Glen Hall

The critical piece will seek to explore the oscillation between modernism and postmodernism and how this plays out in Metamodernism. The Last Druid embraces narrative fragmentation, intertextuality and the unreliable narrator whilst at the same time yearning for stability, certainty and meaning. I am interested in exploring the force behind this tension and whether we can ever know authenticity, truth and meaning in a post-postmodern world. As Professor Jordan suggests, ‘There is a desire in metamodernism for authentic experience while knowing it is an impossibility’ (Jordan, Metamodernism and the Postdigital in the Contemporary Novel (Bloomsbury Studies in Digital Cultures).

The Last Druid begins with a conversation between Sam (the main protagonist) and the mysterious Professor Stuckley who heads up The Department of Quantum Metaphysics at Cherwell College Oxford (a department and college that doesn’t seem to exist at the university switchboard). A department furthermore that aims to show that truth is still knowable even in the postmodern world of The Last Druid. They are situated in C.S Lewis’s old college room, discussing Lewis’s work, his relationship with JRR Tolkien and how Tolkien converted Lewis to Christianity. And yet, Professor Stuckley, almost immediately, not only sets up the oscillation between modernism and postmodernism but a duality between absolute truth (as we move across a pagan landscape that begins to look Christian), and relativity (that questions absolute space-time and, in the process, absolute truth).

‘By now, Sam, you should have realised that Cherwell College is much more than meets the eye. It is trying to teach the unteachable, to get students to think the unthinkable. You should come away from your time at Cherwell with the understanding that you can never quite trust reality, that you should certainly not trust your senses and that you should not believe everything that people tell you.’

The Last Druid appears to be a world of sharp binary opposites. Book One starts with a message delivered to Sam:

‘Tell the professors, Samuel, that the Circle is broken and a Shadow moves through the Otherland. Tell them that the Dead Water is lost and the Fall is dying. Tell them that they must seek the help of the Three. You must be wondering whether these words are those of the wise or the mad. On the road ahead you will find out…’

At the end of the book one, Sam again meets Oscar in the Garden of Druids, Oscar has no recollection of either their first meeting or the message. (How could he, their second meeting takes place before the first). Sam repeats the message to Oscar who then travels back to the beginning of Book One to deliver the message to Sam. There is great uncertainty around who delivered the message. Is the message part of the story or does it actually create the story? In other words, if the message had never been delivered, could the events have still played out? Is this the language-matter matrix at work? Is the language of the message creating the subsequent narrative? The question that we are asked to consider: Does the seeming empty signification of the message create the story. Do the characters simply use the signs to understand the reality around them or do they create it. Or is reality more like the quantum world where superpositions, wave functions, entanglement and wave-particle duality play out. At the beginning of The Last Druid these quantum theories are no more than metaphors, a polite nod to relativity, the arbitrary nature of the sign and deconstruction. A reminder that meaning comes from its relationship and differences within a system, a critique of absolute space-time and truth. As we move deeper into the fantasy landscape this quantum world starts to creep into the postmodern narrative.

Each book in the trilogy concludes in the Garden of Druids. The Garden is a place of shifting signification, landscapes and endings where nothing is stable. The garden stands outside the classical concepts of space-time; it emerges only when observed. It changes

depending on each character’s point of view. But how can so many perspectives exist? How can they each see a different ending? Surely one has to be real. Or does it? Past, present and future are suddenly entangled and each character collapses their own ending from a number of possible endings. Reality itself has become like the language used to describe it. The Garden, amongst other things, is the ultimate postmodern construct.

In the final book we will discover the letter that has accompanied Sam has been written by me the author. It’s been me all along who has been guiding him through his journey, a postmodern twist that attempts to rebirth authorial intention by using the very techniques meant to negate it. Derrida, nonetheless, was only too aware that his own theory could never break its own logocentricism – and that his own writing could itself be deconstructed. It was my intention to write a postmodern fantasy adventure that explored this tension.

The critical piece will aim to explore how The Last Druid transitions from a postmodern fantasy to metamodern fiction. This comes from a yearning for authentic experience which pushes back against its own post-structuralism. This pushback comes from Sam, who yearns for truth, meaning and connection, and yet, finds himself in a world that rejects universal truths where objective reality is continually challenged. The Last Druid oscillates between high and low fantasy, between pagan and Christian symbolism, between modernist certainty and postmodern uncertainty. It looks like it deconstructs its reality, language, self-hood and identity through a continued reference to quantum mechanics, the arbitrary sign and the uncertainty principle.

Sam’s journey is deeply autobiographical, his journey could also be seen to symbolize the oscillation in Metamodernism. As oscillation between my present and past self: a conversation between my teenage/postmodern self with my metamodern present! Sam’s journey further symbolizes the tension at the narrative level of The Last Druid. His journey moves from a naïve acceptance of modernism then later embraces the deconstructive

detachment of postmodernism. A detachment he feels emotionally. He is satisfied by neither.

It is through emotional detachment that fractures the author/character symbiosis. It is a fracture from childhood trauma. Sam is set adrift in the terrifying landscape of the Otherland. I, the author, have metaphorically and psychologically cut him off. I have paradoxically placed him in the postmodern world of Barthes, Derrida and Saussure. There is now only the death of the author and subject. In the Last Druid the fragmented self is both amplified and mirrored in the fractured narrative, space-time, landscape and relationships. It is at this precise moment the oscillation between my teenage postmodern-self and my present-self begins. It is a metamodernist dance. In fact, the greater the oscillation between past and future self the greater the yearning for meaning and authenticity, a yearning for connection, hope and truth.

