Where is New Wye? Claude Leaps In!
An Instantiation of the Use of LLMs in Research and Scholarship
In yesterday’s post, I recycled my Twitter thread from 2021, which investigated the location of the fictional college town of New Wye, Appalachia. New Wye was the setting for Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Based on the appearance of cicadas in the novel at different points in time, I reasoned that one could use geographical and historical data on the emergence of cicada broods to home in on the location of New Wye. My conclusion in 2021 was “somewhere near the border of TN, NC, and VA. If you give more credence to cicada habitats, it’s most likely in NC, maybe TN. The distance from NYC makes VA more likely.”
Today, my goal is to investigate the extent to which I can improve on my original analysis using Claude Sonnet 4.6 and the extent to which this experience and its results support my vision in my essay, “The Work of Humans,” which argued that:
LLMs should be thought of as a knowledge diffusion technology
LLMs make knowledge diffusion cheap and easy
Original insight (a key component of knowledge discovery) remains the comparative advantage of humans
Knowledge discovery and knowledge diffusion are economic complements. As the cost of knowledge diffusion drops, the value of knowledge discovery rises
As hubs of scholarship and research, universities should lean into their knowledge discovery mission
However, universities rely on student tuition, and, at most universities, undergraduate tuition subsidizes the research mission
To make ends meet, universities need to adapt their business models accordingly and better incorporate undergraduates into the research mission
In the essay, I offered a couple of examples – using LLMs to analyze Yellow Pages as historical texts and using machine learning to analyze the nightly images of the Southern Sky produced by the Vera Rubin Observatory
Now, I am taking it a step further by enlisting Claude’s assistance in this literary investigation. Was Claude able to help me improve upon my work? Does this experience offer any validation of my arguments in “The Work of Humans”? My answer on both counts is “yes”, but I will let the reader be the judge.
Initial Inquiry
My first step was to ask Claude the original question.
Me: “Based on the text of the novel and other information, what is your best assessment of the location of New Wye?”
Claude:
“This is a genuinely interesting puzzle Nabokov plants in the novel. Here’s my assessment:
The textual evidence points most directly to the central or southern Appalachian region. Nabokov explicitly situates New Wye in “Appalachia,” and the landscape descriptions — the flora, the deciduous woodland, the cold but not severe winters, the hilly terrain — are consistent with somewhere in the West Virginia / western Virginia / southwestern Pennsylvania range. The presence of a nearby lake or water feature also figures in the setting.
The biographical pull runs in a somewhat different direction. Nabokov spent roughly a decade at Cornell in Ithaca, NY, and Wordsmith College bears obvious resemblance to a small, somewhat isolated northeastern liberal arts institution. Ithaca and the Finger Lakes region match a lot of the atmospheric texture. Some readers weight this heavily and locate New Wye effectively in upstate New York — which is technically Appalachian plateau country, though not what most people mean by “Appalachia.”
My best assessment is that Nabokov deliberately keeps the location unstable — specific enough to feel real, vague enough to resist pinning down. If forced to a map, I’d say the novel’s internal geography points toward West Virginia or western Virginia, while the experiential/atmospheric substrate draws on Ithaca. The gap between those two is part of the novel’s design: Kinbote’s unreliability as narrator extends even to the physical world he’s supposedly describing accurately.
It’s also worth noting that “New Wye” itself — the Wye being a river on the Welsh-English border — fits the Appalachian pattern of transplanted British place names, which is more characteristic of the mid-Atlantic and upper South than of New York.”
My Assessment of Claude’s Take: I think this is a very good general assessment and consistent with much of the literary criticism about Pale Fire. However, it does not look at what specific plot points tell us about the location, and it does not dive particularly deep into the novel. I don’t think it is an advance on my prior Twitter thread.
Claude’s initial response is consistent with the idea that LLMs are excellent engines of cultural and knowledge diffusion. In a few paragraphs, it provides an excellent summary of the conventional wisdom (to the extent that there can be any such thing as conventional wisdom when it come to Vladimir Nabokov or Pale Fire).
Digging Deeper
Rather than beating around the bush and seeing what else Claude could come up with, I next introduced cicadas as a clue.
Me: Based on the appearance of cicadas in the novel at different points in time, can you use geographical and historical data on the emergence of particular cicada broods to home in on the location of New Wye?
