‘A Glittering Storehouse’: The Representation, Parody and Mythologies of Richard Wagner in Novels by Günter Grass, Anthony Burgess and Angela Carter

This study aims to address the lack of critical commentary on representations of the Romantic composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883) in literature written after 1945. Literary criticism is a vital and active arm of Wagner Studies; however, works in this area pertain almost exclusively to fin de siècle and modernist literature. Nevertheless, Wagner’s status as a cultural icon lost none of its significance throughout the post-war period. This has proved especially true for the three writers looked at here: Günter Grass (1927–2015), Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) and Angela Carter (1940–1992).

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the societies, literatures and cultures of Britain and Germany underwent significant transformation. These changes often play out in fiction through a text’s engagement with totemic cultural reference points. The works of German writer Günter Grass are known for their engagement with a society that bears a burden of guilt because of the Second World War. For Grass, Wagner is emblematic of what went wrong but also what was right with his nation’s cultural inheritance. In Britain Anthony Burgess recognised and exploited Wagner’s extensive engagement with mythologies. Burgess saw Wagner as a progenitor of his own mythology through biographical legend. Indeed, the myths and legends that attached to Wagner would be used by Burgess to supplement several of his own narratives. Finally, Angela Carter was acutely aware of the conflicting appropriations that have attached to the Wagner cut. These discordant strands of Wagnerism were exploited by Carter to deconstruct what she saw as problematic and culturally persistent mythologies that relate to gender and sexuality.

Wagner has continually exerted a varied influence on literature and this is no less true of the post-1945 period.