Describing his walks with John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962), Charles Kinbote (Shade's mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) quotes the words of Paul Hentzner’s little son, “here Papa pisses” (a play on Pippa Passes, the title of a 1841 verse drama by Robert Browning, 1812-1889):
This barn, or rather shed, where "certain phenomena" occurred in October 1956 (a few months prior to Hazel Shade's death) had belonged to one Paul Hentzner, an eccentric farmer of German extraction, with old-fashioned hobbies such as taxidermy and herborizing. Through an odd trick of atavism, he was (according to Shade who liked to talk about him - the only time, incidentally, when my sweet old friend became a tiny bit of a bore!) a throwback to the "curious Germans" who three centuries ago had been the fathers of the first great naturalists. Although by academic standards an uneducated man, with no real knowledge of far things in space or time, he had about him a colorful and earthy something that pleased John Shade much better than the suburban refinements of the English Department. He who displayed such fastidious care in his choice of fellow ramblers liked to trudge with the gaunt solemn German, every other evening, up the wood path to Dulwich, and all around his acquaintance's fields. Delighting as he did in the right word, he esteemed Hentzner for knowing "the names of things" - though some of those names were no doubt local monstrosities, or Germanisms, or pure inventions on the old rascal's part.
Now he was walking with another companion. Limpidly do I remember one perfect evening when my friend sparkled with quips, and marrowskies, and anecdotes, which I gallantly countered with tales of Zembla and hairbreadth escapes! As we were skirting Dulwich Forest, he interrupted me to indicate a natural grotto in the mossy rocks by the side of the path under the flowering dogwoods. This was the spot where the good farmer invariably stopped, and once, when they happened to be accompanied by his little boy, the latter, as he trotted beside them, pointed and remarked informatively: "Here Papa pisses." Another, less pointless, story awaited me at the top of the hill, where a square plot invaded with willow herb, milkweed and ironweed, and teeming with butterflies, contrasted sharply with the goldenrod all around it. After Hentzner's wife had left him (around 1950) taking with her their child, he sold his farmhouse (now replaced by a drive-in cinema) and went to live in town; but on summer nights he used to take a sleeping bag to the barn that stood at the far end of the land he still owned, and there one night he passed away. (note to Line 347)
"Here Papa pisses" brings to mind Myn Heer van der Pissen, the Professor in Heinrich Heine's unfinished satirical novel Aus den Memoiren des Herren von Schnabelewopski (1831). In his poem Zur Teleologie (1855) Heinrich Heine (a German poet and prose writer of Jewish descent, 1797-1856) mentions Mankepiß (Manneken Pis, a fountain sculpture in Brussels, Belgium), into whom little god Amor turns by the light of Psyche's lantern:
Psyche schaudert, denn der kleine
Gott Amur der Finsternis,
Er verwandelt sich beim Scheine
Ihrer Lamp - in Mankepiß. (ll. 101-104)
In his poem Heine complains that God gave us two legs, two arms, two hands, two eyes and two ears, but only one nose, one mouth and one organ for procreating and urinating:
Freund, ich hab dir zugehört,
Und du hast mir gut erklärt,
Wie zum weisesten Behuf
Gott den Menschen zwiefach schuf
Augen, Ohren, Arm' und Bein',
Während er ihm gab nur ein
Exemplar von Nas und Mund -
Doch nun sage mir den Grund:
Gott, der Schöpfer der Natur,
Warum schuf er einfach nur
Das skabröse Requisit,
Das der Mann gebraucht, damit
Er fortpflanze seine Rasse
Und zugleich sein Wasser lasse?
In the last line of his poem Miserere (1855) Heinrich Heine calls himself "Der beste der Humoristen (the best of the humorists):"
Ich heule dir dann die Ohren voll,
Wie andre gute Christen –
O Miserere! Verloren geht
Der beste der Humoristen! (ll. 33-36)
According to Kinbote, in a conversation with him Shade mentioned Russian humorists:
Speaking of the Head of the bloated Russian Department, Prof. Pnin, a regular martinet in regard to his underlings (happily, Prof. Botkin, who taught in another department, was not subordinated to that grotesque "perfectionist"): "How odd that Russian intellectuals should lack all sense of humor when they have such marvelous humorists as Gogol, Dostoevski, Chekhov, Zoshchenko, and those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov." (note to Line 172)
Fyodor Dostoevski (1821-1881) is the author of Dvoynik ("The Double," 1846). Der Doppelgänger (1824) is a poem by Heinrich Heine set to music by Franz Schubert (an Austrian composer, 1797-1828). Shade’s poem is almost finished when the author is killed by Gradus. Kinbote believes that, to be completed, Shade’s poem needs but one line (Line 1000, identical to Line 1: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”). But it seems that, like some sonnets, Shade's poem also needs a coda (Line 1001: “By its own double in the windowpane”). Shade's murderer, Gradus is Kinbote's double. The Double is an essay by J. L. Borges (an Argentinean writer, 1899-1986) included in The Book of Imaginary Beings (1957):
Suggested or stimulated by reflections in mirrors and in water and by twins, the idea of the Double is common to many countries. It is likely that sentences such as A friend is another self by Pythagoras or the Platonic Know thyself were inspired by it. In Germany this Double is called Doppelgänger, which means ’double walker’. In Scotland there is the fetch, which comes to fetch a man to bring him to his death; there is also the Scottish word wraith for an apparition thought to be seen by a person in his exact image just before death. To meet oneself is, therefore, ominous. The tragic ballad ‘Ticonderoga’ by Robert Louis Stevenson tells of a legend on this theme. There is also the strange picture by Rossetti (‘How They Met Themselves’) in which two lovers come upon themselves in the dusky gloom of a wood. We may also cite examples from Hawthorne (‘Howe’s Masquerade’), Dostoyevsky, Alfred de Musset, James (‘The Jolly Corner’), Kleist, Chesterton (‘The Mirror of Madmen’), and Hearn (Some Chinese Ghosts).
The ancient Egyptians believed that the Double, the ka, was a man’s exact counterpart, having his same walk and his same dress. Not only men, but gods and beasts, stones and trees, chairs and knives had their ka, which was invisible except to certain priests who could see the Doubles of the gods and were granted by them a knowledge of things past and things to come.
To the Jews the appearance of one’s Double was not an omen of imminent death. On the contrary, it was proof of having attained prophetic powers. This is how it is explained by Gershom Scholem. A legend recorded in the Talmud tells the story of a man who, in search of God, met himself.
In the story ‘William Wilson’ by Poe, the Double is the hero’s conscience. He kills it and dies. In a similar way, Dorian Gray in Wilde’s novel stabs his portrait and meets his death. In Yeats’s poems the Double is our other side, our opposite, the one who complements us, the one we are not nor will ever become.
Plutarch writes that the Greeks gave the name other self to a king’s ambassador.