Claude: “This is a genuinely productive line of inquiry, and the search has turned up some material I find quite compelling. Let me work through it carefully.”
Claude finds the two references to cicadas in the novel, notes that one scholar points out the thematic resonance of the 17-year cicada brood, and goes on to cover the geography and the timing of the broods, and then notes:
“The honest caveat:
The singing cicada on July 5 could simply be an annual cicada (genus Neotibicen or similar), which are ubiquitous across the eastern US in summer and don’t carry geographic specificity at all. July is consistent with both. And “the emerald case” in the poem is probably poetic license — both annual and periodical cicada exuviae are brownish, not emerald-colored.
Net assessment:
The cicada evidence, if we credit the 17-year brood interpretation, adds a modest but real increment of support for West Virginia / western Virginia over the Ithaca/upstate New York hypothesis. It doesn’t decide the question, but it converges with the other geographic evidence rather than cutting against it. The fact that a Nabokov scholar noticed the 17-year structural echo without fully pursuing the entomological implication suggests this particular plum may still be hanging on the tree.”
My Assessment of Claude’s Take: We are starting to make some progress. Claude’s assessment adds little to my earlier analysis, but it is broadly consistent, and Claude does add a crucial caveat that I had not considered–that the cicada that was singing in 1959 might have been an annual cicada.
Again, I provide insights and clues, and Claude fills in the details, assembles information from diverse sources (Nabokov scholars, entomologists, etc.), and offers a critical caveat.
Additional Clues
One-by-one, I introduce some of the additional clues from the novel – that Kinbote had mentioned a trip to Washington, DC in his forward, that John Shade’s killer was said to have caught a ride to Roanoke to get to New Wye, and the 400-mile distance cited from New York City to the nearby town of Exton.
Claude takes in this information and begins to tentatively conclude that the weight of evidence points to the mid-Atlantic section of Appalachia – perhaps in western Virginia or West Virginia.
In the process of searching for these hints in the novel, Claude finds something that I had overlooked. In the foreward, Kinbote describes a brutally cold winter and slipping in the snow and notes drily this was happening “at the latitude of Palermo” (38.1°N). This is the most important discovery of our conversation. This might suggest Charlottesville, VA (38.0°N) or Charleston, WV (38.4°N) though the ride to Roanoke would make Lexington, VA or Blacksburg, VA more likely.
I mention that I had considered Radford, VA, which leads Claude to consider the following:
The “New Wye” etymology:
“Wye” is a river name — the River Wye on the Welsh-English border, one of the most celebrated rivers in British literature and landscape poetry (Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” is set on the Wye). “New Wye” would naturally be an Americanized river-name in the transplanted-British-toponym tradition common in Appalachia. And the New River runs directly through Radford. “New Wye” as a fictional calque of “New River” is genuinely elegant — both names follow the same pattern of an adjective applied to a watercourse, and both names are slightly paradoxical (the New River is geologically ancient; the River Wye is hardly new). That’s exactly the kind of layered wordplay Nabokov would relish.
At this point, Claude has added three important pieces to the puzzle:
1. The cicadas might be annual cicadas. (I still stand by my assessment that Pale Fire is preoccupied with life, death, & the hereafter, as well as with patterns, cycles & metamorphoses in nature. Cicadas emerge from the ground & seemingly spring to life in 13 or 17-year cycles. Cicada broods remain too resonant a metaphor for me to pass up as evidence. Still, I should acknowledge the possibility).
2. Kinbote notes that New Wye is at the latitude of Palermo.
3. New Wye could easily be a stand in for New River, which literally flows through Radford, VA
At this point, I shared my original analysis with Claude and asked it to create a chart of the literary clues and candidate cities and to recreate my map of the Appalachian Counties and the Great Southern Brood adding the candidate cities, the 38th parallel, and the New Wye River.
Created using Claude Sonnet 4.6
My estimation is that the towns of Radford (home to Radford College, the sister school of Virginia Tech in 1959) and the nearby Blacksburg (home to Virginia Tech) are the most likely locations for New Wye. The Great Southern Brood could have easily extended there in 1959; they are near the New River; they are proximate to Roanoke; they are close to the right distance from New York City, and they are within a degree of the lattitude of Palermo.
I believe that using Claude as a research tool helped me to advance the analysis forward substantially. I also believe that it is a good instantiation of the AI-enabled research (especially for the humanities) that I advocate in the “Work of Humans.”