Elric of Melniboné reflections
I've found Elric of Melniboné a bit disappointing to my own interests. about as soon as I became disappointed I wanted to immerse myself in the context it was made in and its importance, and if nothing else I can appreciate it for that.
but, for me, I think the things the stories speak to are things that largely do not speak to me. to me it immediately felt borne of the "drugs, sex and rock and roll" zeitgeist of the time and its sort of solipsistic edginess. the story feels slapdash, jumping from point to point with little establishment or continuity. it felt moreso built upon striking prose and imagery, which are good and entertaining, but left me feeling empty.
my disappointment might have been more simple if the story didn't start by resonating with me so strongly - the foundations of elric as a character struck me and things I care about deeply. a fragile and sickly prince who resists the draconian ways of his people and their doomed kingdom, to instead study and find his own way to live. one whose life is maintained by medicine and tireless care, who insists on the value of life, justice and contemplation alone against his entire declining kingdom. it almost felt more topical than ever to me, in these political times we live in. and personally, I saw some of my experiences and perspectives through elric initially.
but ultimately the story had a different angle on things. elric's convictions are shown to be thin, his worldview weak, petulant and frail as he was. the truth in this story is for him to 'man up' and give in to the ways of Imrryr, of cynical, apathetic and violent 'realism'. his internal conflicts did not strike me so much as a genuine philosophical dialectic as they did a coy tease for the reader to cheer on his relent into hypermasculinity, even perhaps to give the reader a vicarious sense of burying their own weakness.
perhaps that reading is uncharitable. I don't say it as any sort of moral condemnation as much as how that sort of thing doesn't speak to me, even if I know it is something that does speak genuinely to a common sort of experience for teenage boys. and in its 'edginess', I found the explorations of transgressive amorality more moving and considered in the Flat Earth series by Tanith Lee, which is otherwise humanistically grounded.
I've long been leery of pulp fantasy for its frequent hypermasculine indulgence and colonialist/war-hungry framings. Moorcock's work in some ways felt emblematic of such things, while far from the progenitor. in most fantasy stories I still find something for me in its genre language, but this one happened to leave me with particularly little, perhaps a consequence of how laser-focused it is on the things it's about (which I would have admired otherwise!)
In my deep exploration of fantasy the past 7 years, I chose to read only the works of women writers. not out of any sort of overt rejection of male writers, just to make a rough attempt at aligning my interests and worldview with the author without doing any extensive research beforehand. and besides, women writers in fantasy are plenty under-recognized, especially in the pulp era and earlier. this far, it has served me quite well. I think there's an almost subconscious ease when a writer is coming at subjects from a point of view and interests that align with one's own, even if in part. it's a thing I'd become so used to feeling I'd nearly taken it for granted, but I did become reminded of that sort of almost-dysphoric discomfort that began to settle in for me part way through Elric - I just felt that the story and I didn't share priorities.
even so, I don't think Elric's complex character and philosophical nature amounts to nothing - there's a reason he's such a beloved and enduring icon of fantasy that I still found myself moved by. and Moorecock's use of imagery and prose is so enchanting, so good at doing that thing fantasy promises of taking you somewhere else, adrift in the magic of the unfamiliar and the grand.
I can see how it inspired fantasy authors then and ever since. it feels like an almost naked expression of the emotional core of (what we might think of first when we think of) pulp fantasy with everything else discarded. it's almost unusually frank, direct and unapologetic in its relationship to writing convention. it has this indulgent, easy quality to it - never getting too self-conscious about craft to let itself be slowed down. it's always moving forward with something new and exciting and just connected enough to the previous setpiece that I'm not taken out of the story. this is another form of mastery of craft to me, but perhaps one could call it a kind of craft that is itself like the calculating realism of Imrryr - get to the point and don't look back. but here, the point is to excite and indulge the reader every moment.
to me, it's maybe the most transparently "chuunibyou" work I've experienced from a non-japanese author. and somewhat uncommonly, is a western work that seems likely to have influenced much japanese fantasy itself - yoshitaka amano even illustrated the cover art for the japanese editions, and the series is certainly an at least moderate influence on the tone and artistic direction of Final Fantasy. (I can't speak with confidence on how much else it may have influenced, but my impression is 'a lot')
thematically, Elric of Melnibone struck me as a story about power and, specifically, its cost. that power is always granted by fickle forces (fate, gods, elementals, bloodline, popularity, good health) and taken away just as easily. but then, that true power is the determination to live by one's own rules no matter the cost and no matter how futile (or no matter how much that means just being a normal 'war guy' but contrarian instead, but I digress...) I felt myself connecting strongly to those initial themes about power before they took the turn they did into a more Randian narrative.
I think if I read this story as a teenager I would have loved it. I felt weak but yearned to be powerful. I felt so out of control but was desperate for self-determination. I wanted anyone in my corner, if for only a moment, to have the forces of fate guide me to my destiny, such that I might then have a choice to defy it even if in my own tragic arrogance. I felt so betrayed by the whole world that I would (and did) so eagerly welcome individualism as my solace.
but it isn't a story I needed as a teenager, either, much as many like it weren't, and would prove to have misled me in my early adult years. what I needed to be shown was the love in the world and how to recognize it. that life is upheld by care and dreams and not by power. that life could have a place for me not by conquering myself or others, but by finding a place in harmony as I am. that life can be beautiful and vibrant and as full of love as it is pain and tragedy, and that life is so much more than the terrible things we face every day. those are all things I look to in fantasy today, that finding none of in Elric has made especially clear to me.