On Wings of Song/Part Three

UNDER CONSTRUCTION!

Summary

On his own in New York City for years, with Boa still in a coma, Daniel lives as a hustler—under a false name, to avoid being tracked down by Grandison. Social and economic turmoil make it hard to survive in the city without wealthy friends; Daniel is helped by Boa's aunt, who keeps his secret and finds him a home with the eccentric Mrs. Schiff, but he runs out of options and signs himself over to a humiliating life with a sugar daddy, the great singer Ernesto Rey. With Rey's help he finally becomes a singer—still unable to fly. When Boa unexpectedly returns to her body (briefly, before leaving again for good), Grandison finds them, bringing media attention that accelerates Daniel's career. Daniel debuts his greatest performance, during which he will either fly or pretend to fly; we'll never know which, as death comes for him in the form of a zealot from his past.

Chapter 11

I'm a temp myself

In 334, Disch used "temps" somewhat vaguely to describe people who had nowhere to live, having apparently fallen through the cracks in the city's welfare system, which otherwise generally provides at least basic necessities. Here, it seems to mean something more like being an immigrant who's still waiting for a green card, able to work but not much else. The harsher future New York in On Wings of Song either never had the socialist features of 334, or abandoned them after the series of economic and social injuries that are mentioned later in the chapter, so being a legal resident doesn't really get you much anyway except being allowed to rent an apartment.

the Sheldonian, on Broadway at west 78th

This fictional welfare hotel is, I suspect, ironically named after the Sheldonian Theatre in England, a famous centuries-old university building used for music and theater performances.

Teatro Metastasio

The reference is not to metastatic cancer, but to 18th-century librettist Pietro Metastasio.

William Street checkpoint

William Street runs roughly north-south through the financial district, and crosses Wall Street one block away from the New York Stock Exchange. We're told that "the whole Wall Street area" is a high-security gated community; probably this means Daniel is heading south on William, and everything south of Wall Street would normally be off limits to him.

The origin of Wall Street's name is just what it sounds like: it was the northern wall of a Dutch colony that occupied the south end of the island. The future elite have basically recreated that situation.

phoneys

Finally Disch introduces the last and ugliest of the novel's relatively few futuristic ideas: white urbanites have started making themselves black—not exactly to fool anyone, but out of some mixture of ironic fashion, boredom, and paranoia about the fact that whites have become a minority group in the city.

The idea of doing this via a medical technique was probably inspired by John Howard Griffin's notorious work of undercover journalism Black Like Me (1961) (and a similar project by Ray Sprigle in 1948). But whereas Griffin's purpose was to highlight the oppression of African-Americans in the South, Disch's "phonies" have an opposite view, since they believe—or at least act like they believe—that it's now easier to get ahead with dark skin.

Whether that's actually true in the novel is less clear. Disch's narration mentions that in some cities Black people have "begun to reap some of the political and social advantages of their majority status"—which has happened to some degree in the real world in some US cities that are now majority-Black. Of course, in the real world, that only meant that they got somewhere closer to parity, and it certainly didn't cause white residents to cling less to whiteness; racists simply moved to the suburbs even faster. But at the same time, the novel tells us (in the discussion of castrato singers) that the poorest people, who would sacrifice the most for a better life, are still generally not white. The status anxiety that drives the "phoneys" is the kind that affects people who were born into middle-class privilege—even if, like some of Daniel's peers, they've fallen on hard times since then—rather than people who grew up in an underclass.

(Note: in 1979, "African-American" was not yet common usage, and "black" or "Black" was standard—with no clear consensus as to whether it should be capitalized or not. Disch in this book frequently uses "black"/"blacks" as a noun rather than "black people"; that's still jarring, certainly wouldn't be considered respectful today, and wasn't great in 1979 either, but was very typical for white writers.)

We're doing Demofoönte

That title could refer to any of more than 70 different operas that are all based on the same libretto by Metastasio. We're told a little later that what they're doing is "a pastiche of four composers' settings" of the libretto, but (unlike pretty much all of the other opera references in the book) Disch doesn't bother to name any of the composers, which suggests that he just doesn't like any of those operas.

Bladebridge ... had sung neither wisely nor too well

In Othello, Act V, Scene 2, Othello—about to kill himself, after having been tricked into murdering his wife—describes his tragic flaw as having "loved not wisely but too well."