Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0022962, Sun, 17 Jun 2012 23:19:35 -0300

Subject
Swinburne quotes and James Joyce's in Lolita and Ada
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I was curious about Swinburne in "Lolita" and "Ada" and I missed this link,found in the wiki: Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle - Wikiquote
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...



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