On Wings of Song/Part One
UNDER CONSTRUCTION!
Summary
As a teenager in Amesville, where flying is outlawed and music is barely allowed, Daniel knows there must be more to life than this. A brief dalliance with forbidden activities—distributing a banned newspaper and visiting Minneapolis, with the boy he has an unacknowledged love for—lands him in prison. The eight-month ordeal drastically disillusions him, but also sparks his obsession with singing.
Chapter 1
Amesville, Iowa
No such town exists, although there is a city of Ames in Iowa—not far from Des Moines, where Disch was born and lived until age 13. Amesville sounds smaller, and not so close to a big city; in chapter 2 we learn that it's 40 miles from Fort Dodge, and several references to Fort Dodge make it sound like that's the next largest town in the area. For more about where Amesville might be, see Chapter 3.
She would sit watching him ... people shouldn't let fairies into their houses
Fairies, as we will learn quickly from context, are the invisible presences of people who are "flying." All other references to fairies in Daniel's childhood are steeped in paranoia about being observed—but his daydreams here are a reminder that being watched over by an unseen dead family member or guardian angel is a standard religious idea meant to be comforting to children. The crucial difference is that Daniel's mother is a living person.
a collect call from New York
Throughout the 20th century there was a large price difference between local and long-distance calling, so calling collect would be a typical way for someone to call home from another state without affecting their phone bill. This is now rare since many phone providers no longer have a separate long-distance rate.
the Iowa Stamp Tax
A stamp tax is a tax on property purchases and other transactions, typically at the state level in the US.
Otto Hassler Park
If this is a historical reference, it would be a misspelling of Otto Haesler (1880-1962), a German architect best known for social housing. There would be no obvious connection to this novel or to Disch's life, so it may be that this is just a random fictional name; Hassler, Haesler, Haessler, etc. would be plausible German names to find in Iowa.
to help him take up his indenture
This is only briefly mentioned in connection with Daniel's father's dentistry career; it's unclear if he is in some kind of formal contract such as an apprenticeship or indentured servitude (which would fit with the general sense that capitalism in Iowa has taken a neo-feudal direction), or if Millie is just metaphorically talking about his level of debt.
fans whirling everywhere you went
The way that fans and other spinning objects can harm "fairies" is described by Barbara Steiner in chapter 4.
Chapter 2
bowdlerized editions of Frankenstein and The War of the Worlds
Bowdlerization refers generally to creating censored versions of books or other art. Fantasy literature has always been a common target of censorship. Frankenstein is an unusual case in that the best-known version of the novel, the 1831 edition, contained changes by the author that some have described as self-censorship to appease Victorian sensibilities (although the differences between the 1818 and 1838 editions are more complex)—but any version of Frankenstein would be problematic for fundamentalist Christians due to its basic premise. It's less clear why The War of the Worlds would offend conservatives, unless it's just that H.G. Wells was a famous atheist.
their own artless Grand Guignol
This could refer literally to the style of horror theater made famous by the Grand-Guignol, or more generally to any kind of horror-inspired bad-taste make-believe that a 14-year-old would enjoy.
a book of speeches by Herbert Hoover
Hoover remains the only US President to be born in Iowa.
destroyed most of Tel Aviv
There are just enough references to non-US places in the novel to establish that some of them have been ruined by war or terrorism, but that this was not a global disaster; Cairo and Tehran, for instance, are still vacation destinations (chapter 10), as is Rome although other parts of Italy have been bombed (chapter 11), and Switzerland seems fine (chapter 5).
Old Black Joe
An 1860 Stephen Foster song. Foster is most commonly thought of in connection with blackface minstrelsy, which is very relevant to this book. "Old Black Joe" is a choice that makes sense here as something a teacher might have picked: while it romanticizes Southern slaveholding culture like other Foster songs, it has more plausible deniability due to not being written in dialect.
undergoders .... they practically ran Iowa
The reason that the far-right evangelicals who are so prominent in Daniel's world are called "undergoders" is never spelled out, but to someone of Disch's generation it would clearly refer to the controversy over the wording of the Pledge of Allegiance. "One nation" was changed to "One nation, under God" in 1954, as part of a Cold War trend of emphasizing American piety in contrast to the Soviets. This was clearly at odds with separation of church and state, and even though no legal challenge was made on that basis until 2000, it was a common focus of arguments about the overlap between religion and political conservatism—and a convenient phrase for the religious right to rally around.
