MDDM23: Uncle Toby

[Dave Monroe]

   "Mr. Knockwood, the landlord, a sort of
trans-Elemental Uncle Toby, spends hours every day not
with Earth Fortifications, but studying rather the
passage of Water across his land, and constructing
elaborate works to divert its flow, not to mention his
guests." (M&D, Ch. 36, p. 261)

>From Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of
Tristram Shandy (1759-67), Vol. 2, Ch. 3 ...

   "The more my uncle Toby drank of this sweet
fountain of science, the greater was the heat and
impatience of his thirst, so that, before the first
year of his confinement had well gone round, there was

scarce a fortified town in Italy or Flanders, of
which, by one means or other, he had not procured a
plan, reading over as he got them, and carefully
collating therewith the histories of their sieges,
their demolitions, their improvements and new works,
all which he would read with that intense application
and delight, that he would forget himself, his wound,
his confinement, his dinner." 

http://www.gifu-u.ac.jp/%7Emasaru/TS/ii.20-39.html#bowling-green

And from Vol. 6, Ch. 22 ...

   "His way, which was the simplest one in the world,
was this: as soon as ever a town was invested--(but
sooner when the design was known) to take the plan of
it (let it be what town it would) and enlarge it upon
a scale to the exact size of his bowling-green; upon
the surface of which, by means of a large role of
packthread, and a number of small pickets driven into
the ground, at the several angles and redans, he
transferred the lines from his paper; then taking the
profile of the place, with its works, to determine the
depths and slopes of the ditches,-- the talus of the
glacis, and the precise height of the several 
banquets, parapets &c.-- he set the corporal to
work----and sweetly went it on:---- The nature of the
soil,--the nature of the work itself,-- and above all,
the good nature of my uncle Toby sitting by from
morning to night, and chatting kindly with the
corporal upon past-done deeds,-- left LABOUR little
else but the ceremony of the name.
   "When the place was finished in this manner, and
put into a proper posture of defence,-- it was
invested,-- and my uncle Toby and the corporal began
to run their first parallel.---- I beg I may not be
interrupted in my story, by being told, That the first
parallel should be at least three hundred toises
distant from the main body of the place,-- and that I 
have not left a single inch for it;---- for my uncle
Toby took the liberty of incroaching upon his kitchen
garden, for the sake of enlarging his works on the 
bowling green, and for that reason generally ran his
first and second parallels betwixt two rows of his
cabbages and his collyflowers; the conveniences and 
inconveniences of which will be considered at large in
the history of my uncle Toby's and the corporal's cam-
paigns, of which, this I'm now writing is but a
sketch, and will be finished, if I conjecture right,
in three pages (but there is no guessing)---- The
campaigns themselves will take up as many books ...."

http://www.gifu-u.ac.jp/~masaru/TS/vi.80-99.html#miniature

And see as well ...

http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/99/kearley/Toby.html

http://alandp0.tripod.com/tristram/

>From Hanjo Berressem, "Serres Reads Pynchon/Pynchon
Reads Serres," Postmodern Culture, Vol. 11, No. 3
(May, 2001) ...

In an almost direct reference to Edward Lorenz's image
of a chaotic trajectory, which he illustrates by a
ski-slope (another image might be a the surface of a
pachinko or a pinball machine, both of which figure
prominently in Vineland), Pynchon shows how "Mr. 
Knockwood, a sort of trans-Elemental Uncle Toby,
spends hours every day not with Earth Fortifications,
but studying rather the passage of Water across his
land, and constructing elaborate works to divert its
flow.... 'You don't smoak how it is,' he argues,
'--all that has to happen is some Beaver, miles
upstream from here, moves a single Pebble,--suddenly,
down here,
everything's changed! The creek's a mile away, running
through the Horse Barn! Acres of Forest no longer
exist! And that Beaver don't even know what he's
done!'" (364). Pynchon relates this freedom of choice
and the possibility of "unaccountable" change to the
chronology of human life, relating it thus to the
trajectory from youth to maturity--one might turn
Lorenz's image upside-down and write death at the
bottom! Again, one might refer to the tangled lines of
history converging onto death as a final attractor "on
this side" ...

http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.501/11.3berressem_prs1.txt

And see as well here ...

http://www.ualberta.ca/~gifford/textstristram.htm

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0259.html

Always pays to look these things up ...

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