Return of the Goddess: Contemporary Music and Celtic Mythology in Alan Warner's Morvern Callar

Abstract

Scot Alan Warner’s first novel, Morvern Callar, brings together, in a postmodern fashion, ancient Celtic and contemporary ‘New Age’ worldviews. The novel focuses on the depressed reality of Scottish youth and culture as the title character, imprisoned by a moribund patriarchy, adopts her suicide boyfriend’s identity as a means of reasserting both her own and Scotland’s sovereignty. Crucial to this reassertion is Morvern’s intuitive adoption of the character of the queens and druids of Celtic mythology, but also significant is her fondness for contemporary music’s postmodern aesthetic of dismemberment that, paradoxically, engenders a womb-like watery space similar to that of the developing global communications network. “Look all around. The male god is dysfunctional. The goddess is coming back.” (Tomson Highway)