ABSTRACT
Robert Lee Hodge’s ancestor is Laurence Sterne’s Uncle Toby, who begins his career of reenactment by reproducing the siege-works at the battle of Namur, where he was badly injured during the War of the Grand Alliance. Hodge’s critics accuse him of elitism, but it seems more accurate to call him and Toby solipsists, since the rapture they seek is personal and to a great degree private, no matter how they justify it. As the distance grows between Toby’s own experience of war and each successive siege represented on his bowling green, so does his attention to the realism of each scene. The measure of successful realism in the reenactment of history, then, is not mere situational exactitude, sentience, or thought, but what happens—that is to say, what actually occurs—when history and fiction become a volatile and unpredictable emulsion.
