Who says there are gods? Russell Amos Kirk does in “The Last God’s Dream,” a long, complicated tale and challenges us to reflect once again on both God’s agency and mercy.
All of Russell Kirk’s stories have been grossly neglected over the years, so it would perhaps be redundant to describe “The Last God’s Dream” as overlooked or ignored. Still, even aficionados of Kirk’s ghostly tales may prefer to skip this lengthy and puzzling read in favor of one that is more straightforward. That would be a shame, because “The Last God’s Dream,” while certainly among the more daring of Kirk’s “experiments in the moral imagination”[i] (as he described his literary efforts), is also one of the more successful at blending the author’s varied interests in politics, history, literature, and metaphysics. And with its core messages regarding the ephemeral nature of human endeavors and the necessity of imagination, it remains one of his most timely—and timeless—literary efforts. The story is based on a trip Kirk took to Yugoslavia in 1969, which he discussed both in his memoirs and in several articles written shortly after returning home. Kirk spent two weeks traveling in Dalmatia, during which he visited Diocletian’s Palace in the city of Split, located in what was then the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). At Split, Kirk could reflect on human governance from the 4th century to the 20th century. Beyond this, he could reflect on the Christian faith that both preceded Diocletian and survived into his time in Yugoslavia.
In this essay, we discuss two key things about this story. First, Kirk uses the tale to look back into history to reflect on power and the persistence of culture. We will explore these lessons via a trio of articles Kirk wrote shortly after his visit to Diocletian’s Palace. Comparing these with “The Last God’s Dream” reveals some of his different, though complementary, concerns as a correspondent and author. Second, Kirk uses the tale to provide a resolution to Lewis Carroll’s philosophical enigma of the Red King’s Dream. We will explore this resolution by analyzing the supernatural event in this story.
The story features one of Kirk’s most beloved literary creations: Manfred Arcane, Minister-without-Portfolio in the African kingdom of Hamnegri. First introduced in Kirk’s 1966 novel, A Creature of the Twilight, the Arcane we meet in “The Last God’s Dream” is a much older, if not wiser, man, and like Kirk himself a middle-aged convert to Catholicism. This Arcane, inhabiting the Summer of 1978, is the final appearance of Arcane in Kirk’s literary universe.
Arcane also appears in Kirk’s 1979 novel Lord of the Hollow Dark but the events in that novel are said to have occurred “very nearly three years”[ii] after “Balgrummo’s Hell” which took place in 1963. Additionally, a flashback[iii] in Lord of the Hollow Dark quickly recounts the events of “The Peculiar Demesne of Archvicar Gerontion”, Arcane’s only other appearance in Kirk’s writings, thereby placing those events in the Sixties as well. So, after a series of strange and amazing adventures in the mid-1960’s, we encounter the elder Arcane one memorable evening in 1978 during which he regales a pair of American tourists with stories of his two prior visits to Split.
Key details in “The Last God’s Dream” allow one to estimate Manfred Arcane’s age. Arcane states that his mother brought him to Spalato (Split’s previous name) when it was still under Austrian rule in 1913 and he was “a small boy”[iv]. He visited again in 1943 and then narrates the tale from Split on a summer evening in 1978. So, there are 65 years between 1978 and 1913. How old must a “small boy” be before a loving mother puts him into his own hotel room? Possibly as old as 10 years of age? Certainly not before 5 years of age. Thus, for this tale we can estimate Arcane to be about 75 years old.
Kirk penned two articles for his nationally syndicated “To the Point” column shortly after returning from Yugoslavia. In each, Kirk highlights several major themes that are also present in the story. First is his admiration for the remarkable resistance shown by the Yugoslav government towards the temptation to greater collectivization and Soviet influence on their country. Kirk is amazed by the hordes of foreign tourists in Split, the many examples of flourishing private enterprise he sees, and the persistence of faith in the public sphere. Despite being formally atheist, the state does not persecute believers, and churches and seminaries are as full as their counterparts in the West. “They have settled for the politics of the possible,” he concludes admiringly[v]. Just two years after the short-lived “Prague Spring” was brutally suppressed in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia seems determined to pursue its own path, one that blends some of the best and worst features of East and West. This balancing act is deftly captured in the opening scene of “The Last God’s Dream,” in which Americans Didi and Arthur Ross spend several minutes trying to find a table at a crowded cafe, before being rescued by Arcane. Their ensuing conversation is carefully attended by several members of the secret police, who nevertheless maintain a respectful attitude towards their country’s guests (especially Arcane, who is there to negotiate an important trade deal). With all the wine, brandy, and cigars the characters consume, it is easy to forget that the story is set in a remote town hidden behind the Iron Curtain, rather than a bustling tourist hub on the French Riviera.
