Elric Of Melniboné – a final thought
All talk of opening a can of soup aside, I finished a volume of Michael Moorcock’s “Elric” stories, and my thoughts can be boiled down to two concise bullet points:
1.) Entertaining adventures.
2.) Philosophically and morally arid.
Because there are swordfights and derring-do and bold rogues and evil sorcerers and strange lands and all the other things that make for entertaining sword & sorcery. A swordfight, indeed, almost always improves any work of fiction in which it appears. “Elric” is chock full of this kind of stuff, and you can see the massive impact it has had on the world of pop fantasy, specifically video games and RPGs. Blizzard Entertainment’s vast and sprawling “World of Warcraft” empire owes a lot to Moorcock, as does its “Diablo” games. Game tie-in fiction has a lot of Moorcock influence as well; after reading “Elric”, I half-suspect that writers like Ed Greenwood, R.A. Salvatore, and Paul S. Kemp were actually Moorcock clones grown in a CIA laboratory someplace. No doubt my own stuff has some Moorcock influences in it that I picked up second or third hand* (I played a lot of Diablo II in college).
That said, the “Elric” stories themselves are morally and philosophically bankrupt. “Meaningless, meaningless,” they say, “everything is meaningless, all is chaos and random chance, and from nothingness you sprang and to nothingness you shall return”. This is an adolescent view of the world, which no doubt explains the stories’ popularity with adolescent males. For that matter, Elric himself is a very bad man, and does a lot of very bad things. It’s hard to sympathize with his troubles where they’re almost all his own fault, and the blood of thousands is upon his hands.
But strangely, Moorcock may have made the “Elric” stories more moral than he intended. I have no way of proving this, but I suspect that Moorcock would argue that there is no such thing as absolute right and wrong, that ethics are dependent upon economic circumstances and situational concerns – pretty boilerplate stuff for left-wing British intellectuals.
And yet, Elric does not live happily ever after, and in, the end, gets exactly the fate that his crimes deserve. Which is almost moralistic.
In the end, the “Elric” stories are entertaining, but they’re about nothing. And that is why, despite the protestations of “Epic Pooh”, “The Lord of the Rings” is the superior work of literature – it’s both entertaining and about something.
-JM
*When I say “second or third hand”, I mean that I haven’t actually read anything by Moorcock until this last month.
I think you misapprehend Elric’s place in Michael Moorcock’s career. Moorcock is the author of well over a hundred novels and too many short stories to count. He was short listed for Britain’s prestigious Whitbread award for Mother London, one of his literary novels. Elric is an early example of the revolutionary avant garde approach that Moorcock would later foster during the days he edited New Worlds. Briefly, Moorcock, Ballard, Spinrad, Aldiss and a host of others, used genre fiction for political and artistic purposes during the New Wave movement. Elric appeared prior to the British New Wave. However, the avant garde tendency is clearly present. He is character placed in the sword and sorcery genre, a genre that had previously been empty of political or artistic content. He is an anti-hero. In fact, he is an anti-hero who reverses the attributes of Conan, the genre’s previously reigning anti-hero. This reversal was conscious. Through Elric, Moorcock sought to critique dependencies. I guess, if all one is looking for is a rollicking good time, then the black and white world Tolkien created is a good one. However, if one seeks to explore the grey areas of human action, then there really is no place in genre fiction like the multiverse.
Oh, Moorcock is unquestionably an excellent writer, no quibble about that.
Still, I am for the most part not a fan of fiction used for political or avant-garde purposes, since in short I think it reinforces the dominant paradigm rather than challenging it (I might write more on that later). And I quite agree that genre fiction is an excellent place for exploring the gray areas of human existence, though I suspect Elric spent more time in the dark areas than in the gray.
Granted this is long after you originally posted this, but…
you said that the “Elric” books had a big influence on things like videogames, then went on to site Blizzard developed games. BUT they were only influenced by it in a second hand kind of way (like you). Blizzard is very heavily influenced by Game Workshops IPs. To the point of satire even! “Warcraft” is “Warhammer” and “Starcraft” is “Warhammer 40,000” No joke, Blizzard pulled very heavily from them, even using the same looks and ideas. So “Elric” had no direct influence…but here is the catch…”Elric” did have an influence on “Warhammer”! And so it does come off somewhat in “Warcraft”. (Funny thing, “Warhammer” is really just Middle-earth, with some real history and “Elric” themes thrown in)