Modernist literature has a special fascination with Wagner. The voices of “Das Rheingold” and “Tristan und Isolde” drift across T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Virginia Woolf’s The Waves bears the imprint of the composer’s motivic method, along with the symbolism of the “Ring” Cycle and “Parsifal.” A lusty Wagnerian atavism is stamped all over the novels and essays of D. H. Lawrence. In Marcel Proust’s Time Regained, air-raid sirens ring out “like the heart-rending scream of a Valkyrie—the only German music to have been heard since the war.”
The Society of the Spectacle
The inventive and iconoclastic energies of Elfriede Jelinek