In both the story and articles Kirk also touches upon the importance of learning from the history of the places one lives in or visits. That ought to be easier, not to mention more enjoyable, in a place like Split, which has a history stretching back thousands of years. Long before it was part of the SFRY, it belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire… and before then, it served as the capital of the Roman province of Dalmatia. Late in the 3rd century AD, having grown weary of the burdens of rule, Emperor Diocletian chose to settle there after his retirement. He built a monumental palace, the ruins of which are still, in the 21st century, a major tourist attraction. What lessons did Kirk draw from his ambles along those ancient streets and crumbling stairways? Their very age and condition remind him of the vanity of human wishes. We cannot know the future, he writes, “But the past is knowable, even though history is an art, rather than a science. Through a fuller understanding of vanished civilizations, we may do something to avert our own destruction”[vi]. In both article and story he wonders about the “fifteen centuries of rubbish” that have accumulated since Diocletian’s rule in the palace cellars, which have yet to be fully excavated. For those interested in the past, and willing to learn its lessons, there is much treasure yet to discover in Split, regardless of its monetary value.
Finally, Kirk’s travels in Yugoslavia prompt him to reflect upon the vagaries of absolute power, such as that held by the country’s former and current rulers. He sees many similarities between the Roman emperor Diocletian and Josip Broz Tito, the communist partisan who led the country after WWII (and who died in 1980). Both employed autocratic means in an attempt to maintain order during increasingly disordered times. Diocletian persecuted Christians, while Tito managed a vast security apparatus that proved almost as efficient as the KGB at suppressing dissent and terrorizing ethnic minorities. Yet the depiction of Diocletian in “The Last God’s Dream” is undeniably favorable. The ruins of his palace attend to his skill as a builder and administrator. He did the best he could, Arcane argues, under the circumstances:
His talents were more than human, and his energies. What modern man could rule all the lands he ruled, with such instruments as he possessed then, and bring to them justice and peace? Wasn’t he driven down to dusty death, like wife and daughter before him, because he was righteous in a criminal age? And wasn’t he crucified, so to speak: the long agony of starvation, with no sop of vinegar carried to him?[vii]
By contrast, Kirk does not believe that Tito will leave any lasting legacy. He may rule with the authority of an emperor, but he is hailed by his groveling subjects with far inferior titles; nor are the monuments of his Socialist Federal Republic ever likely to rival those of the Roman Empire even in its dying glory. “Tito will leave no such colossal monument behind him” as Diocletian’s palace, Kirk writes in National Review, “and his time may be recorded by future historians as a brief distasteful interregnum”[viii]. With Tito, his SFRY, and the USSR all consigned now to the dustbin of history, we can appreciate the prophetic nature of these words of 1970.
During his 1943 trip to Split, Arcane experienced a “timeless moment,” one of those rare instances in life at which the material and transcendent worlds intersect, described by Kirk in his memoirs as an experience or memory that we are destined to relive eternally after death, “not in memory only, not somehow re-enacted, but present, beyond the barriers of time, in all their fullness”[ix]. “The Last God’s Dream” differentiates itself among a variety of timeless moments in Kirk’s fiction. In “Saviourgate,” a timeless moment is experienced by a group of wartime acquaintances in a cozy British public house. Likewise, the protagonist of “An Encounter by Mortstone Pond” shares a timeless moment with his younger/older self. In contrast, Manfred Arcane shares a timeless moment across centuries with the emperor Diocletian in “The Last God’s Dream.” All timeless moments in his stories are, shall we say, thrust upon the protagonists.
