Elric_ The Stealer of Souls - Michael Moorcock [204]
The Dead Gods’ Book is eventually located in a vast underground world which I had intended as a womb-symbol, and after a philosophical conversation with the book’s Keeper, Elric discovers it. This passage is, to me now, rather overwritten, but, for better or worse:
It was a huge book—the Dead Gods’ Book, its covers encrusted with alien gems from which the light sprang. It gleamed, it throbbed with light and brilliant colour.
“At last,” Elric breathed. “At last—the Truth!”
He stumbled forward like a man made stupid with drink, his pale hands reaching for the thing he had sought with such savage bitterness. His hands touched the pulsating cover of the Book and, trembling, turned it back…With a crash, the cover fell to the floor, sending the bright gems skipping and dancing over the paving stones. Beneath Elric’s…hands lay nothing but a pile of yellowish dust.
The Dead Gods’ Book and the Golden Barge are one and the same. They have no real existence, save in the wishful imagination of mankind. There is, the story says, no Holy Grail which will transform a man overnight from bewildered ignorance to complete knowledge—the answer already is within him, if he cares to train himself to find it. A rather over-emphasized fact, throughout history, but one generally ignored all the same.
“The Stealer of Souls,” the third story, continues this theme, but brought in rather different kinds of symbols. Coupled with the Jungian symbols already inherent in any tale using direct mythic material, I used Freudian symbols, too. This was a cynical attempt and a rather vulgar attempt to make the series popular. It appeared to work. “The Stealer of Souls,” whatever else it may be, is one of the most pornographic stories I have ever written. In Freudian terms it is the description of, if you like, a night’s love-making.
Which brings me to another point. Although there is comparatively little direct description of sexual encounters in the stories, and what there are are largely romanticized, the whole Elric saga has, in its choice of situations and symbols, very heavy sexual undertones. This is true of most sword-and-sorcery stories, but I have an idea that I may be the first such author to understand his material to this extent, to know what he’s using. If I hadn’t been a bit fed-up by the big response received by “The Stealer of Souls” (magazine story, not the book), I could have made even greater use of what I discovered.
Other critics have pointed out the close relationship the horror story (and often the SF story for that matter) has with the pornographic story, so there’s no need to go any deeper into it here.
The pornographic content of the Elric saga doesn’t interest me much, but I have hinted at the relationship between sex and violence in several stories, and, indeed, there are a dozen syndromes to be found in the stories, particularly if you bear in mind my own involvement with sexual love, expression in violence, etc., at the time the stories were first conceived. Even my own interpretation of what I was doing is open to interpretation, in this case!
The allegory goes through all ten stories (including “To Rescue Tanelorn…” which did not feature Elric) in Science Fantasy, but it tends to change its emphasis as my own ideas take better shape and my emotions mature. When, in the last Elric story of all, the sword, his crutch, Stormbringer turns and slays Elric, it is meant to represent, on one level, how mankind’s wish-fantasies can often bring about the destruction of (till now at least) part of mankind. Hitler, for instance, founded his whole so-called political creed on a series of wish-fantasies (this is detailed in that odd book Dawn of Magic, recently published here). Again this is an old question, a bit trite from being asked too often, maybe, but how much of what we believe is true and how much is what we wish were true? Hitler dreamed of his Thousand Year Reich,