Malcolm Bull

Get into the car sometime and drive out of town. Once you have got past the suburbs, and the industrial estates, and the home-made signs (‘Buy British’, ‘Our Beef With Blair’) that mark the transition, you will find yourself in another England, barely inhabited, tranquil, timeless. It is easy to see yourself in this world; its unruffled surface seems to reflect a...

It was in 1982 that the artist then still known as Prince first invited us to ‘party like it’s 1999’, and in those days everyone quickly grasped what he meant. The Cold War made people edgy (‘Mommy, why does everybody have a bomb?’) and it seemed quite possible that we might wake up one morning and find that we were ‘out of time’. But now? Well, ‘it’s here and I like it,’ as Will Smith says in his greeting card to the new year ‘Will 2K’. There isn’t much anxiety in this song, it’s time to celebrate. What exactly? The ‘Willennium’, he helpfully suggests, ‘the party of a lifetime … resolution: get the money’. Future historians looking for evidence of the ‘terrors’ of the year 2000 aren’t going to get much mileage out of Will Smith, or indeed any other area of popular culture. The Western world is unthreatened, some people are enjoying great prosperity, and governments are more popular than at any time in living memory. The End has become a marketing opportunity; it sells anything, even (in the TV ads) Uncle Ben’s rice.‘

They want him back. They always have, but now they want him more than ever: living in Rome for almost his entire career was one thing, posthumous residence in England is another. That the artist ‘qui incame le XVIIe siècle français’ should have become (as Olivier Bonfait’s essay in the Paris catalogue describes him) ‘un objet totalement “anglo-saxon” ’ is seen as a source of national shame. Interviewed in Le Monde, Jacques Thuillier of the Collège de France complained that, ‘à l’étranger’, Poussin’s reputation had been dulled if not sullied; the quatercentenary of his birth was an opportunity to clean and polish his image to its true lustre, to show the world that the artist was (in the words of Thuillier’s colleague, Marc Fumaroli) ‘at heart ever more loyal to that noble simplicity of form that Frenchmen in the 17th century were quick to recognise as one of the … distinctive characteristics of their own kingdom’.…

Each person who dies has attributes that are shared with others, and almost every death can be ascribed to a cause that gives rise to multiple mortalities. Some deaths, like that of the Turkish hunter who was recently shot by a snake coiled around his gun, are freak accidents unlikely to be repeated; most are easily categorised by the identity of the deceased and the cause of death. In this way, the numberless dead can be corralled into conceptual villages – female victims of domestic violence, executives with heart attacks, starving refugees and so on. Although epidemiologists and insurance companies use these categories to map the landscape of the dead, their boundaries are rarely sealed. There are diseases endemic to particular populations and certain logical limitations on the possible combinations of personal attributes and causes of death; but the dead, like the quick, usually have multiple identities, and their departure is often over-determined. The spectral geography of the underworld is remarkably fluid; it is a place of shifting populations, constantly moving to fit the categories that the living impose on it.

Roberto Calasso is an Italian publisher who writes erudite works of non-fiction so elegantly self-indulgent they can be marketed as novels. He is working on a trilogy, or perhaps tetralogy, of which The Ruin of Kasch is the first part, and The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (which preceded it in English translation) the second. According to the author, the former deals with history, the latter with myth. But whereas The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony was a delightful recreation of the lost art of mythography, The Ruin of Kasch does nothing comparable for historiography, and isn’t really about history at all.