This supernatural experience shared by Arcane and Diocletian—along with Arcane’s commentary—dominates the second half of the story. Swept into forgotten passageways above the hotel room at which he is staying, Arcane encounters the titular figure, Diocletian, who like many Roman emperors was worshipped as a God. Facing disgrace at the hands of his ignoble successors, Diocletian has chosen to starve himself to death. His final moments are timeless ones, connecting him with Arcane many centuries hence, though Diocletian believes that he is only dreaming or has gone mad with hunger. One cannot help but note a striking resonance between these scenes and the Red King’s Dream in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, the sequel to Alice in Wonderland.
Kirk notes his earliest memory of Lewis Carroll in his autobiography[x]. Beyond this, his fiction first references the Red King’s Dream in the 1952 tale “Sorworth Place” when protagonist Ralph Bain comforts a distraught Ann Lurlin with, “You’re not mad. We both may be dolls in someone’s dream, Ann, but you’re not mad.”[xi] Almost three decades later in this tale, Kirk refers to the Red King’s Dream as “worse than solipsism,”[xii] the philosophical view that the existence of one’s self is the only thing about which one can be certain. Kirk offers his own resolution to Carroll’s literary enigma, arguing that even worse than knowing only that you exist is being told that you cannot even trust your own cognitions – that your entire existence is only a temporary figment of another’s imagination.
Kirk sets up his tale in parallel with the Red King’s Dream (the similar titles being the first clue) but with some key differences. First, whereas the Red King is asleep and silent, Diocletian is awake and speaking. Whereas Alice only observes a sleeping Red King, Arcane converses with a near-death Diocletian. Further, it’s not a fictional Red King but a historical dominus et deus interacting with Manfred Arcane. Finally, Alice must also endure the caustic commentary of Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Arcane, in contrast, dialogues with Arthur and Didi Ross as he recounts his tale. Tweedledum describes existence ending with the Red King’s awakening as “you’d go out – bang! – just like a candle!” In an ironic twist, Arcane and Diocletian’s timeless moments resolves not with darkness but with a bolt of lightning.
In Diocletian’s delirious dream-state near the end of his life, he presents the paradox of the Red King’s Dream in the following questions to Arcane: “Was everything always dream?”, “When I cease to dream, will you cease to be?”, “Am I to dream in this room until the sun and all the stars grow cold, until the gods themselves are dead?”[xiii] Then, Diocletian implores Father Jove, the God of his understanding, for a sign… and receives one in the form of a consuming electrical fireball that enters his chamber and ends the timeless moment. It is the light and fire of this bolt of lightning, seemingly divinely sent, that signals Kirk’s resolution to the Red King’s Dream. Specifically, Kirk shows that all experiences—from those of an Emperor who claims to be a god to those of the most ordinary people from Ohio—happen in God’s presence, are subject to God’s intervention, and can be “reconstituted or restored”[xiv] at God’s pleasure. Our lives consist of “not moments of dream but moments of truth”[xv] and that death itself is the “insubstantial dream”. A further demonstration of this resolution is Arcane referring to Diocletian as dominus only at the end of the tale and then crossing himself as a sign of his loyalty to his Christian deus.
Not only does Kirk provide an answer to the philosophical enigma of the Red King’s Dream, he also seeks to show the reader a pathway to the realization of timeless moments in one’s own life. Kirk gives guidance to the reader via Didi Ross and her husband, Judge Arthur Ross. Both Arthur and Didi are lauded for their centricity – even being from a centrally located US state—Ohio. Arcane also notes that the presence of Arthur and Didi helps him recall the ordered world characterized by custom and the permanent things and away from the chaos and antagonism of his life in Hamnegri. If all the moments in our lives are played out before God and subject to reconstitution, what then must we do? We must be open to recognizing and receiving such moments. Thus, Arcane asks, “Did there come upon you tonight, Didi Ross, such moments?”[xvi]
On the final page, Arcane returns to the moral of the story: “And the grandest mystery is this: that certain moments of temporal existence defy the tooth of time—not moments of dream, but moments of truth.” Arcane goes on to proclaim to Didi, “Throughout eternity, you and I will meet by the Mausoleum, laughing together.”[xvii] But Judge Arthur Ross remains conspicuously absent from this proclamation. Why? One possibility is that Judge Ross lacks, not morality, but a moral imagination.
