Postscript: The Dreg Heap and the Angel of History
Part Five
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. —Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
At the close of the Age of Fire, all lands meet at the end of the earth. Great kingdoms and anemic townships will be one and the same. The great tide of human enterprise, all for naught. That's why I'm so taken by this grand sight. This must be what it's like to be a god. —Stone-Humped Hag, Dark Souls 3
When the Chosen Undead opens the way to the Kiln of the First Flame at the end of Dark Souls 1, they descend a staircase that floats in a void, passing out of Lordran into a space beyond time. It’s easy to assume that the Kiln exists in the past, preserved as it was when Gwyn linked the fire. When the Ashen One reaches the Kiln at the end of Dark Souls 3, the scene is somewhat different. It now sits on a high promontory overlooking an awe-inspiring sight: surrounding the Kiln is a veritable mountain range of piled ruins. The walls of great castles stretch toward the sky atop each other, mixed with detritus of all kinds, all doused in deep drifts of ash. We’ve stepped outside of linear time again but rather than the beginning, this is a vision of the end. From the end of time we can look back and see, jumbled and superimposed, the remnants of every cycle of regeneration, the vast refuse of Ages and Ages of Fire past.
Dark Souls 3 has two expansions that tell a new story and function as a postscript of sorts to the series, definitively closing the door to further stories set in that world. The second of the expansions, The Ringed City, begins in the Dreg Heap we saw from the Kiln and takes place at the end of time. Digging through the tumbled detritus that testifies the sweep of history, players make their way to the Ringed City, a grand fortification safely ensconced within a great whirlwind, where it has escaped the ravages of time.
The journey toward the Ringed City feels like a holy pilgrimage. Deep within the Dreg Heap’s disaster of grey stone and half buried towers, we find Firelink Shrine—not the dusty, withered Shrine of Lothric, but the Firelink of Lordran, green and unspoiled. Within the ruin of history, something remains.
In Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, the great thinker attacked a vulgarized version of historical materialism that had been infected with eschatological and teleological assumptions, coming to resemble a religious dogma in its faith that history makes progress toward desired ends. Benjamin was skeptical of progress, skeptical of sorting the events of history into a causal chain—instead he envisioned the working of time as a piling up of unsorted trash. In the ninth thesis he wrote:
A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Unlike the Angel of History, we are able to face the storm blowing in from Paradise and we do plan to awaken the dead. From old Firelink we gaze out at the vast tornado that shrouds the Ringed City and hoist the Small Envoy Banner. Its description reads, “The small banner used by envoys of Great Lord Gwyn in the days of yore. For the pygmies, who took the dark soul, the Great Lord gifted the Ringed City, an isolated place at world's end, and his beloved youngest daughter, promising her that he would come for her when the day came.” It’s time to return to Eden.
At the end of the path through the Ringed City we find that youngest daughter of Gwyn: Filianore, whose eternal slumber acts as the seal on a metaphysical cataclysm. We wake her, naturally. As she gazes at us a great light rises, blinding and blotting out everything else. When we come to, the Ringed City is gone. Filianore’s body is dead and withered. Great dunes of ash stretch in every direction, an endless desert made of the past. In the distance stand the great towers of Anor Londo and Lothric Castle, these seats of divine kings having withstood the end of time.
In the fifth thesis, Benjamin wrote, “The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.” In the end, this proves to be the truest description of all the exertions and renewals of the Dark Souls series, not cycles of decline and renewal with setbacks and triumphs but one single catastrophe. It was an image, maintained for an instant that felt like eternity in Filianore’s dream. Behind that flash all is ash and decay. We thought we resisted the gale winds of progress but we were blown into the future nonetheless.
Of the creatures Miyazaki could have chosen to populate the Dreg Heap with—pulling from the vast array of demons, cosmic horrors, and spirits out of Japanese folklore that fill his worlds—he chose a being unlike anything that had appeared before or has appeared since: an angel.
