Intellectual Adjunct to the Games : BARCELONA, <i> By Robert Hughes (Alfred A. Knopf: $27.50; 416 pp., illustrated)</i>

In any other year one might wonder why this long, flawed but truly majestic book should have been launched upon a mass American market. Why Barcelona?

It is certainly not, as the book’s blurb suggests, “one of Europe’s most powerful and least-known cities.” Nor would many people call it “entrancing”--about the last adjective I myself would use for a tough port city that suffered 13,000 traffic casualties in a single recent year. But what the publicists suavely fail to mention is that this is 1992, and next summer a whole new book-buying audience is going to be created for Barcelona when the crowds pour into Catalonia for the Olympic Games.

Even so, the city is lucky to be commemorated for the occasion by so formidable a chronicler as Robert Hughes. We might expect no more than a flood of tacky guide- books and ad hoc travelogues. Instead, we have here a scholarly cornucopia of facts, evocations, interpretations and speculations, presented with a grand enthusiasm and telling us more about the city of Barcelona than almost any of us will ever need to know--least of all those who will be going there this year just to wave a flag beside a running track.

Let me first detail what I see as the book’s flaws, to get them over with. For my taste, it is far too long--but then what work of nonfiction for American audiences is not? It is oddly unbalanced: We have five pages about medieval guilds and five about 19th-Century musical preferences, but almost nothing about the internecine furies of the 1930s.

It can be irritatingly dogmatic, sometimes fallibly so--there is no such thing as a Hindu stupa, for instance--and it is marred by a particularly Australian kind of know-allism: Even now Australian polymaths such as Hughes seem to find it necessary to demonstrate their worldliness by wearing their learning where it most shows.

Finally, the book doesn’t quite know what it is, fluctuating so uncertainly among history, description and critique that in the end, Hughes himself seems to lose conviction, and the work trails away in a trite metaphor using Gaudi’s Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia, the one Barcelona landmark most of us know, to illustrate the condition of the city itself.

All these faults, however, are but mirror images of the book’s tremendous merits. If it is too long, that is because Hughes has such an irrepressible flood of thought to express. If it is doctrinaire and too clever for its own good, that is because he is bursting with strong feelings and astonishing erudition. And its sense of imbalance and shapelessness is only the other side of its immense range, variety and exuberance.

It is best thought of, I think, as a kind of personal anthology about Catalonia--not just about Barcelona, but about the whole ancient region for which it provides a focus and a symbol. Hughes starts with his own first acquaintance with the place, in the 1960s, and thereafter attempts some kind of historical chronology, but the material is so rich and strange, and his own interests are so wide, that all is elevated into a kind of glorious muddle. There is almost no aspect of Catalonian civilization that is not touched upon, from folk art to men’s clubs, from mustaches and medieval fishing methods to the contemporary superfluity of Barcelona “design”--defined here as an “ecstasy of angular, spiky, spotted, jerry-built, post-Memphis, sub-Miroesque mannerism.”

Through this heady melange, though, there runs a constant line--Hughes’ steady assessment of the Catalan character. He sees it as a contradictory blend of the common-sensical and the irrational: on the one hand, the hard-headed energies of peasants, engineers and businessmen; on the other, the often riotous excess of poets, artists, politicians and scatologists.

Century by century he explores this theme, illustrating it with lengthy poetic quotations, expositions of art, portraits of Catalans eminent and obscure, brilliant but all too few descriptions of the Barcelona scene today. We examine the nature of Catalan feudalism, and the fortunes of the Catalan language. We go down in a submarine with its 19th-Century Catalan inventor. We join the Excursionists, whose late Victorian rambles powerfully contributed to the Catalan sense of cultural tradition; we visit the Four Cats cafe where the Catalan artistic spirit of fin de siecle found its meeting place and its advertisement.

Best of all, we are introduced in detail to all the main facets of Catalan architecture, which Hughes presents as the true index to Catalan history. Nobody can describe buildings better than he does, and one need not agree with his judgments to relish his analyses. Fortunately, Catalonia offers a marvelous selection of designs for his robust and often witty comments, whether they be medieval churches, the palaces of 19th-Century nouveaux riches or the immense town-planning schemes that have more than once transformed Barcelona itself (the 18th-Century plan for the port area being, as Hughes says in his best Sydney manner, “so abstract as to be proleptically modernist”).

The book ends rather abruptly, as I say, with Gaudi’s fantastical Sagrada Familia (of which a critic just as eminent as Hughes recently remarked to me on a postcard that “there’s nothing loonier/in Catalunya”). Perhaps for American readers, the cathedral is a proper place to finish, conveniently reflecting as it does the Catalan characteristics that Hughes has been defining, and providing as it were a single icon to represent both the book and its subject.

To many European readers, though, and especially to citizens (like me) of cultural minorities, it may seem too facile a conclusion to a book of genuine historical significance. In Europe we are living in a time of flux, when many old loyalties are being revived or tested, and many long-accepted conceptions opened to doubt. In particular, the meaning and sanctity of the nation-state is being questioned as never before, and visionaries foresee a continent not of nations at all but of regional cultures, in which peoples long subsumed into greater political formations may come into their own at last.

Preeminent among these cultural and historical entities is the Spanish Autonomous Region of Catalonia, and nobody has ever represented its character more powerfully, or illustrated its claims to self-destiny more persuasively, than has Robert Hughes in this monumental work. Americans may enjoy “Barcelona” as an intellectual adjunct to the Olympics: In Wales, where I live, it can be read as a proleptic bill of rights.