show how very little control of our possessions we have. What an accidental affair this living is and all of our civilization. Just let me count over a few things lost in a lifetime beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious of losses. What cat would gnaw? What rat would nibble? Three pale blue canisters of bookbinding tools. And there were the bird cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne Kohl's scuttle, the bag-and-tale board, the hand-doggin, all gone in jewels, too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about it, the roots of turnets. What a scraping ferret is, to be sure. The wonder is that, of any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the tube at 50 miles an hour, landing at the other end without a single hairpin in my hair, shot out of the feet of God entirely naked, tumbling head over heels and asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down the chute in the post office. With one's hair flying back like the tail of a racehorse, yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repel, also casual, also haphazard. Let's look at the pattern here. The narrator of the piece is examining Halossus. Her own past is gone, as are the objects associated with it, bird cages, iron hoops, steel skates, the queen and coal scuttles, the bagatelle boards, the hand-doggin. These things have returned to the earth and lie about like the roots of turnips. Too, the Victorian age with its solid furniture is gone. Life is now technologically driven and must be compared to the subway, the tube that blows one about at 50 miles per hour. The rapidity of life is also casual, so haphazard, so lit by lightning, as should now be clear. The fact that we term this technique stream of consciousness is not at all suggest that this technique is haphazard. It is a craft deliberately constructed to take the reader from idea to idea in subtle plan ways that give the impression of unstructured movement. As a result, the technique prompts the reader to see ideas as they bubble up, suggesting the instruction way the mind often works. As a technique, it is appropriately used by the great experimental novelist Virginia Woolf to provide a picture of a world in which simple structured ideas no longer hold. And at the end of the story, it is key that the narrator finds that the mark on the wall is, after all, a snail. Her husband defines the mark for her. As Jean de Bela Garant tells us in her fine analysis of the story, after the long winding course of the narrator's reflection, this clear definition of the mark, it is, after all, a snail, falls down on us with a thud, almost the force of a decree. It is like the blackness of the mark on the white surface of the wall, like the fixity of a rule in the flux of life. Here is the masculine point of view, which governs our lives, which sets the standards, which solidifies all that it touches. Indeed, the snail itself captures the essence of the story. The snail, with its shell outside, may be seen to suggest the form of the story, while the burying and digging of the mollusks suggests the inexhaustible energy of the life force itself. Here is the hard shell of form and the fluidity of the content. Delbarre Gannet suggests that symbolizes Wolf's attempt to create a free world of the narrator's consciousness. For Wolf, consciousness was carried in a formal way on the outside, but the inside was expansive and natural. The snail is, in fact, a good way to think about Wolf's view of the world. It is a view that is often underestimated, even by those most qualified to give opinions. The great British novelist, E. M. Forster, for example, saw the mark on the wall only as a lovely little thing that led nowhere. The story was all tiny dots and colored blobs and inspired bleakness. How wrong could one be, we think. In the story, Wolf provides a microcosm of her major themes, a critique of male-female relationships, an argument for a revolution in literary perception, and a rendering of the world of human consciousness and the natural world. Indeed, after reading a mark on the wall, students would do well to read Wolf's Room of One's Own, published in 1929, a classic treatment of the role of women in society. Role's witches, Wolf would argue, should not be shell-like, but rather fluid. James Joyce was also concerned about the way the mind works. Like Wolf in England, Ireland's Joyce used stream of consciousness techniques in his novel, Ulysses, published in 1922. But in Arabic, the technique is different. Arabic is part of Joyce's early collection of stories. The Dublin is published in 1914. Here are stories that provide aspects of life in Dublin as Joyce knew it, the parochial piety and sometimes repressive conditions of Irish life that could stifle an individual soul. Arabic is often seen as a classic story. The plot is straightforward. The loved one is a girl at the Convent School. She wants to go to a bazaar called Arabic, like most public events in Joyce's