Mallorca und die Universalität der Lumières: "Bearn o la sala de les nines" von Llorenç Villalonga

Abstract

Villalonga's best-known novel is seen as an exemplary model of a type of writing that creates its narratives by elaborating the subjective, socio-geographical experiences on which it is based, and taking the region it is from, to serve as a symbol of the world. That is, a writing that seeks the exact opposite of classical regionalism, with its insistence on phenomenologically described particularities. Villalonga, who does not seek his cultural identity in mainland Catalonia and Spain, but in a dialogue between his Majorcan experiences and the skeptical side of French Illustration, uses in this work certain narrative structures that are inherited from the philosophical novel of the 18th century. This "elective affinity" with a specific aspect of French culture, however, is not limited to the narrative method: with the protagonist of his novel, el volterià don Toni, Villalonga achieves a not-at-all naive representation of the Majorcan reality of the 19th century, but as if torn to pieces, oscillating between an elegiac-idyllic attitude in the Schillerian sense and a satirical one; a double perspective that seems characteristic for Villalonga’s narrative in general.