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Text File | 1992-08-28 | 4KB | 87 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 70

A Story of Vim and Rigor


By PICO IYER

BARCELONA
By Robert Hughes
Knopf; 573 pages; $27.50


    For Cervantes, Barcelona was a "refuge of foreigners,
school of chivalry, and epitome of all that a civilized and
inquisitive taste could ask for." For less quixotic souls,
however, the Spanish city has always been something quite other,
a contentious, raffish, yeasty place of shopkeepers. Catalans,
as Robert Hughes sympathetically calls them, pride themselves
on their pragmatism and their independent-mindedness: two of
their sovereign virtues are mesura and ironia. And at the heart
of their idealized self-image is seny, or "a natural
level-headedness." The patron saint of Barcelona, St. Eulalia,
is also the patron saint of stonecutters, bricklayers and
millstone makers.

    Hardly surprising, then, that the savory city of rebels
and craftsmen would appeal to Hughes, the longtime art critic
for TIME and the epic chronicler of his native Australia (in
the best-selling Fatal Shore). In Barcelona Hughes shows, in
magisterial detail, how the brash province has always been as
distinct from Spain as Catalan is from Spanish (derived as it
is not from early Latin but from later). At the same time he
notes, with affectionate irony, how Catalans have sometimes sung
the praises of their unique tongue in Spanish. Some Catalans,
he remarks, feel homesick even while at home.

    Barcelona, then, is not so much a travel book as a
prodigiously researched biography of the city, taking in every
nook and cranny of its involved history, from the 9th century
confrontation of "Wilfred the Hairy" and "Charles the Bald" to
the Postmodernist affectations of today's Catalan renaissance
(the Olympic Village for this summer's Games, Hughes notes, was
named after a Utopian socialist scheme of the last century that
fizzled disastrously). In the Middle Ages, Catalan was probably
more spoken around the Mediterranean than French, Italian or
Spanish, and the Catalan empire had consulates in 126 places;
later Barcelona was the home of the first submarine and the
world capital of anarchism. Discoursing with authority on such
arcana as bourgeois hairstyles of the 19th century, and spicing
up his narrative with his own juicily vernacular translations
of Catalan poetry, Hughes lights up even the structure of
Catalan fishing nets with indelibly vivid descriptions ("gauzy
forecourts and inner rooms hanging in the sea, into which whole
schools of tuna would stray and be compressed to a frenzy of
foam and chunky thrashing bodies").

    The great distinction of Hughes' approach is that he can
move, commandingly, from a Miro canvas to transvestite hookers
in the street without missing a beat -- and bring to both the
same kind of rigorous attention and full-bodied sensibility.
Here is a critic who can put Joe Sixpack and Jacques Derrida in
the same sentence. And if at times the sheer weight of detail
may almost be dizzying to a newcomer, the text is enlivened at
every turn by all the familiar props of the Hughes voice -- the
mischievous erudition (translating a Latin motto as "Far down!
Far out!"), the rococo diction ("fribblers" and "cutpurses"
abound) and the Augustan bite (asides that wither "the mingy
veneering of today's `lite' architecture"). Beneath the virile
lucidity of the prose, however, is a subtle and sensitive mind
that can lead the reader, patiently, into complexity: "In Gaudi
one sees flourishing the egotism achieved by those who think
they have stepped beyond the bounds of the mere ego and
identified themselves with nature, becoming God's humble servant
but copying their employer."

    It is, ultimately, for its unpretentiousness, its vigor
and its sense of style and language that Hughes loves
Barcelona. For the same reasons, one suspects, Barcelona would
love Hughes.