Germaine to the title, Judge Ross offers up this exclamation at the end of Arcane’s telling of his timeless moment: “That was quite a dream!” Judge Ross also loudly proclaims that, unlike Arcane’s hotel, the hotel occupied by the Ross’ during their visit is not haunted by ghosts. More tellingly, he also asserts to Arcane that he doesn’t believe in timeless moments. Throughout the tale, Judge Arthur Ross finds Arcane to be incredulous and dismisses the possibility of the supernatural asking Didi at the end, “Do you think that man has all his marbles?”
Arcane, in contrast, does not think that his timeless moment with Diocletian was merely a dream. Rather, Arcane speaks of his timeless moment as an Experience (with a capital E) created when a fragment of Diocletian’s experience and Arcane’s experience coincided with one another. In the end, Arcane knows more than he can prove but he does more than simply appeal to trust. Specifically, Arcane continues to show how this “moment of truth” might be objectively confirmed. Arcane details how he invited museum professionals to his room to open the door in the closet. Arcane goes on to offer a hypothetical description of Diocletian’s private apartment – which no longer exists – thereby dazzling the museum staffers who had speculated about the Emperor’s private quarters.
Manfred Arcane’s final literary appearance reminds us in the most vivid way that we are meant for immortality and not trapped within political systems (like collectivism) or philosophical dilemmas (like the Red King’s Dream). Nor can we ever be too certain about the ultimate fate of anyone’s soul. “The Last God’s Dream” ends where it begins with Arcane ruminating on the final statement in the tale’s epigraph: “Who says that there are gods?” Kirk’s epigraph quotes lines 145-146 from the Roman poet Juvenal’s tenth Satire—a passage regarding reversals of fortune. Born the son of a serf or a slave, Diocletian rose to become Emperor. His fortune reversed once again after his abdication when enemies executed his wife and daughter and forced Diocletian into exile in his Dalmatian palace. Yet, Kirk hints at a final, divine reversal in the closing pages of his tale.
What, then, are contemporary Christians to make of a man like Diocletian, the ancient Roman emperor who persecuted their forebears? Kirk, a Christian himself, seems to have regarded Diocletian with a great deal of sympathy, asserting that he was a man “just and pious according to his ancient lights,” who did the best he could for the majority of his subjects under difficult circumstances. As Arcane states near the end of the tale, “He built for the ages, and that must count for something in the Book of Judgment.” [xviii] Who says there are gods? Russell Amos Kirk does in this long, complicated tale and challenges us to reflect once again on both God’s agency and mercy.
Dr. Camilo Peralta is Associate Professor of English at Joilet Junior College and author of The Wizard of Mecosta: Russell Kirk, Gothic Fiction, and the Moral Imagination.
The authors wish to thank Cecilia Kirk Nelson for sharing the three cited articles from the Kirk Center archives.
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Notes:
The authors wish to thank Cecilia Kirk Nelson for sharing the three cited articles from the Kirk Center archives.
[i] Russell Kirk (2004) Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology of Ghostly Tales, edited by Vigen Guroin (Eerdmans), page 402.
[ii] Russell Kirk (1979) Lord of the Hollow Dark (St. Martin’s Press), page 16.
[iii] Lord of the Hollow Dark, page 215.
[iv] Ancestral Shadows, page 222.
[v] “Communism in Decay: Yugoslavia” by Russell Kirk “To the Point”, November 15, 1969.
[vi] “Digging Up the Bones of Empire” by Russell Kirk “To the Point”, November 19, 1969.
[vii] Ancestral Shadows, page 246.
[viii] “Reflections in Diocletian’s Palace” by Russell Kirk National Review, February 10, 1970.
[ix] Russell Kirk (1995) The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half-Century of Literary Conflict (Eerdmans), page 341.
[x] The Sword of Imagination, pages 188-89.
[xi] Ancestral Shadows, page 188.
[xii] Ancestral Shadows, page 222.
[xiii] Ancestral Shadows, page 236.
[xiv] Ancestral Shadows, page 241.
[xv] Ancestral Shadows, page 249.
[xvi] Ancestral Shadows, page 249.
[xvii] Ancestral Shadows, page 249.
[xviii] Ancestral Shadows, page 245 and 247.
The featured image is “Romantic Landscape with Ruined Tower” (1832-1836), by Thomas Cole, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.