Woven throughout this chapter, there are references to state/federal conflicts, Supreme Court decisions, etc., to establish what kind of dystopia Daniel is living in: not a nationwide theocracy like The Handmaid's Tale, but something more contiguous with US history so far. Most of the repression is happening at the state level, and wasn't established by a coup, but by the same processes as right-wing politics today: a coalition of interests including sincere religious zealots, corrupt politicians, and businessmen who have no real ideology but are comfortable in an authoritarian setting. The undergoders don't make up a majority in Iowa, and haven't really forced everyone to live like they do ("it was impossible to pretend to be an undergoder since it involved giving up almost anything you might enjoy")—but they're over-represented in the agricultural industry where the state's main economic power is.
The novel doesn't say exactly which states are dominated by undergoders, just that it's most of "the Farm Belt", which could refer to any subset of Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, and Nebraska. In chapter 3 we see that at least some of Iowa's neighbor states, like Minnesota, have managed not to go this way.
Three days after Governor Brewster vetoed this law his only daughter was shot at
Besides being another reminder that the government hasn't uniformly fallen in line, this is an example of the other traditional instrument of local right-wing power: anonymous violence by individuals. You could call this stochastic terrorism, or just the kind of thing that the KKK and similar groups have always done; in many ways the undergoder regime in the Farm Belt states operates very much like the deep South in the 1950s and '60s, where authoritarianism existed on both formal and informal levels.
it was as though civilization had ground to a halt
To American readers in 1979, the fuel crisis depicted here would feel very timely: oil production dropped in that year for several reasons, and even though the impact of this on the US was not as dramatic as expected, it brought back bad memories of the much more severe 1973 oil crisis when Americans had experienced rationing for the first time since World War Two.
Much as in 334, the theme of American decline in On Wings of Song, and the idea that any serious lowering of the familiar standard of middle-class comfort would be a harbinger of the collapse of civilization, are rooted in feelings that were very common in the 1970s across the political spectrum. The rise of Ronald Reagan—already clearly in progress when this book was written—was based on the premise that economic problems in America, and social unrest in general, were due to having strayed from old-fashioned values and free-market capitalism.
The real aristocracy of Iowa, the farmers
The idea that the "farmers" are all undergoders living a strict religious life is not quite right, but from the limited perspective of Daniel and his family, knowing only the farmers in and around Amesville, it makes sense that it would seem that way. Later in chapter 5 we'll see a different side of the aristocracy: agribusiness tycoons who live in secular luxury.
copies of The Star-Tribune
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune (renamed Minnesota Star-Tribune in 2024) is a real newspaper, although in 1979 this was a slightly ahead-of-its-time reference because the Star and the Tribune were technically still two separate papers owned by the same company.
Chapter 3
the Twin Cities were Sodom and Gomorrah
While there are many twin cities around the world, in the Midwest this exclusively means Minneapolis and St. Paul. Since the undergoders in this future have not managed to dominate Minnesota like Iowa, these are the nearest examples of urban decadence.
Calling Sodom and Gomorrah "twin cities" is not original to Disch—they are often described that way, but the Bible really says nothing about them having any relationship to each other, just that they were in the same general part of the world (the Dead Sea plain), along with three other cities that may or may not (depending on which texts you read) have met the same fate.
they rode their bikes north as far as U.S. 18 ... Albert Lea to Minneapolis
Route is about 25 miles from the Iowa-Minnesota border. For what it's worth, this may help to narrow down where the fictional Amesville might be. If you headed straight north from Fort Dodge, route 18 would be about 40 miles away—and Amesville is supposed to be 40 miles from Fort Dodge. So, unless the boys took either a very long bike ride or a very short one, they probably started somewhere north-northwest or north-northeast of Fort Dodge, like where the real villages of West Bend and Corwith are. This doesn't really matter except to emphasize that Daniel lives in a very rural area.
urging the enactment of the Twenty-Eighth Amendment
This was mentioned earlier in chapter 2 as "the national Anti-Flight Amendment."
Gold-Diggers of 1984
This is a reference to the movie musicals Gold Diggers of 1933, Gold Diggers of 1935, and Gold Diggers of 1937, which were all vehicles for elaborate Busby Berkeley numbers. They were loosely derived from the 1919 play The Gold Diggers in the sense that all of their plots involved women marrying rich men; despite the negative connotation of "gold-diggers", the women always succeed in doing so and it's a happy ending.
The years in the titles were the years that those movies were made... so is this implying that On Wings of Song actually takes place in the '80s? Even though no year is ever given for this near-future setting, everything else about the setting makes that unlikely; these political and social changes did not happen in just a few years. So this is presumably a case of '80s nostalgia—not unlike the one we've been undergoing in real life for a while now, and, like the current one, of course it includes ridiculous anachronisms (a flight apparatus).
a comic tap dance in black face
This would be no surprise at any point in the first half of the 20th century, but casually mentioning its presence in a near-future movie is a jarring effect (as with the earlier reference to "Old Black Joe"), and a reminder that race is something that hasn't really come up at all in Daniel's homogenous upbringing. It won't be until Part Three that we learn the fairly disturbing details of how ideas about skin color have developed in other parts of America.
north to the icebergs of Baffin Island
The location of Baffin Island makes it a logical ending point if you traveled due north from the American Midwest and kept going.