fiction. This event is historical. Such a bazaar was held in Dublin from May 14th to May 19th in 1894. Unfortunately, though, there's a retreat at the Convent and the girl has to be disappointed. The boy promises to go instead and bring her back a present. It's the last night of Arabic and he must get money from his uncle to attend, but his uncle comes home late. When the boy finally arrives, the bazaar is closing down and the lights are going out. The story ends with this recollection from the narrator, gazing up into the darkness. I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity and my eyes burned with anguish and anger. So in its simplicity, is this nothing more than a story of puppy love just as D.H. Lawrence's, the horse dealer's daughter, may have been seen simply as a fairy tale? Or as was the case in Lawrence's story, is there something more here? One of the best guides to the story is that found in a very old textbook, Understanding Fiction, written by the literary critics Cleonth Brooks and Robin Penn Warren, published in 1943. Brooks and Warren wonder, too, if the story may be too sentimental, a tale of calf love. The fact that the story must be taken more seriously is supported by two elements. The details of the story, the story's point of view, regarding the details. There is a description of North Richmond Street. It is a blind alley. The information in the story about the dead priest and his abandoned belongings, the relationship, the lack of it between the aunt and uncle. He adjoices establishing the boy's growing sense of isolation. He says, and this is perhaps the single most significant line in the story, I imagine that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes. The metaphor of the chalice implies a secret triumph. He carries his loneliness with him and along with it, his love of his friend's system. Regarding point of view, we come to realize after reading the story that the narrator is recalling the event years after it occurred. Since the narrator is recalling this form for the point of view of a male adult, he has come to see the event as a kind of parable of a problem, as Brooks and Warren put it, which run through the narrator's later adult experiences. The discrepancy between the real and the ideal existed for the adolescent and exists we may assume for the narrator in the present. So the story is merely an account of a stage in the process of growing up. It does not merely represent clinical interest in the psychology of growing up, but it is symbolic rendering of a central conflict in mature experience, Brooks and Warren believe. Brooks and Warren were essential importance by the way in literary theory as they promoted a school of critical thought termed new criticism or formalism. The new critics sought to shift focus to the text by studying it in isolation for biographical and historical information. As we can see, this kind of reading is quite powerful. It helps us focus on the text. Yet we also need to focus on the context in which the text was written. For example, the details of the story, the mention of the chalice, the comment of the ant that she hoped the bazaar was not some freemason that is Protestant affair, point to attention between Catholic and Protestant ideologies in Ireland. We should also recall that Arabic as a geographic place has significance. The syllables of the word Arabic, the narrator states, were called to me through the silence in which my soul was luxuriated and cast an eastern enchantment over me. Of course, Arabia was not known to the narrator for the narrator, the orient is a mythical construct. As Edward Said of Columbia has written in his 1980, 1978 book, rather Orientalism. The East as such is a projection of the Western mind and bears little resemblance to the actual East. This is certainly the case in the story. Recall, for example, the boys, Uncle S of the boy knows the Arabs farewell to his steed, a poem by the English novelist, Carolyn Norton. The romanticism of the East and the romanticism of the boys' vision of the girl are both constructs divorced from reality. So, both the text and the context are important. Acknowledging the significance of context will help us gain a better understanding of Albert Camus, the guest, published in 1957. The context of this story is the Algerian War for Independence. Algiers, the second largest country in Africa, had been governed by the French since 1830. On May 8th, 1945, the day after World War II ended, thousands of Algerians, rather, demonstrated for independence. The struggle became accelerated, rather, in 1954 when the Algerian National Liberation Front launched a guerrilla campaign against the French. After more than seven years of bloody civil war, an agreement was reached in 1962, finally providing independence for Algeria. It is this setting in which we find the main character, Daru, a French Algerian who teaches in a one-room schoolhouse for Arab children in the middle of a bleak Algerian plane. Into his