Duke Elric - Michael Moorcock [123]
“You have still not explained whose soul Klosterheim's body drank,” pointed out Sinclair.
“Why, the last soul it took,” said Monsieur Zenith in some surprise. “I thought that is what you understood.”
“And whose was that—?”
Monsieur Zenith rose swiftly and elegantly and kissed Mrs. Persson's hand before moving towards the shelf where he had placed his silk hat and gloves. “You must forgive me, gentlemen. I have some unfinished business nearby.”
Instinctively Commissionaire Lapointe was on his feet as if to apprehend him but then caught himself and sat down again quickly.
Sir Seaton Begg, with dawning comprehension, laid his hand on his old friend's arm, but Taffy Sinclair was insistent. “Whose, Monsieur Zenith? Whose?”
Zenith the Albino slipped gracefully from the table and in a moment seemed to disappear, merging with the sunlit spray of the fountain.
“But whose …?” Sinclair turned a baffled glance at Mrs. Persson who had lifted her two cats into her lap and was stroking them gently. “Do you know?”
She inclined her head, raised her perfectly shaped eyebrows, and looked intimately at Sir Seaton Begg, whose nod was scarcely perceptible.
“It was his own, of course.”
ELRIC: A PERSONALITY AT WAR
ELRIC: A PERSONALITY AT WAR
(2008)
ICAME TO ELRIC relatively late in life, picking up a copy of the Fantasy Masterworks edition for the first time at the age of forty-three.
As I ploughed into “The Dreaming City” I began to feel that my first foray into the Moorcock Multiverse might not work out. Sword-wielding barbarian warriors have become something of a fantasy cliché, and the whole treatment seemed a little, well, derivative. It was only when I checked the publication date that I realized “The Dreaming City” was published in 1961, over forty-seven years ago! In other words it predates many other fantasy books that are now such established parts of the mainstream.
In time I realized that I was reading a work that had spawned so many pale imitations that some elements of Elric's world had almost become clichés. Once I realized this I was able to clear my mind and read on with a fresh palate, allowing the story to speak for itself.
In creating Elric, Moorcock did not pander to the reader's feelings. He is a hard character to like initially, but deeply fascinating nonetheless. He is a beguiling mixture of the vulnerable, heroic, and tragic, and your attachment to him grows almost imperceptibly as you turn the pages.
In a strange sense, Elric and his sword, Stormbringer, together represent a dysfunctional compound personality, unable to exist when separated but in constant conflict. In Freudian terms Elric represents a complex combination of ego and superego, and Stormbringer the id.
The id is a key element of our personality because it ensures that our basic needs are fulfilled from the moment of birth though our formative years. Sigmund Freud believed that the id operates purely on the pleasure principle. The id wants whatever feels good at that instant without consideration for morality or the potential consequences.
Acting as a metaphor for the id, Stormbringer's unquenchable desire to bury itself in the flesh of both men and women drives Elric from the outset.
Interestingly, in chapter nine of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), Freud comments on the significance of the sword as a metaphor for a phallus. Moorcock's narrative documents Elric's losing battle with the powerful yet destructive urges of his sword/phallus, driven on by his id. The metaphor becomes quite explicit when the girl he loves dies “screaming on the point of Stormbringer” at the end of chapter three of “The Dreaming City.”
Within the first three years of life, a child interacts more and