The Elsewhere Community (Massey Lectures Series)

Rating:
Summary: A Great Place to Visit (and to Live...)
Review: "The Elsewhere Community" examines the role of "elsewhere" in learning. One learns by going (or being) elsewhere -- geographically, with other people, in another frame of mind, or with other types of literature. One learns by being around what one doesn't know -- something else.

And among other things, this is a fascinating account of Hugh Kenner's own voyage to elsewhere. In 1948, driving from Toronto to New Haven (via New York and Washington) with Marshall McLuhan, Kenner went to visit Ezra Pound, then incarcerated at St. Elizabeth's hospital for the mentally ill in Washington. That visit led to Kenner's subsequent career as one of the leading critics of our time. For fifty years, Kenner has explained Modernism and its leading writers (Pound, Joyce, Beckett, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and others) to us with his comprehensive intelligence and wit. This book is perhaps the closest we will come to having Kenner's autobiography, and it's a treasure.

Early on in their friendship, Ezra Pound told Kenner that he had "an ob-li-ga-tion" to visit the great people of his time. And so began Kenner's trips to Europe to meet the writers he has explained so eloquently. The stories of his experiences with these people (with Beckett and Eliot, for example) are always revealing. Kenner has always amazed readers with his power to see and to hear things that the rest of us might miss. His eye misses nothing, and his ear is musical in its ability to catch just the right inflection and the meaning beneath it. Some of these stories have appeared in Kenner's earlier books, but here they are presented not to Explain Literature, but rather in the form of five radio scripts. They are warm, personal, fascinating, and charming.

Read this book, whether or not you know Modernism. If you don't know Pound, Eliot, and Beckett, you'll want to after you read this. And you'll want to read more Kenner. Above all, you'll want to discover and explore your own "elsewheres."

This book is a treasure.

Rating:
Summary: A Voyage to your own Elsewhere Community
Review: I had never heard of Hugh Kenner until a local radio station replayed the Massey Lectures ( a radio lecture series on the Canandian Broadcasting Corporation) on which this book is based. They entranced me so much that I went out and bought this title.

Kenner expounds the merits of travelling and meeting people as a way of both learning and shaping your life and work. He starts by looking at the "Grand Tour", the visits to Europe by the English (and later North Americans, including Kenner's father) and links in Homer and "The Odyssey", Aristotle, Gibbon, Wordsworth, Milton and Dante before moving on to his own trips Elsewhere when he visited first Ezra Pound and then T.S. Eliot. These allow Kenner to tie in Yeats, James Joyce, Henry James and many others.

Kenner shows how all these writers were influenced and educated by their own voyages and exiles and how the movement of people shaped modern literature, among others.

The book is marvellously written and incredibly engaging. It sent me delving into my shelves and visiting libraries to find poems or prose by the authors he mentions. It once again focused my mind on my own desire to see England and Europe.

I heartily recommend this book to anyone who enjoys literature or wants a marvellous excuse to travel and find their own Elsewhere Community.