NPPF: Summary Line 347

[Jasper Fidget]

> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
> Behalf Of Scott Badger

> Kinbote ends his account of Hetzner with a description of his favorite,
> umm,
> watering hole. "Here Papa pisses." remarks H's son. An act that carries
> with
> it the obvious territorial connotations, consistent with the several
> canine
> references in this passage, but also, I think, binds him to the immediate
> landscape as texture - a temporal and physical present repeatedly renewed,
> turned-over, and lacking the abstract text of historians, poets and
> prophets. But in the end, the course of history washes Hetzner away;


Also, "Here Papa pisses" is a reference to Browning's dramatic poem "Pippa
Passes," (1843) which the poet conceived while walking through Dulwich wood.

http://www.sm.rim.or.jp/~osawa/AGG/poetry/pippa-passes.html

William Sharp, in his _Life of Robert Browning_, writes, "In that same wood
beyond Dulwich to which allusion has already been made, the germinal motive
of 'Pippa Passes' flashed upon the poet.  No wonder this resort was for long
one of his sacred places, and that he lamented its disappearance as
fervently as Ruskin bewailed the encroachment of the ocean of bricks and
mortar upon the wooded privacies of Denmark Hill."

http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/hst/biography/LifeofBrowning/ch
ap5.html

Boyd writes, "Just as obscure Pippa passes by characters whose lives she
affects without her ever meaning to -- including a sculptor whose art she
redirects -- so the outwardly unprepossessing Hentzner proves an inspiration
to John Shade when the self-important Kinbote, the incognito king, cannot
stir his fancy" (_Magic of Artistic Discovery_, p. 88).

Pippa Passes is also eponymous for a town in Kentucky, home of Alice Lloyd
College, whose slogan is "Providing Leadership for Appalachia."

http://www.alc.edu/

Jasper Fidget