NPPF - Foreword - Notes (1)

[gumbo at fuse.net]

It seems a general consensus that the town depicted in Pale Fire
is actually Ithaca, New York, home to Cornell University where VN taught
(and Pynchon attended).


Excellent job on the notes and summary, Jasper.

It's interesting (and not real surprising) that Nabokov took some pains to confuse the geography of New Wye. Several of his sparing uses of real place names seem to seek to place the town in Virginia rather than upstate New York. We're told early that it's at the latitude of Palermo (which is almost directly on the 38th parallel, as is Charlottesville). It's 400 train miles from New York City, and an alternative to taking the direct or express train from New York is to go to Washington and catch the local, not a very good way to get to Ithaca. It's reasonably close to Roanoke (where Jack Grey apparently escaped from custody and hitchhiked to New Wye).

Charlottesville, of course, is the home of the University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson, who was something of a wordsmith himself.

I'm not arguing that the college and town aren't modeled on Cornell and Ithaca, but why the elaborate dodge to direct our attention elsewhere?

Don Corathers