Paula Fourie, Predicting Apartheid’s ‘Götterdämmerung’? Wagnerian Spectres in the Work of Etienne Leroux

‘I heard Wagner’s music, the valkyries flew through the heavens and trombones played the Vorspiel zum dritten Akt’, writes the South African author Etienne Leroux in his novel 18-44, which was first published in Cape Town in 1967. This description is offered by the novel’s first-person narrator, a self-declared ‘hack writer’, about the ‘fourteen days of Aryan pleasure’ that followed his wedding with his ‘Brunhild’. Elsewhere, their marriage is described as a ‘Germanic Götterdämmerung of sex, with my [...] butcher-father an enthusiastic invisible spectator over snow-white shoulders in the darkness of the disfigured heaven-bed’. Although the mention of the Ride of the Valkyries is the only time in the novel when Wagner is actually named, his characters and spectres flit across its pages again and again – from valkyries to the flying Dutchman, Kundry, Amfortas and Gurnemanz. Finally, it is a ‘Götterdämmerung’ that sweeps away one world of the novel to herald another.