334/The Death of Socrates

"The Death of Socrates" is the first section of 334. It first appeared with the title "Problems of Creativeness" in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1967.

Summary

Birdie Ludd, a disaffected and poorly educated teenager, finds that due to a combination of his bad grades, his father's medical history, and his social class, he is forbidden to have children under the government's eugenic standards. The chance to remedy this by writing a special essay for extra credit makes him briefly interested in learning for the first time, but it's not enough. His friend Frances offers to have illicit children with him; he rejects her violently, and is last seen joining the Marines— the last resort of young people in need of extra credit.

Related characters

Birdie's former lover, Milly Holt, doesn't appear in this chapter but is a central character in "Emancipation". Frances Schaap appears again in "Bodies".

Notes

Psychology of Aristotle

In De Anima (c. 330 BC), a major influence on all subsequent Western science of the mind, Aristotle proposed that the mind could not be separated from the body but was dependent on it.

Gibble-gabble Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg illustrated Dante's Inferno in 1959 with a series of 34 pieces that combined drawing, painting, and collages of magazine images. (Excerpts, from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation)

General Studies Annexe ... Barnard

"General studies" means different things at different schools, but in many colleges and universities it's a program that accepts students who would not otherwise qualify for admission— in effect, a community college program within a four-year college. Barnard College is a sister school to Columbia which, in the present day, is for women only.

Francesca da Rimini

In the Inferno, Francesca and her lover Paolo are condemned to the second circle of hell, for the sins of lust and adultery. Their relatively mild punishment is to be suspended in a whirlwind, unable to make contact but still able to be in each other's presence; Virgil explains that these two are innocent compared to Francesca's husband, who is somewhere much worse since his jealousy drove him to commit murder.

Birdie Ludd

Birdie's last name may be an unsubtle reference to Ned Ludd, who became a folk hero to anti-industrialization saboteurs (although his own machine-smashing actions may have been apocryphal). If so, it's an ironic one since Birdie makes no attempt to rebel against the mechanized systems of his time.

a naked man trapped inside a square and a circle

The Vitruvian Man, Leonardo da Vinci's famous anatomical drawing. The square and circle were an attempt to determine the ideal proportions of the body through simple geometry, but Birdie not surprisingly sees them as traps.

they're born one way and not another

The student's question refers to Dante's notion that people who had committed no sins, but were not Christian— including those who couldn't possibly have been Christian since they were born before Christ— were condemned to Limbo, the relatively pleasant first circle of Hell. Birdie is about to face a similarly unfair institutional judgment, due to his family history and an education that's given him no real chance of achieving the desired standard.

334 East 11th Street

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The Manhattan address where most of the novel takes place, located near the corner of 11th and First Avenue, three blocks from Stuyvesant Town and five blocks from the East River.

The neighborhood, formerly a working-class part of the Lower East Side, had become a counterculture haven in the 1960s— first dubbed the "East Village" around the same time that Disch began writing these stories. Gentrification took hold in later decades, but in 1967-1972 Disch was imagining it moving in a different direction: cheap but overcrowded and utilitarian.

The 21-story building described here ("built in the pre-Squeeze affluent '80s") is fictional. That address currently is occupied by a five-story red brick tenement-style building from the early 20th century; although it doesn't appear in the Manhattan New Building Database, it was probably built in 1902 or 1903 like its neighbors.

Thomas Disch did not live at 334; the apartment he shared with his partner Charles Naylor, and continued to live in after Naylor's death, was about six blocks away on Union Square West.

MODICUM

MODICUM is the federal welfare agency that controls many aspects of life in 334, including the management of the 334 E. 11th St. building. The name refers to a bare minimum or desultory quantity of necessary things.

a population of three thousand ... excluding temps

As described later in 334 Part III (24), "temps" are basically homeless people sleeping in hallways and stairwells. This was also a feature of the overcrowded future New Yorks in The Space Merchants (1952), and Make Room! Make Room! (1966). Birdie is "temporary on the sixteenth-floor landing."

Some old lady lugging a bag of groceries

This is Nora Hanson, who describes her encounter with Birdie in 334 Part III (22).

a stick of Oraline

A popular legal drug in 334. As described later in the book, it is one of several widely used variations on the fictional drug Morbehanine. Chewing on the stick delivers a dose over a fixed amount of time ("her ten metered minutes"). The "premium button" is just a decorative accessory.

David's Death of Socrates

The 1787 oil painting by Jacques-Louis David: Socrates, surrounded by his pupils, prepares to meet his death by poison. More on Wikipedia.

why don't they fix the elevators

A constant refrain— see "Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire" and 334 Part II (13).

Some Burmese nationals

As we see at the end of the story, the U.S. in 334 is at war in Burma; this is probably a refugee family.

kids in black masks—U.S. guerrillas

Although guerrillas are normally the opposite of an official state military, the kids here are imitating the US Marines, who wear pull-over black masks in the world of 334; the chapter ends with a new recruit putting one of these on.

There are two references/jokes here: the ongoing Vietnam-like war has eroded the usual distinction between organized troops and irregulars (Disch was ahead of his time in terms of pop culture at least, since 1980s action heroes like Stallone and Schwarzenegger were rarely in traditional uniform)... and the dehumanizing full-face masks make the Marines look like gorillas. In earlier editions of 334, this line actually said "U.S. gorillas"; the change to "guerrillas" may have been a mistake (see Editions).

