Jerry Cornelius is a fictional character created by English author Michael Moorcock. The character is an urban adventurer and an incarnation of the author's Eternal Champion concept. Cornelius is a hipster of ambiguous and occasionally polymorphous gender. Many of the same characters feature in each of several Cornelius books, though the individual books have little connection with one another, having a more metafictional than causal relationship. The first Jerry Cornelius book, The Final Programme, was made into a 1973 film starring Jon Finch and Jenny Runacre. Notting Hill in London features prominently in the stories.
The series draws plot elements from Moorcock's Elric series, as well as the Commedia dell'Arte. Moorcock hints in many places that Cornelius may be an aspect of the Eternal Champion. Characters from the Cornelius novels show up in much of Moorcock's other fiction: The Dancers at the End of Time series has a character called Jherek Carnelian who is the son of Lord Jagged of Canaria, and there are several hints in the series that Lord Jagged may be a guise of Jerry Cornelius; the Cornelius-series character Una Persson also appears in the "Dancers" series and the Oswald Bastable books, and may also be the character Oona in the later Elric books; Colonel Pyat has his own non-SF series of books by Moorcock, beginning with Byzantium Endures.
At least five other variants of the name occur in other Moorcock works (Jerry Cornell, Jehamiah Cohnalias, Jhary-a-Conel (Corum, Runestaff), Lord Jagged of Canaria from The Dancers at the End of Time, and the anagrammatic Corum Jhaelen Irsei). A space pirate named Captain Cornelius (who like Jerry is associated with the commedia dell'arte character Pierrot) appears in Moorcock's Doctor Who novel, The Coming of the Terraphiles.
In these four novels Jerry undergoes transformations, dies, is reborn, spends one entire novel as a shivering wreck, and eventually discovers his true natures. Moorcock strenuously objects to his character being depicted as a 'secret agent'. There are almost no elements of the spy genre in the Cornelius stories.
Jerry battles his brother Frank who has kidnapped his beloved sister Catherine. Frank dies, but Catherine is also killed. Jerry is sucked into the plans of Miss Brunner to create the perfect being by merging the bodies of Jerry and herself together. When this is done, a radiantly charismatic hermaphroditic being emerges from the machinery. All who see the new creature fall quaking to their knees. The creature itself announces that this is "a very tasty world".
Jerry is solo again, existing as negative character with black skin and white hair. He moves through a landscape of destroyed English cities and occupying American armies, a metaphor for contemporary Vietnam. He runs a clandestine "transmogrification" service for people who want to cast off their old selves, flesh and all. There is the gluttonous Bishop Beesley, and his daughter Mitzi. Eventually Jerry drives the Americans to madness, causing them to burn everything, including themselves.
All the supporting characters, particularly Una Persson, drive this novel while Jerry is nothing more than a whimpering heap of rags washed up on a beach and carried in the back of a lorry to safety. There are episodes in settings ranging from the cockpit of a Dornier Do X, the deck of an Edwardian sailing ship, the anarchic steppes of revolutionary Russia, and Victorian music-hall. Finally Jerry is able to revive as the character Pierrot, forever mourning his lost Columbine, who is Catherine.
Taking its title from the Walter Pater quote "All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music", this is a series of vignettes that cast Jerry as a teenager in Notting Hill, a character in the commedia dell'arte, a secret agent and a fool. Particularly notable are the Notting Hill scenes, which seem to reduce all the other parts of the canon to fantasies in the adolescent Jerry's mind. Other scenes fill in detail, if any were needed, between the novels. In the final scene Jerry's foul-mouthed mother dies, and on her deathbed she reveals the family's history as a distorted version of the canon which Jerry and his now-pregnant sister Catherine seem doomed to continue.
In 2008, The Entropy Tango & Gloriana Demo Sessions by Michael Moorcock & The Deep Fix was released. These were sessions for planned albums based on two Moorcock novels: Glorianna and The Entropy Tango. Two of the Jerry Cornelius/Entropy Tango tracks were reworked with additional musicians and appeared on the Spirits Burning CD Alien Injection, also released in 2008.
Moorcock encouraged other authors and artists to create works about Jerry Cornelius, in an early open source shared world attempt at open brand sharing. One example is Norman Spinrad's The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde. Another is Mœbius's The Airtight Garage. The Nature of the Catastrophe, a collection of Jerry Cornelius stories and comic strips which had appeared in New Worlds (with art by Mal Dean) by various hands, was published in 1971. It includes works by Moorcock himself, James Sallis, Brian Aldiss, Langdon Jones, M. John Harrison, Richard Glyn Jones, Alex Krislov, and Maxim Jakubowski.
The story "...the price is worth it" by Graeme K Talboys and the subsequent novels in the Stormlight quartet (along with the short story collection Stormwrack) are centred on Charlie Cornelius, a daughter of the Cornelius clan with uncertain parentage.
In comics, various writers have used elements of the character, including Bryan Talbot's character Luther Arkwright. Image publishes Matt Fraction's Casanova series which also pays homage to Cornelius. Tony Lee's Midnight Kiss features Cornelius with Michael Moorcock's blessing. (Moorcock wrote the introduction for the collected trade paperback). Grant Morrison created an Oscar Wilde-inspired steampunk version of Jerry Cornelius in Sebastian O, the original Vertigo mini-series. Another Morrison character, Gideon Stargrave of The Invisibles, is one of the few interpretations of the character that Moorcock has issues with, as he considers the character little more than a straight lift of Cornelius.[1] [2]
The name of the protagonist of Mœbius's The Airtight Garage was changed in later editions to "Lewis Carnelian". In 2006, on his website, Moorcock wrote:
Bad Voltage, a 1980s cyberpunk novel by Jonathan Littell that also dealt with themes of bisexuality and violence, features guest appearances by a has-been Jerry Cornelius and a substance-abusing 'Shaky' Mo Collier. The independent comic Elf-Thing featured not only Cornelius but members of his supporting cast in an homage. Cornelius is also seen in Alan Moore's as a child. Cornelius appears in the second part of Alan Moore's three-part comic . The character also appears in Neurotwistin, a French novel by Laurent Queyssi (an appearance sanctioned by Moorcock). The 1996 White Wolf anthology Pawn of CHAOS features new Cornelius stories by John Shirley, Caitlín R. Kiernan, and Nancy Collins. A version of Jerry Cornelius also appears in Michael Moorcock's 1999 graphic novel Multiverse. An ongoing presentation of new Cornelius stories is on Moorcock's Jeremiah Cornelius Facebook page.[3]
Carter Kaplan plays a variation on Jerry Cornelius in his novel Tally-Ho, Cornelius!.
Author Bruce Sterling has described his recurring character Leggy Starlitz, star of a series of short stories and the novel Zeitgeist, as "a nonlinear descendant of Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius".[4]