“The Erl-King is the most innovative and experimental of the narratives.” How far does this quotation support the statement?

‘The Erl-King’ is one of the more innovative and experimental of the Carter narratives in The Bloody Chamber as it has a blend of the detailed and the simple, a heavy use of abstract imagery and has a constant change in narrative perspective; all of which are present in the statement provided. Despite Carter’s use of the experimental and innovative in other Bloody Chamber stories, I agree that, with the quotation, it shows The Erl-King to be the most innovative and experimental of the narratives.

The statement contains intricate descriptions of the environment that the narrator is in, a lot like the narrative itself, which features an open paragraph that has the qualities of a prose poem, while contrasting it with the simple. Many of her other works, including The Bloody Chamber, do also contain incredible vivid descriptions of the narrators surroundings, but The Erl-King manages to balance the complex and the easy. “The woods enclose and then enclose again” provides us with an idea of just how the environment seems to the narrator, disorientating and bizarre; this alongside the simile “like a system of Chinese boxes opening one into another” gives us an elaborate plan of just how perplexing the situation is through this use of description. And this can be contrasted with the final statement of “it is easy to lose yourself in these woods” – the sentence simply rounds up the entire statement without resorting to the deeply philosophical and abstract descriptions that she has provided beforehand; this may be to provide comic relief or to finish the statement in a calm and complete way, because the sentence is quite an understatement, given the drastic lengths the narrator has gone to describe the situation she is in. This drastic experimental use of descriptive contrasts panders to the text’s Gothic genre with the use of duality.

Abstract imagery is used gratuitously throughout the novel, and even features in the small statement. Similar abstract imagery features also in Carter’s other works like The Bloody Chamber, and even more so in The Snow Child with its use of raven feathers and pools of blood in snow, but it isn’t quite as melancholic as The Erl-King is. For example, the environment is described as being like “Chinese boxes”; this forces us to interpret the image of a Chinese box and also makes us associate the forest with oriental imagery, which is usually associated with mystery and mythology and fits in with the text’s Gothic genre of fantasy and mystery. Also, the forest is described as having “perpetually receded before” her which is difficult to imagine and shows us just how confused the character is; this plays into the psychological part of the book’s Gothic genre.

The shifting narrative perspective in The Erl-King is very experimental and often causes confusion with the reader. This kind of experimentation is a prominent feature in post-modern literature and doesn’t feature as prominently in Carter’s other works (The Courtship of Mr Lyon changes which character it focuses on in a very fluid manner, but doesn’t go so far as to change the narrative perspective in such a way as The Erl-King). The narrator begins to generalise herself as “the interloper”, but continues with this and then refers to an “imaginary traveller” – this shift in narrative perspective shows the confusion and isolation that the narrator is suffering, so much so that she begins to not only see herself from an external, omniscient view, but from such a perspective that she cannot realise herself. In the same sentence, she shifts back to first-person by stating “me”, which possibly shows her gradual realisation that something is wrong with the environment she is in.

From this, I conclude that the statement indeed does support the idea that The Erl-King is more innovative and more experimental than the other short stories in Carter’s The Bloody Chamber as it encapsulates all the literary devices and aspects of narrative that makes The Erl-King an exceedingly unusual text.