Ironically, this kind of mask is also associated with militant anarchism, as with the Black bloc— or in Disch's time, the Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers (originally known as "Black Mask").

the upstate Regents Office

"Regents" may be derived from a semi-acronym for "Revised Genetic Testing Act", the legislation that created the eugenics system in 334 determining who may have children. But it also has special meaning for present-day New Yorkers: as part of the graduation requirements for all high schools in New York, students take standardized tests created by the Board of Regents of New York State University, and these tests are commonly known as just "the Regents".

First National Citibank

At the time Disch was writing, this name was a mildly futuristic touch since Citibank was still spelling its name as "First National City Bank."

The Sicilian Vespers

The name given to a 13th-century war of independence by Sicilian rebels against the French; also an opera by Verdi based on the same events. In this case it's an Italian restaurant.

Jim Crow Compromise

Disch suggests that the national mandatory contraception and eugenics program was not established by a dictatorial act, but by old-fashioned political dealing. Minority groups would understandably expect such a program to discriminate against them; they were apparently persuaded by being given compensatory bonus points as a form of affirmative action, but the use of the racist term Jim Crow suggests a highly cynical attitude toward this compromise. Although Birdie supposedly benefits from the rule, he is simultaneously being docked points for his father's unemployment and poor health, two things that are much more common in minority groups due to economic inequality but that the Regents system apparently assumes must be genetic.

the Stanford-Binet (Short Form) and the Skinner-Waxman Scale

Stanford-Binet refers to a set of psychological tests, first compiled in 1916, intended to measure a person's intellectual ability as compared with other people in the same age group. The scale developed by Binet is now known as IQ.

The "short form" and the Skinner-Waxman scale are Disch's inventions, the latter being a standardized test of creativity, including (as seen later in this section) multiple-choice questions to measure one's sense of humor. Skinner would be B. F. Skinner, a strict behaviorist who regarded both free will and creativity as illusions; Waxman is probably fictional. Besides the test question Birdie complains about here, another example is described later in "Emancipation".

An average score on the regular Stanford-Binet is 100, but apparently Birdie did fairly well by getting a score of 7, so the "short form" must have been very drastically simplified— one sign that the Regents system is not interested in evaluating people in much detail.

a cherry, an apple, and a banana

A non-winning score on a slot machine.

Moloch

A Canaanite god whose worshipers were said, in the Hebrew Bible, to practice child sacrifice. Allan Ginsberg's Howl used Moloch as a symbol of the evil influence of money and industry. The theme of child sacrifice will be revisited in "Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire".

Great Kills Harbor

Part of the south shore of Staten Island.

executive washroom of the actuarial division of New York Life

The New York Life Insurance Company headquarters is in midtown Manhattan at Madison Avenue and 26th Street.

An old man in an old suit

This is probably the man called "Alyona Ivanovna" in "Angouleme".

cultured eggs and a cup of Koffee

Signs of the general shortage of natural resources in the future: eggs produced artifically by tissue culture, and a coffee substitute (which, as we learn later, also contains Morbehanine).

There's a long tradition in science fiction of imaginary coffee-like substances. In some cases these sound organic ("klah" in the Pern books), but more often they have 1950s-style brand names that connote fakeness ("Coffiest" in The Space Merchants, "Kaff" in The Divine Invasion). Disch (like Harry Harrison in Make Room! Make Room!, where New Yorkers drank "Koffy") has, presumably on purpose, used the least creative term imaginable: it can't be distinguished from "coffee" even by pronunciation.

Problems of Creativeness

Although "creativeness" is technically a real word, Birdie's unfamiliarity with the more common form "creativity" conveys his awkwardness as a writer.

is it true, that "All roads lead to Rome"

The tendency of people to compare everything to ancient Rome is a major theme of "Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire" and also appears in 334 Part V (30).

the ability to see relationships where none exist

Birdie's definition of "creativeness" is a garbled version of oft-quoted advice from James Webb Young's A Technique For Producing Ideas: "The capacity to bring old elements into new combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships." It's particularly appropriate to his personal situation, since his adolescent passion for Milly has left him pining for a grand romance that was really more of a fling.

some disease she had

As seen in "Bodies", Frances's disease is lupus.

Stuyvesant Town

Stuyvesant Town is a large private apartment complex covering 27 blocks of lower Manhattan, owned by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company until 2006. At the time of its construction in the 1940s, it was controversial for its scale, density, non-public nature, and racially discriminatory policies.

As described in "Bodies", a black market has been established in a playground area at the center of the complex.

defend democracy in Burma

The conflict in Burma is never described, but it's clearly analogous to the Vietnam War. In 1967, when this story was first published, the U.S. had been intervening in Vietnam for 17 years and there was no end in sight. Burma has been under military rule since 1962; unless Disch was more optimistic about political change abroad than he was at home, that is probably still the case in 334, so there is no actual democracy being defended any more than there was in South Vietnam during the war there.

Given Birdie's decision to abandon his world and join a project of meaningless violence— and what we later see of Milly's dissatisfied but still hopeful life with her new love in "Emancipation"— the earlier mention of Francesca di Rimini is appropriate, with Birdie casting himself in the role of the jealous husband (though his violence is directed not at Milly but at Frances, and at persons unknown in Burma), and the second circle of hell being just the troubled state in which many relationships normally exist.