Namur, St Denis, and an uncle in gestation

I hope it is tiresomely plain, that this blog takes opportune juxtaposition as its moderate form of scholarship and as its natural voice. This is the tactic of uncles. A blogger friend of mine, occasionally cited in these pages, confides to me that unclehood is gathering gainfully in his future, even as we speak. And I say to him, he's been practicing the part, fuh-evah.


Is not the rawest exploiter of the child's credulity, the uncle? Is not the cardinal saboteur of family order, the uncle? Is not the thrillingest visitor who can be announced at any home, the uncle? 

I'm missing something marvelous of life, if my own corruption by uncles is an exception: the guy who'll get down on the floor and draw with one in crayons, the one who'll arrive with a basketball in one's recovery from a broken leg, the fellow who defends one's stack of Mad magazines to a fretting mother, as the height of satire, when one loved them for their naughtiness. The boy who was sent down from school to set an immortal example to his nephew's awe.



One could go on, but what could be less necessary? The crayonneur turns out to be the draughtsman of a turtle with a lantern on his back, acquainting the boy in his mockery with bigotry, for his entire life. The connoisseur of satire turns out to be teaching compassion. Fair enough, you say, but the uncle has Crusoe's advantage, of lighter responsibilities. And I answer, there you are: "And who will ride with me, in my little car," is both the funniest and the darkest line in the entire Philadelphia Story. Yet, the film is unthinkable without Uncle Willie.

If you think this is the indirect route to the Battle of Namur, then you haven't been introduced to Everyman's uncle. His name is Toby, his nephew is Tristram Shandy. Uncle Toby spends his life (and everyone else's beneath the same roof) convulsing the household in reliving a military campaign of his youth - indoors, on his hands and knees - and annihilating, along the way, much of the furniture, all of his fortune, and the foundations of linear discourse. The book is not merely hilarious; I'm not sure hilarity existed before it. Tristram, by the way, observes all this from the ostensible imperviousness of the womb; but he could be the sleepless child upstairs to hear his uncle to his father, down below: O brother! 'tis one thing for a soldier to gather laurels - and 'tis another to scatter cypress. This style of invention anticipates the post-modern as modernity is being invented.


Sterne happened to hit upon a universal childhood antic, in his depiction of Uncle Toby, to draw the very same conclusions respecting the structure of narrative, which the architectural historian John Summerson arrived at in his study of the Gothic. I owe it to an Oxonian (of all things), Peter Conrad, to have put the perception as succinctly as can be done: 


Sublimity contemplates, awestruck, the vastness of nature; irony inverts that perception.. aware that the small is as infinite as the vast, the ironist recreates sublimity in miniature.

Summerson rests Heavenly Mansions: An Interpretation of Gothic cogently and exhaustively on the child's delight in structuring his play, exactly as Uncle Toby does, within an aedicule, a fortress scaled for him, from the overhanging parapet of a piano or within the lower cavity of an armoire. The suggestion no sooner is made than the reader can extrapolate the cathedral as both a rational and ecstatic protraction of this sanctuary; and this remains, one of the durable architectural essays of the past century. 

Sterne's book, not in an identical way but in a sympathetic one, is the romantic ironist's answer to structures of fiction. The aedicule, miming the structure of gestation, is the kernel of the story's jest but also of its proliferation.


In many ways, when you think of the other authorities on the Gothic cathedral you may have read, or been blessed to study under, Summerson's aedicular theory occupies the slant of an uncle's perceptions; it makes emotional sense, in historic and artistic terms as well as in Freudian theory. It is intuitive, learned, and expert, without resorting to the vernacular of expertise. Do not, however, try this at home. 


Felix qui potuit rerunt cognoscere causas, Virgil said in the Georgics, fortunate is the man who knows the causes of things. Distinctly blessed is the uncled child, who will learn them with delight, and never forget.

Laurence Sterne
The Life and Opinions of
  Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
1759-69
Everyman's Library,
J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1912©


The Philadelphia Story
Donald Ogden Stewart, screenplay
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1940©


John Summerson
Heavenly Mansions
  and other Essays on Architecture
Norton, 1963©


Peter Conrad
Sterne: Tragedy, Comedy, Irony
  The History of English Literature
J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1985©