en.wikiquote.org/.../Ada_or_Ardor:_A_Family_...
" 'All our old loves are corpses or wives.' All our
sorrows are virgins or whores."
(See Algernon Charles Swinburne: "Time
turns the old days to derision, / Our loves into corpses or wives; / And
marriage and death and division / Make barren our
lives.")
Another entry on Swinburne brought up by
google is by Brian Boyd and it connects "Algy" to James
Joyce. In "Colors and shades: the
Temnosiniy and Proust allusions," (Nov.16, 2002) B.B posted to the
VN-L:
"Van says "the sea, his
dark-blue great-grandmother" in allusion to the opening chapter of
another famous novel, Ulysses (pub. 1922), by James Joyce (1882-1941). In
the opening chapter Buck Mulligan, looking seaward, and like Van and Ada also
showing off in the first conversation in the novel, exclaims: "Isn't the
sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The
scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton." ([Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1986], 4; 1.77-78) "Algy" here is Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909): "I
will go back to the great sweet mother, / Mother and lover of men, the sea"
("The Triumph of Time," pub. 1866, ll. 257-58). "Epi oinopa ponton" means
"over the wine-dark sea," a Homeric formula recurring throughout the
Odyssey.
Brian Boyd explains how this reference relates to the
Veen Family Tree ["Prince Vseslav Zemski and Princess Sofia
Temnosiniy...First, Russian Zemski ("earthly") derives from the root zem,
"earth, land" (as in zemlya, "earth, land,"; zemskiy, zemnoy "earthly")
and Temnosiniy, "dark blue," is the "traditional epithet for the sky"
(Johnson 1985:129). In this sense the
Veen family tree evokes old cosmogonies, as if the Veens represented a
whole world-as in some sense they do."] B.Boyd explains that these names
evoke "the myth of Terra and Coelus, Earth and Sky, most pertinently
summarized in the following excerpt from the novel Pierre, or the
Ambiguities (1852), by Herman Melville (1819-91), which Nabokov alludes to in
Lolita I.9, and which plays with the shadow of brother-sister incest... In a
dream-vision Pierre sees an outcrop on his old family lands as representing
represent "Enceladus the Titan, the most potent of all the giants, writhing
from out the imprisoning earth [ ]then ruminates on the fable: "Old
Titan's self was the son of incestuous Coelus and Terra, the son of
incestuous Heaven and Earth. And Titan married his mother Terra, another and
accumulatively incestuous match. And thereof Enceladus was one issue. So
Enceladus was both the son and grandson of an incest..." ( I recommend a
direct return to the VN-L archives for precise
information).
Nice to recover all these links bt. Lolita
and Ada, gliding over Melville, Swinburne and James Joyce's
Ulysses, one day after Bloomsday...