beloved solitude comes Jean Darm, Balouchi, leading an Arab man who has killed his cousin over a dispute. Balouchi insists on handing over the prison to Daru for delivery to police headquarters at a village some four hours in distance from the schoolhouse. Daru protested that his not his job, but Balouchi, citing police short-handiness in the face of a possible Arab revolt, makes Daru responsible for the prisoner, and he departs. A sensitive, humane, compassionate man, Daru treats his hostage as a human, although an unknowable human. Even though he's a French civil servant, Daru rebels against the notion of handling the Arab prisoner over to the French authorities. Daru sows the dilemma by taking the Arab a two-hour journey across a plateau where two roads divide. He gives him a thousand francs enough to last for two days, gives him food. Daru points the way to prison and the way to freedom. Daru then leaves the prisoner. When he looks back, he sees with heavy heart the Arab walking slowly on the road to prison. Later back in the classroom, Daru finds written on the blackboard these words, you have handed over our brother, you will pay for this, the story ends. Kamu's story is about the difficulty, complexity, the agony, the thanklessness of moral choice. As the critic, Lawrence Perrine, wrote in a 1963 study of the story, the guest is subtle and complex. At one level, it tells us about the French situation in Algiers at the end of World War II, a situation as difficult as Daru's. The story is about the complexity of human choice. To understand more about the story, we should compare it with Algerian writer, Mohammed Dibb's Neymar, whereabouts unknown. Both stories are centered in Algeria during the anti-colonial struggle and both confront the Arab European perspective. From Dibb, we see the war from an Arab point of view. From Kamu, we see the story from a French point of view. In Dibb's story, we see a politically committed point of view. The narrator's experiences lead him to commit himself to the Algerian cause at the end of the story. In Kamu's story, we see the main character, Daru, fleeing political commitment and seeking to avoid responsibility for his prisoner. Does Kamu, we might ask, actually address the Algerian conflict? Or does he really adopt a European philosophical position, existentialism, to a colonial setting? In comparison, both stories deal with questions about the meaning of life and death, with questions about meaning in a chaotic world. In essence, the story is about understanding, a point that Kamu made in his 1958 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, as he wrote, true artists score nothing. They force themselves to understand instead of judging. It is questions of meaning that are interwined in Franz Kafka's The Hunger Artist. On a literal level, this is a story about fasting. The main character literally performs a fast before an audience. However, this once popular spectacle has fallen into disfavor, as circus goers have moved on to other spectacles. And so the hunger artist neglected fast sawn without hindrance and in time dies. At the end of the story, the hunger artist is buried with a straw in his cage and a panther is brought into this cage as a crowd gathers to watch the beast. On web level, the story is a sociological allegory. The play to the hunger artist represents the play to the artist in modern world. Recall Virginia Woolf's similar treatment of this theme in The Mark on the Wall when she recalls being shot out of a tube on the subway. Taken on another level, the story is an allegory about human spiritual nature. The hunger artist represents the aspiring spiritual side of mankind. The panther represents the material, the sensual side. And seeking that which is absolutely spiritual, the hunger artist is isolated from society. At still another level, if we take the hunger artist as symbolic of a savior, we realize that there is no chance of that savior rising from the dead. There is no rebirth. The sense of the individual striving against hostile forces is part of the age and anxiety in the West and the company at the end of World War One and a cage that lasts until the present. Easy answers, if ever any existed were gone. Present war uncertainty and pessimism, the authors we have just explored pursued experimentation as a way to articulate their vision in a world in which insecurity was paramount. At the end of the Second World War, Western Europe and America were to recover. Nevertheless, the end of the age of Western dominance was in sight. Between 1947 and 1962, nearly every former colonial territory gained independence, truly a turning point in world history. In the late 1960s and early 70s, moreover, Europe and America entered a new time of turbulent crisis. Social conflicts and ideological battles divided communities and shook nations. As we look closely at European literature at the beginning of the 20th century, we see the origin of modern thought in all its complexity.