On Wings of Song

Title

"On Wings of Song" is the English title of the German Romantic poem "Auf Flügeln des Gesanges" by Heinrich Heine, which was set to music by Felix Mendelssohn. The lyric speaks of flying with a lover to a peaceful paradise in "the fields of the Ganges".

Plot summary

The novel takes place in suburban Iowa and in New York City, around the middle of the 21st century. Its first section describes the childhood and adolescence of Daniel Weinreb, an imaginative boy who manages to adapt well to his conservative surroundings until a minor act of rebellion sends him to prison at age 14. Daniel's experience there makes him eager to leave the Midwest. After falling in love with the daughter of a powerful and reactionary local tycoon, he moves with her to New York, dreaming of becoming a musician and exploring the forbidden art of "flying"—electronically-assisted astral projection. Tragedy and exploitation leave Daniel's idealism in ruins, but he persists and becomes an internationally famous and controversial performer.

Alongside this Bildungsroman storyline, the novel presents a detailed portrait of a future United States torn by economic hardship and culture war. The Midwestern Farm Belt states are ruled by a coalition of the Christian right, known as "undergoders" (a reference to the successful conservative campaign to add the words "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance); the nominally secular government is socially repressive and business-friendly to an extreme. The coastal states more closely resemble present-day urban America, with generally permissive social attitudes and artistic ferment, but great economic inequality.

The invention of "flying" (which has happened at some unspecified point prior to the beginning of the novel, and is never described in any technological detail) aggravates these cultural divisions. By using a device that seems to be based on biofeedback, while singing with particular verve (an action that, as Disch suggests, causes unique integration of brain activity), a practitioner can separate mind from body and roam the world as an invisible "fairy", able to travel almost without restriction and perceive hidden things. The undergoders regard this as a sinful and dangerous practice, so much so that they discourage musical performance of any kind; but in the coastal cities flying is a fad, so popular that singers are afraid to admit not having been able to achieve it. Many Americans simply refuse to believe that such a radical escape is possible and claim that flying is a hallucination, but still take precautions to avoid being observed by "fairies".

Literary significance

Harold Bloom listed On Wings of Song in The Western Canon, as did David Pringle in his Science Fiction: 100 Best Novels. John Clute wrote in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia that it "thematically sums up most of the abiding concerns of TMD's career, as well as presenting an exemplary portrait of the pleasures and miseries of art in a world made barbarous by material scarcities and spiritual lassitude; in the final analysis, however, it lacks the complex, energetic denseness of the earlier book." Author William Gibson described it as "one of the great neglected masterpieces of late 20th-century science fiction." Michael Bishop in A Reverie for Mister Ray writes that the novel "comments on the American predicament by exaggerating its salient stinks...leaving us to walk about in this funhouse future as if it were real. [We are] repeatedly surprised by the vividness with which Disch has rendered our present provincialism, conformity, commercialism, frivolity, intolerance, and narcissism. On Wings of Song is a major accomplishment of American letters."

Awards and nominations

On Wings of Song won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1980. It was nominated for the 1979 Nebula Award for Best Novel and the 1980 Hugo Award for Best Novel.