I DON'T CARE IF THE SUN DON'T SHINE. Or: GIVE US FIVE MINUTES MORE
It's deliberately unclear what these could mean as political protest slogans, but in this book it's probably not a coincidence that "I Don't Care If the Sun Don't Shine" and "Five Minutes More" are the names of mid-20th-century pop songs. The lyrics of the first one don't seem to have any special relevance, but the line "you can sleep late" in the second one may take on a sadder meaning after the events of Chapter 10.
the opposing lawyer raised an objection
Another example of the kind of soft authoritarianism that distinguishes Amesville from other literary dystopias: all of the legal structures that we have today still exist in the future, they're just applied even less fairly than before.
Chapter 4
the compound at Spirit Lake
Spirit Lake or Big Spirit Lake is one of the "Iowa Great Lakes" that form a chain from Minnesota to northwestern Iowa; there's also a small town in that area with the same name, although the town is on the shore of the next lake down, Lake Okoboji.
The latter area was the site of the last violent attack by Sioux on US settlers in Iowa (in reprisal for various abuses by the settlers and the federal government), after which the state and federal governments became even more aggressive in driving out the Native population. These events took on legendary stature in the Midwest,[1] especially since they included the capture and ransom of a white female hostage who then wrote a memoir.[2]
All of this makes it a perversely appropriate location for an authoritarian regime with an ultra-American ideology to establish a prison. The fact that it's right at the edge of Iowa, close to a non-undergoder state, just emphasizes how sure the authorities are that escape is impossible.
this scene was rotated through ninety degrees and the flowing river became a wall
This echoes a line in Camp Concentration, from a description of the mad scientist Dr. Skilliman's various interests:
- He was trying to analyze the peculiar fascination of lakes, reservoirs, and suchlike large, standing bodies of water. He observed that it is only in these that nature presents us with the spectacle of the Euclidean plane stretching on without apparent limit. It represents that final submission to the law of gravity that is always at work on our cell tissues. From this he went on to observe that the great achievement of architecture is simply to take the notion of the Euclidean plane and stand it on its edge. A wall is such an impressive phenomenon because it is a body of water... stood on its side.
the P-W lozenge
The idea of prisoners having a remote-controlled bomb on or in their bodies was fairly popular in late-20th-century science fiction. Often this was in the form of an explosive collar around the neck—which has an obvious narrative advantage in movies, since it's always visible and can have an ominous flashing light on it; examples include The Running Man (1987), Wedlock (1991), and Battlefield Earth (2000). Less cinematically but more ickily, the bomb might be implanted inside someone's neck or skull.
I'm not sure whether On Wings of Song is the earliest example, but I'm fairly sure that this and the movie Fortress (1992) are the only ones where you have to swallow the bomb—and that this was the first fictional depiction of a prison where instead of the bomb being the last-ditch mechanism to prevent escape, it's the only mechanism. In keeping with 1970s/80s conservative economic ideology, the Spirit Lake prison runs on an extreme laissez-faire model with basically no staff.
Basques in Spain, Jews in Russia, the Irish in England ... the decimation of Palestinians
As before, mentions of any society outside of the US are rare and brief, but this passage is an efficient and chilling way to convey that the Iowa style of authoritarianism is just one of many; every industrialized society adapts tools of control for its own purposes. Disch mentions that the US—unlike Spain, Russia, England, and Israel—only applies this technology within prisons and not to large groups of "potentially dissident civilians," but that doesn't make the situation in Iowa any less horrible, just different, in keeping with the overall less-centralized nature of the repression there.
to pretend to be good, devout, and faithful .... Eventually, saying makes it so
There's a very subtle callback to this idea in Disch's The Brave Little Toaster, when we're told that the toaster's favorite song is "I Whistle a Happy Tune" ("You may be as brave/As you make believe you are").
Logomachies
Arguments about words.
his last year's homeroom teacher, Mrs. Norberg
Mrs. Norberg and her opinions will be described in much more detail in Chapter 6.
the breeding of a specially mutated form of termite
The idea that termites could become a major food source in the future has been around for a long time, mainly because people were already eating them.[3] Academic discussion of the subject has increased in the 21st century due to increasing awareness of how agriculture suffers from climate change and contributes to it; unsurprisingly, as with everything related to climate change, this has also become the subject of right-wing conspiracy theories.[4]
It's a matter of opinion whether Disch's portrayal of termite processing on an industrial scale is the grossest version of a food factory in science fiction (that honor might go to the giant underground chicken-heart blob in The Space Merchants), but it's one of the more plausible ones.
Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers
From Philippians 3:2-4, King James Version.
This is an example of Disch doing something he also did twice in 334: having a character land on a supposedly random Bible verse, when it's really the author being mischievous. Here Daniel has picked one of the most confusing Biblical passages that a casual reader could've possibly found—both because of the peculiar translation (the King James version uses the word "concision" in a way that I'm not sure it was ever used anywhere else in English literature), and because the meaning is so incomplete without the context (the apostle Paul is ranting against other Christian factions of his time). Some other translations are a bit clearer, but only a bit.
The specific content of the passage may not be very important, but here's my best attempt to summarize it. After some general insults about "dogs" and "evil workers", Paul specifically complains about Christians who believe that circumcision and other traditional Jewish practices should remain important in their faith. He argues instead that "circumcision" should now be thought of as a spiritual condition, a matter of having the right faith—as the people in his own faction do. But as sort of a hedge and/or brag, he adds that if traditional circumcision is so important, i.e. if you really insist on having "confidence in the flesh", then he has that too since he was physically circumcised—and that maybe it should even count extra for him, since he used to be a very traditional Pharisee.
the windows were all sealed tight
Here we get one more bit of exposition about the rules of flying: "fairies" can travel effortlessly by willpower, but they can't go through solid objects.
The faster I let myself spin the more exciting
And finally, the most important rule for fairies: if you go near any spinning thing, you'll be entranced and stuck there forever. The nature of a "fairy-trap" was left intentionally vague before, but in hindsight, every fan that we've heard about being used for this purpose indicates someone's willingness to cause someone else to die in a coma—especially chilling since, as we'll hear much later in Chapter 19, the most effective fairy-traps are designed by people who have experienced flight.
The idea that a particular physical structure could entice a disembodied spirit also appears in Disch's The Businessman, where Giselle's ghost is mystically intoxicated by the pattern on a potholder.
the one about purity of heart being to will one thing
Van Dyke got this from Kierkegaard.
to live at the end of such a civilization
Here I think On Wings of Song is echoing not just a general 1970s fear of American decline, but the specific angle that Disch explored in 334: the psychological appeal of imagining that you're in a crumbling empire, at least if you're a relatively privileged person.
Cairo and Bombay for the National Council of Churches' Triage Committee
Triage is the process of deciding who to help first in an emergency, and who to immediately give up on.
run into an iceberg and sink, like ... the lost city of Brasilia
This condensed metaphor might refer to Vila Amaury, the lost city within the city of Brasilia. It makes sense for Van Dyke to see Brasilia as an example of "the Civilization of the Business Man": it was a heavily planned city built by technocrats in relatively recent history, and in the process of its creation, Vila Amaury was created as a company shanty-town to house 15,000 migrant workers—who were then displaced because the plan for Brasilia included an artificial lake, created by the Lago Paranoá dam, entirely submerging the site of the town.[5]
you are a punk singer
Disch probably was not thinking of punk rock, which was still fairly new at the time, but he's using the word in the same sense that gave punk rock its name: unskilled, no good, lowlife. Not coincidentally, it's also an old derogatory word for a young man who is used for sex, especially in prison.
I am the captain of the Pinafore
From H.M.S. Pinafore by Gilbert & Sullivan (1878). This is a call-and-response song, and Daniel is singing both parts, a little inaccurately; the actual lines are:
- CAPTAIN: I am the Captain of the Pinafore;
- CREW: And a right good captain, too!
- CAPTAIN: You're very, very good,
- And be it understood,
- I command a right good crew.
(Recording of a performance by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, 1959)
Footnotes
- ↑ Teakle, Thomas. The Spirit Lake Massacre. Cedar Rapids: Torch Press, 1918.
- ↑ Prout, Katie. "A History of Violence: Walking the Blood-Soaked Shores of Spirit Lake". Literary Hub. March 1, 2017 (retrieved January 2, 2025).
- ↑ Reis de Figueirêdo, Vasconcellos, Policarpo, & Nóbrega Alves. "Edible and medicinal termites: a global overview". Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, April 30, 2015.
- ↑ Jingnan, Huo. "From 4chan to international politics, a bug-eating conspiracy theory goes mainstream". All Things Considered, March 31, 2023 (retrieved January 2, 2025).
- ↑ Basques, Victoria. "Vila Amaury, uma cidade submersa". Esquina On-line, Nov. 14, 2018 (retrieved January 5, 2025).