National Book Award-winning writer and literary fussbudget Jonathan Franzen, who looked a $1.5 million gift horse in the mouth by dissing Oprah Winfrey in 2001 when she picked his novel The Corrections for her book club, has now helpfully outlined the geographic and emotional boundaries of the Midwest.
In an interview printed in the summer issue of Duke University's literary journal, Boundary 2, Franzen, who grew up in St. Louis suburb Webster Groves, explains:
If you ask what the Midwest means to me, it's that myth of aninnocence prolonged and then abruptly lost. ... And somehow this dynamic seems more
like a Midwestern thing than a Lower East Side thing or a South Boston thing.
I'm not enough of a social historian to have a good theory of why exactly this
is true. I do know that, for a long time, you really were isolated in Gopher
Prairie, Minnesota, or Webster Groves, Missouri, or Oak Park, Illinois -- it really
was a long way from the Lower East Side. This is all rapidly changing with our
new technologies, and our homogenized exurbs and suburbs, but some of the social
and mental habits that grew out of isolation may persist in succeeding
generations, leaving vestiges of a "Midwestern" character ...
[On whatHold up a minute. All of Kansas is the Midwest, but in Missouri the Midwest exists north of Interstate 70 but not south of it? That's pretty confusing. Lower East Side, here I come.counts as the Midwest:] Indiana is a special case. Evansville is the South. Fort
Wayne is still Rust Belt, Valparaiso is definitely Midwest. That's actually an
interesting way to approach it--to define where my boundaries of the Midwest run.
I think it begins around Columbus, Ohio -- Thurberville -- and stretches west.
Anything below I-70 is basically southern. And that's true right across
Missouri. My Midwest is bounded on the south by I-70. It stretches all the way
to about an hour east of Denver and includes pretty much all of the Great Plains
states north of I-70. ... You can take all of Kansas, some of Oklahoma, too. But
not, for example, downstate Illinois. You start hearing the South in people's
voices. They don't sound like Tom Brokaw anymore.
of bullshit."
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Meanwhile Southern Illinois has strong political and business ties to the rest of Illinois and St. Louis. Williamson County has its own little democratic machine with strong backing from such unions as the railroad engineers and construction trades which continues to receive a great deal of patronage from Springfield. The St. Louis mafia used to run joints as far south as Cairo. At the beginning of the 20th century, gangs such as the Shelton Brothers Gang and Birger Gang operated in Southern Illinois, sold liquor in St. Louis, and murdered and kicked out the KKK from Williamson County, Illinois. Striking union workers murdered scabs and many of the towns of Southern Illinois were settled by large numbers of Southern and Eastern European immigrants.
This is a bit late for a reply, but as a former Southern Indiana resident, this sort of prejudice towards southern Hoosiers really irks me. Franzen obviously knows nothing about what he labels "the South" in Indiana and Illinois. I seriously question whether he has spent significant time there or researched its history. If he has done so, then he is just whitewashing its actual culture in favor of some BS narrative he wants to paint. For example, Evansville, Indiana is a predominantly German Catholic town with a strong working class union presence which more closely resembles Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and St. Louis in culture more than the actual South. Sure, there may be more Southern and Appalachian accents in Southern Indiana and Illinois than further north, but that is an indication of its presence on the Mason Dixon Line rather than utter exclusion from the Mid-West. Whenever denizens of Southern Indiana and Illinois travel through the actual South, they are consistently told they are Yankees, not Southerners.
" that myth of an innocence prolonged and then abruptly lost"
Midwest my ass, sounds like any Brooklyn guy talking about the tragedy of the Dodgers!
Franzen's geography makes emotional sense.
Missouri has always had the darker southern tendencies. Missouri sneaks out after dark to eat greasy pan-fried chicken, to stock up on night-crawlers and run around nigger-knocking (at least it did before they became so well armed; now it just lets the KKK adopt parts of its highways...).
Once upon a western ago Jesse James epitomized the West; Missouri slavers made a mess of Kansas homesteads and even today the KC City Council behaves as though they were landed gentry. Missouri picks up and treasures the quaintest vices�
Of course, none of this stands against Seal's eloquent �bullshit�.
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