334/Angouleme

"Angouleme" is the fifth section of 334. It first appeared separately in New Worlds, 1971.

This section is unique in that it inspired an entire book-length critical essay, The American Shore, by Disch's fellow New Wave SF writer Samuel R. Delany, which analyzed the novella in literally sentence-by-sentence (sometimes word-by-word) detail. Delany considered "Angouleme" the foremost example of the science fiction genre's flexibility, in that it is clearly speculative yet has nothing to do with scientific premises. Long out of print, The American Shore is now available in a new edition. Whenever "Delany" is cited below, the reference is to this book.

Summary

Seven prepubescent children at an exclusive school decide to experiment with gratuitous crime: they plan to murder a stranger they've been observing in Battery Park. The children flirt with the idea all summer but eventually all drop out, except for the ringleader, Bill—a.k.a. Little Mister Kissy Lips—who is determined to follow through.

Related characters

Two of the children are Tancred, the son of the social worker Alexa Miller from "Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire", and Amparo, the daughter of Lottie Hanson from the 334 novella.

Notes

the Alexander Lowen school

The arts-oriented school that Alexa finally settled on at the end of "Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire" as a more spiritually nourishing environment than Stuyvesant.

a teevee executive. In, as he would quip, both senses

Bill's father works in television; the joke is unclear, but he may mean that "TV" can also stand for "transvestite."

a Dostoevsky, a Gide, a Mailer

As Delany points out, all three of these authors wrote novels involving a gratuitous murder: Crime and Punishment, Lafcadio's Adventures, and An American Dream.

Pauline Campbell, R.N.

This was an actual murder case which was basically as Disch describes it.

the bridge that had, so famously, collapsed

The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge connects Brooklyn and Staten Island. It was completed in 1969, and has not collapsed.

the New Sentimentality

Possibly an ironic reference to Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), an artistic movement in Weimar Germany.

Just Plain Bill

The title of a 1930s radio soap opera—advertised as "the real-life story of people just like people we all know."

Miss Kraus

An actual woman by this name was a prominent sign-carrying lunatic in New York in Disch's time and had been for many years. A 1960 report described her thus:

On Forty-Fourth Street, Mrs. Sylvia Kraus ... carried a placard reading: "Americans Awake—Germ Warfare Has Begun." "I know that people are putting things in my food," she told crowds in the street. "They've been trying to eliminate me since 1956, but I know how to combat it."

Her sign identifies her as "Miss" Kraus, but the children note that she wears the "diamond ring and gold band of a Mrs."

Delany suggests that this borrowed character could be interpreted not only as Disch referring to a familiar real person, but alternately as Miss Kraus herself making this reference, naming herself after her famous predecessor.

Four thousand eight hundred?

MaryJane correctly argues that this can't be the total figure for U.S. casualties in World War Two, but the reason for the apparent mistake is never explained. Delany points out that the memorial they're looking at actually shows "the names of the soldiers, sailors, and airmen (and women) killed in U.S. coastal waters during World War II" and offers three possible conclusions: Disch left out this information by accident; the children didn't bother to read the explanation on the memorial; or the children think "that World War II was fought entirely in U.S. coastal waters .... a particularly Dischlike move for signaling the progression of historical ignorance over time."

Or a new Moondoggle!!

There's no way to know what Kraus means by this or why she feels so strongly about it, but given earlier references to space exploration having been mostly abandoned, it may be that the moon landings are now seen as a boondoggle by some concerned citizens. Delany also points out that "Moondog" was the stage name of a New York street musician, Louis Hardin, who was a contemporary of both Disch and the original Mrs. Kraus.

Terry Riley's day-long Orfeo

Probably the real composer Terry Riley, although he has produced no such work. Delany suggests, very drily, that the notion that Riley will one day compose an all-day piece might be a satirical dig at "the unity of tonal impression that tends to perfuse most of the Riley pieces available in recordings so far."

Riley titled a shorter piece "Orfeo" in his 1997 collaboration Lazy Afternoon among the Crocodiles.

a hell that mushroomed from the size of a pea to the size of a planet

The notion of Hell being extremely small and condensed may be a reference to C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce; also Hamlet, II.ii: "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams."

any since the days of Jacopo Peri

Peri composed the earliest known opera, Euridice (1600), also about the Orpheus myth.

clock on the facade of the First National Citibank said it was fifteen after two

This is an exact echo of the moment in "Bodies" when Birdie notices the same clock showing the same time (though it's not clear whether the two stories are happening on the same day) and realizes he has missed his exam; he and Little Mister Kissy Lips even have the same thought: "That wasn't possible." It does seem unlikely that so much time passed since Bill got to the South Ferry subway stop at noon, so it may be that the Citibank clock, like the elevators at 334, just doesn't work.