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.

New York had reduced its (legal) population to two and a half million

Combined with the other 2.5 million who are "temps", this would make the city smaller than it had been since about 1910.

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.

the bel canto revival

Whether this future revival would count as the first one, or one of several, depends on what exactly is being revived.

To an opera lover in Disch's time, "the bel canto revival" would mean the surge of attention after World War Two—as seen for instance in the career of Maria Callas—toward certain 18th and early 19th century composers, especially Rossini, Bellini, and Donazetti. Very generally (my knowledge of opera is minimal) the term has been used to describe both a particular vocal style, characterized by smooth and clear execution of long melodic passages, and the way that composers tended to write such passages during the time when that style was especially popular.

Proponents sometimes referred to the heyday of the bel canto tradition as a "golden age"—and the idea that this type of agile delivery of a solo aria was inherently more beautiful, or a truer expression of emotion, or showed a purer devotion to musical skill due to its technical qualities, has some obvious relevance to a story where "flying" depends on achieving a kind of ideal aesthetic harmony within the brain. The early 20th century composer and teacher Giulio Silva described the evolution of bel canto as a progress toward "true and lofty art", where expressiveness and technique were in proper balance: "The aim of the art of singing is to make of the human voice a potent agent of musical emotion, for when a human being is musically moved, he feels and communicates his emotion more strongly than in his usual psychological state."

Silva mentioned several factors in that evolution, including overall changes in how European music treated melody and rhythm, developments in musical education, the Italian language, and competitive innovation during the Renaissance. One that he did not mention, which other historians considered even more important, was the prominence in 18th century Italian opera of castrati. The extreme value placed on male singers who had had orchioectomies as children was driven by a combination of all the things that drive people in On Wings of Song: religious orthodoxy (female singers being excluded from sacred music), obsessive pursuit of an aesthetic ideal (castrati had a specific vocal timbre different from any other adults, and possibly higher lung capacity), and economic inequality (more and more parents subjected their children to this, and some children even allegedly volunteered, hoping for a career in music). Also, anyone whose life had been so irrevocably changed for the sake of being the best possible singer, and who would be treated as a social pariah in any other context, had a very high incentive to devote themselves to their craft to the exclusion of all else—so ideas about castrati having inherently superior voices, higher lung capacity, etc., may have been partly self-fulfilling ones. Castrati became successful not only as performers, but as teachers of vocal technique, who were so central to the bel canto tradition that when they started to die off during the 19th century, some felt that students who had not learned from castrati could not really be part of that tradition.

So, in the context of this novel, it's important that "the bel canto revival" means not only a certain kind of music becoming popular again, but also the return of a kind of sacrifice that would have been considered barbaric in our time—one that blurs the line between self-sacrifice and authoritarian control, as anything involving money can do.

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."