It is not just the narrative, characters, language that oscillates in the last druid, but ideas of self are both fragmented and decentered. Again, modernism’s view of self is juxtaposed with postmodernism’s death of the author. The postmodern becomes the metaphor for my own emotional detachment from Sam. If my intention was to use metafiction to highlight the author as construct of its own discourse could this be deemed paradoxical. Could authorial intention be the catalyst to create these paradoxical moments which lead to a deeper truth perhaps even to authentic experience. Could metamodernism’s oscillation be Sam’s salvation.

Sam’s ‘dark night of the soul’, not only symbolizes The Last Druid’s transition from postmodern fantasy to a kind of metamodern autofiction, but also represents The Last Druid’s oscillating narrative, landscape and at times disorientating duality. Sam communicates with the past and future through the Way-Curves (a quantum tapestry). First, he communicates with the Inklings: C.S Lewis, JRR Tolkien and Charles Williams in

the Eagle and Child in Oxford. In the chapter title: Oxford Shadows’, there is a suggestion they can be seen and heard but can never be touched.

‘How strange that conversation had been. Had the professors been in the room or could they have been images of some kind? There had been a jitteriness about the scene, almost as if it was a newly painted picture, its colours still liquid, still moving…Then there had been Jack and Ronald’s voices – he had seen and felt them rather than heard them. It was as if they hadn’t existed as sound waves but as light waves, as if their thoughts had been carried on the electromagnetic flow. Was that how they had made the connection? And Jack and Ronald – could they really be who he thought they were?’

There is a further suggestion in the word ‘Inklings’, that truth, belief and faith is sometimes nothing more than a feeling. These interactions with the past give Sam hope, that all is not lost, a hint that there is an objective absolute truth if you search for it. ‘I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else (C.S Lewis), a counterweight to The Last Druid’s narrative fragmentation and disorientating relativism. The Way-curves oscillate between the past and future, it is through this deeply poststructuralist trope, that Sam begins to realize, paradoxically, that everything is connected, that below the fragmentation there is a deeper reality. Through the quantum oscillation of the Way-curve, Sam is able to seek guidance from authors who believed in absolute truth. In The Last Druid, truth and meaning start to emerge from this duality.

Sam understands from his studies, nonetheless, that this epistemological interweave is really the system that the story finds itself in. He understands as he approaches the end of the story that something can be ‘true and not proven within a system’, he understands that such paradoxes can help you reconstruct meaning. It no longer matters whether it is subjective or objective, what matters is the awareness of duality. In other words, Sam becomes the oscillation.

It is through this duality that Sam realizes there is another way, a metamodern affect that allows him to reconstruct self through relationality whilst at the same time acknowledging the emotional detachment of postmodernism and self-reflexivity. Sam is determined to feel again; he pushes through the de-centered and fragmented self. It is through this reconnection with self that he is finally able to connect with his own emotions and there is a form of reconciliation between author and character.

‘Correspondingly, poststructuralism and deconstruction flatten identity by dismantling the subject’s claim to referentiality. Whist the poststructuralist ‘Death of the Author’ (Barthes 1977) discredits textuality and critical, especially linguistic, meaning as inherently unstable and indeterminate, so too postmodernism abandons identity and affect by proclaiming the ‘death of the subject’ (Jameson 1992, 167).

In contrast, I would go as far as saying it is through Sam’s ‘dark journey of the soul’ that there is a moment of revelation when we finally discover he is the last druid, far from being impotent, alone, unable to grasp his self-hood, or authenticity. The Way-curves have been answering to Sam, it is Sam who has been changing the future by speaking to the past. We move from the empty signification of the original message, the terrifying but empty landscape of the Otherland with its monstrous Grim-Witch, to the comprehension that the character/author duality has reconstructed meaning in a single sentence. ‘I am with you’. In that instant, the fragmented narrative surface level fractures to reveal a sincere depth, an authentic experience between the author/character and past/present self which becomes their truth.

‘Sturgeon’s words already suggest a fit between contemporary autofiction, and the situated model of affect discussed earlier in that – like the post-positivist position and the oscillating dynamics of metamodernism – he argues that autofiction disrupt polarizing

accounts of ontology, self-hood and truth’, (Van Den Akker, Gibbons, Vermeulen (2017, 121).

I wish then to critique the author/character ‘dark journey of the soul’ which becomes a metaphor for The Last druid’s transition from a postmodern fantasy to metamodern fiction. A transition that emerges from the yearning for authentic reconciliation, not only between author/character but between past/present self, whilst knowing and acknowledging this might be an impossibility.

Bibliography

Spencer Jordan, Metamodernism and the Postdigital in the Contemporary Novel (Bloomsbury Studies in Digital Cultures, London 2024)

Robin Van Den Akker, Alison Gibbons and Timotheus Vermeulen, Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect and Depth After Postmodernism (Rowman & Littlefield, London 2017)

Alexandra Effe (Editor), Arnaud Schmitt (Editor Autofiction, Emotions, and Humour: A Playfully Serious Affective Mode (Life Writing) (Routledge 2024) Mariel Rodriguez, Ana de Almeida, Standpoint Autotheory: Writing Embodied Experiences and Relational Artistic Practice (Sternberg Press / Publication Series of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna 2025)

Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993)

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(Modern Literary Theory, ed. Ann Jefferson and David Robey (London: B T Batsford, 1993).