How We Got Here: Mallorca and literature

Before the unexpected scorched earth policy a few days ago abruptly interrupted my train of thought, I had been reflecting - as you do while lying on the beach - on Great Works. My companion, literary-wise, was Jonathan Meades, a favourite of mine, as some of you will know, as he has been name-checked here more than once. Though not for the faint-hearted or for one disinclined to drag a dictionary and thesaurus to the beach, I had come across an old essay by Meades in which it was possible to decipher the names of great authors in the English language. It was these, the manufacturers of Great Works, which began to make me wonder.

Mallorca, and don't we just keep being reminded of it, proclaims a prodigious cultural heritage, one exaggerated often enough that we might start to believe it to be so. The poetry of the island might be said to support a literary culture, but it is parochial, a tradition continued via the pompous poetic introductions to most local fiesta brochures. And one says pompous, assuming anyone other than a local can understand them. Mallorcan poetry does not cross linguistic barriers. Indeed within the island's whole literary oeuvre, few names, let alone their works, have crossed into anything like a wider consciousness. And of these, one, Ramon Llull, was born almost 800 years ago. With one or two exceptions, such as Llorenç Villalonga who probably does deserve wider recognition for his twentieth-century novel on the decline of the Mallorcan nobility, one great author every millennium or so doesn't exactly constitute a rich tradition.

The literary heritage, and indeed other aspects of the arts culture of Mallorca, owes as much to non-Mallorcans as it does to those native to the island. But even here, it is a heritage by association as much as it is by work that is Mallorcan by content, if at all. As a refuge for the arty, the island, certain parts of it at any rate, is a matter of record, yet Mallorca has not lent itself to Great Works. And it was this absence that started to make me wonder.

Perhaps the two best known foreign literary figures with a clear Mallorcan identity are Robert Graves and George Sand. Graves, though he lived on the island on and off for nigh on sixty years, was too busy paving the way for Derek Jacobi to find international acclaim as Claudius to attempt a Mallorcan Great Work. Sand, holed up with Chopin in the shivering, tubercular hell of Valldemossa, gifted the world a winter in Mallorca, a book slavishly read by inquisitive Germans and largely ignored by everyone else. It is the very paucity of writing that has given rise to prominence being given to a minor thriller-ette by Agatha Christie and the absurd notion of invoking her as a promotional tool for Pollensa.

Into this barrenness has emerged pop literature. One hesitates to describe it as a movement; it is more of a crawl, with just a hint of the opportunist, a nod in the direction of Peter Mayle here, Ruth Rendell there, TV rights and a production unit somewhere else. If it has a cultural veneer, it is one polished to reflect the superficiality that can too easily be assigned to Mallorca. This is but one problem with the island and any pretence to the Great Work. The lack of depth is analogous with the lack of history. The joke with the cultural heritage is that Mallorca doesn't have a history, outside of its own insularity. In European terms it hardly merits a footnote. Nothing of note has ever happened in Mallorca or to it. Jaume I, you might argue, but he was a part of a process that climaxed in Granada 263 years later. The Civil War, you might say. Well, you might, but so you could about anywhere in Spain. Other than aspects of the period that would rather be forgotten, such as the Guernica-bombing Condor Legion being based in Puerto Pollensa, Mallorca's Civil War was not out of the ordinary, while Great Workers - Hemingway, Orwell - have done the subject of the war rather well.

But hang on. Go back a bit. Insularity. Mallorca may not have the potential for romanticised violence as other Mediterranean islands - Sicily and the Mafia, Corsica and its terrorism - but what it does have is an obstinate remoteness. Historical events may not lend themselves to a Great Work, but historical context most certainly does, and moulded into this context are the poets, artists, the polymath Llull, the families and the landed tradition.

Great Works are also great stories, of which the Spanish language has spawned translated crossovers with worldwide appreciation - Cervantes, Marquez for example. Villalonga wrote in both Spanish and Catalan; there is no reason why his epic "Bearn" should not be better known (it is available in English). Just as there is no reason why Mallorca shouldn't lend itself to current-day Great Works, in Catalan, Spanish or English. It is the nature of a land apart that holds the key, a land that today finds itself caught in the conflict of internalising, as symbolised by those fiesta poems, and a Europe, Spain even, it once had little to do with. That's the Great Work. Just one. How it got here.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.