The Snow Is General All Over Ireland: Irish Modernism and Northern European Drama

I feel particularly honoured to be asked to deliver this year's Milan Dimić Memorial Lecture,* because my first Comparative Literature professors were Milan Dimić and Henry Kreisel. As an undergraduate at the University of Alberta, I majored in Honours English, not in Comparative Literature. In those days, the two units fought well-established turf wars, not least over who had the right to teach European drama. My first Comparative Literature course was Kreisel's eye-opening Modern European Drama (with a particularly memorable session on how to read Chekhov's dialogue).

The next semester, I took Dimić's course on psychoanalysis and literature-reading Freud on the uncanny, along with E.T.A. Hoffman, and Freud's essay on Wilhelm Jensen's Gravida, along with Ernest Jones and Marie Bonaparte. Dimić was a learned, rather formidable teacher, relatively unbending, relatively formal. Yet our class met in a small seminar room with a stupendous view of Edmonton's river valley and the Alberta Legislature building, and there was a recurrent moment in which Professor Dimić pointed out the unmistakable similarities between the architectural style of our local parliament and that of the parliament building in Belgrade.

In later years, I came to appreciate how much comparatists from Central Europe-especially the Balkans-had done, from the late nineteenth century onwards, to shape our discipline, and to appreciate, deeply, how easily, frequently and self-evidently the University of Alberta Comparative Literature department, as I then knew it, had included all of Eastern Europe in their conception of European literature. To that end, it was very open to reading and teaching in translation. Such openness, as I came to realize, was rather unusual, but it shaped much of my own outlook on the field and my own work.

Peculiar and random though Dimić's observation seemed at the time, I savour in retrospect his recurrent juxtaposition between his native Serbia and Edmonton, as the place he spent much of his professional life. In his 1995 prose memoir, Two Cities: On Exile, History and the Imagination, the Polish émigré poet Adam Zagajewski describes the oddities of his own infancy and childhood, spent from 1945 onwards in Wroclaw (formerly Breslau), whose German citizens were forcibly cleared at the end of World War II and which was then resettled with Polish expellees the Soviets had forcibly cleared from eastern Poland. Naturally, these new residents mourned their lost places of origin; Zagajewski describes how his family's lost Lvov lingered in memory underneath their lives in postwar Wroclaw, one city mentally overlaid atop another.

Those who built Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta and across North America were often exiles, expatriates, or expellees similarly haunted by World War II and by the Cold War. Along with Ernst Reinhold, Henry (originally Heinrich) Kreisel came to Canada as teenage internees, Jewish children who fled Nazi occupation only to find themselves imprisoned by the British government as enemy aliens and shipped out to Canada for further years of internment; an apparently inauspicious beginning. Yet their binocular vision of the world helped to shape Comparative Literature at Alberta as a particularly cosmopolitan discipline.

European modernism, this essay will argue, often involved a similarly stereoscopic vision: not always of two cities, but of two places, planes of action, two layers of time. The essay is itself a retrospective attempt to link the respective canons of Alberta's Comparative Literature and English departments in my day. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, every university book sale at Alberta overflowed with dozens, even hundreds of copies of the books assigned perennially in freshman English courses: the work of W.B. Yeats, James Joyce's Dubliners, J.M. Synge's Plays. All three of these feature prominently in this essay. But they are put into dialogue, in various ways, with the broader range of works Kreisel used to teach as well: with Chekhov, Ibsen, and Strindberg.

The essay returns to a key notion in Comparative Literature from its inception: that in different parts of Europe, writers avidly read each other, pondering what their peers...