Hardly TRP at all, yet............

[alice wellintown]

> a topos in both senses, geographical as well as rhetorical. --- [I]n
> order to understand why Ohio, of all places, belongs to the postmodernist
> repertoire, we need to take into account the semiotics of American space
> in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."
> Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (1987), p. 49.

McHale is clever. Notice how he connects his reading of the Ohio Zone,
back, to the development of American Literature,  Cooper & Co. and to
Chase's definition of Romance, then to the  Closing of the American
Frontier.

Notice that he fails to mention Turner, but he gets us to Baum and Oz
(Kansas/Ohio) circa 1900.

Notice that he fails to mention Henry Adams, and the turn of the
century zone of all zones, the mechanical world exhibitions that Adams
haunts, and that become the zone, for Pynchon, from V. to AGTD.

McHale skips the mechanical cities (The East, NYC and Long Island)
that Nick Caraway will move to from the west and away from....back to
the West. Recall that all of the GG characters are
Westerners...Caraway a tool man, not a machine man  or bonds
(abstrations) man...

His point is, it seems, to get us out of the excluded middle, that is,
figuratively, Ohio. So, Ohio, not Ohio, but, a Swing State of Mind.