On Wings of Song

UNDER CONSTRUCTION!

On Wings of Song is a 1979 novel by Thomas M. Disch, originally serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. It follows the life and career of Daniel Weinreb, who aspires to become a singer—and to experience "flying", a form of electronically-assisted astral projection triggered by singing—in a deeply dysfunctional near-future America where Midwestern states have fallen into religious fascism.

Title

This is the English translation of the title of Heinrich Heine's poem "Auf Flügeln des Gesanges" (1827), which was set to music by Felix Mendelssohn in 1834 (known as Mendelssohn's Opus 34, No. 2). In English, the poem's first and last stanzas are:

On wings of song,

Sweetheart, I carry you away,

Away to the fields of the Ganges,

Where I know the most beautiful place. ....

There we will lie down

Under the palm tree

Drink in peace and love

And dream our blissful dream.

Epigram

Proficiscere, anima Christiana, de hoc mundo.

This is the beginning of an eighth-century Roman Catholic prayer that is traditionally used in ministry to a dying person, advising the soul to begin its journey. It is generally known as the "Commendation of the Soul", or sometimes referred to simply as the Proficiscere.

Like the novel's title, the Proficiscere is associated with choral music. Text from the prayer, in both Latin and English, appeared in the poem The Dream of Gerontius (1865) by John Henry Newman, which Edward Elgar used as text for his orchestral/choral work The Dream of Gerontius (1900). The translation in Newman and Elgar renders the first line as:

Go forth upon thy journey, Christian soul! Go from this world!

Part One, 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.

She would sit watching him ... people shouldn't let fairies into their houses

Fairies, as we will pick up pretty 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 don't 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 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 rotating 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 and other art. Fantasy literature in general 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 complex and the argument is too long to get into here)—but any version of Frankenstein would obviously be problematic for fundamentalist Christians. 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.

when the country got back on its feet again

One of many reminders in these scene-setting chapters that the self-satisfied semi-theocratic dystopia Daniel has been born into is not representative of the whole country, and that other parts of the US, besides being more liberal, have been experiencing more economic troubles than the Midwest.

destroyed most of Tel Aviv

There are just enough references to non-US places in the novel to establish that many 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, because 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 toward 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- and federal-level politics, 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 in keeping 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, and they've managed to narrowly win enough elections to solidify their power. In chapter 3 we see that other nearby 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 the KKK has 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 be 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 lowering of the familiar standard of middle-class comfort must be a sign of the collapse of civilization, has its roots in political sentiments that were very common in the 1970s. Ronald Reagan's campaign 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 fact that the economy did improve in the 1980s and

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: agricultural tycoons who live in luxury.