May 06, 2010

D'Andorra

I got out of Catalan class yesterday at 2, and with that, the regular semester was over. Now I've just got finals ahead of me... and my two honors papers. Nihonjinron has but to be written - I have the research, I have the outline - I can knock it out in a day of good, solid work. In fact, that's the bulk of my agenda for Saturday.

The Andorra one is an entirely different matter. I read Peter Cameron's entire book Andorra, before reaching almost the end, becoming suspicious of an ocean in a landlocked country, and realizing that other than the name and the location between Spain and France, Cameron's Andorra was pure fiction. Lovely. Because, you know, I really have that much time to waste right now. And Ellis in it's infinite wisdom had the book cataloged under Andorra - Social Customs. There is another famous literary work called Andorra, but I didn't even bother looking that one up, because Max Frisch's Andorra isn't even near Spain. If you're going to make up a country, fine, but at least make up a name to go along with it! Watch Princess Diaries if you don't know how!

Where could I go next? Let me start by introducing Andorra for those not in the know. It's a very small country, considered a microstate, but not in the sort of pocket-sized sense of Monaco or the Vatican. It's got just over 80,000 people and just under 500 square kilometers. (About the size of Prague. Luxembourg, for comparison, is 2,500 square kilometers, and the Vatican is 0.44 kilometers.)

Andorra is physically squished between France and Spain, landlocked high in the Pyrenees Mountains. Especially until recently, many aspects of Andorra's economy, governance, and cultural make-up would have been best illustrated by a Venn Diagram between France and Spain. Even today, Andorra is governed by two co-princes, the president of France and the bishop of Urgell, Spain. The official language of Andorra is Catalan, a romance language spoken by some 9 million people, mostly as a minority language within Spain.

Oh! And one time, a Russian adventurer named Boris Skossyreff showed up, called himself the Prince of Andorra, and declared war on the bishop of Urgell. Spain arrested him about 8 days later.

A good start, right? Well, that's all I had for a long time, and it came mostly from the Wikipedia article. I had that and Peter Cameron's book and Max Frisch's play, both of which seemed to serve mainly to clog up Google results, which weren't all that extensive and helpful to start with. I was frankly stunned by how difficult the research was proving. I decided I could probably find more information about Columbia, Missouri than I could find about the entire country of Andorra and it's thousand years of history. And I'm no amateur when it comes to research, and I have a large research library practically in my backyard! There had to be more!

I started by lowering my expectations. I started admitting books about micro-states in general, hoping for several lines or maybe even a chapter on Andorra. I came away with Fragmentation and the International Relations of Micro-States, by Duursma, and Secrets of the Seven Smallest States of Europe, by Eccardt. Both were surprisingly helpful - amazing what seems like a generous amount of information after looking for a while. The Eccardt title is far more accessible, with the kinder writing style, slightly less dense form, and occasional picture almost reminding me of those little explore the country books for kids, or a very well done Wikipedia article. In addition, the Duursma text had extra information about.. well.. the fragmentation and international relations of Andorra, and the Eccardt text was useful for the cross-comparisons with the other microstates.

Congratulations, I thought to myself. You now have enough to... make a basic, middle-school level project. With the cute poster and fun facts and everything. Brilliant.

Except for the small matter of... this is supposed to be a 25 page research paper, with, you know, a thesis, an argument, the works.

I started to get very, very nervous.

I spent hours on Google, with precious little to show other than copies of the Wikipedia page, an occasional blurb about dear Prince Boris, and a few sparse travel articles about how much fun it was to go skiing and get drunk in Andorra. In Peter Cameron's book, the main character said that he had travelled to Andorra because of a book he had once read, called Crewe Train. Now, this seemed a strange title to be invented, so I looked up the book myself. Surprisingly, it not only exists, but - I'm cautious, and not devoting a lot of time to it - the Andorra depicted in its pages seems at least more realistic than Cameron's Andorra... it is landlocked, for example. This is, I suppose, the point and the joke behind the two or three pages devoted to Crewe Train within Cameron's book, wherein the main character remarks on how different the real Andorra seems, and another character laughs and says that the author of Crewe Train had never even been to Andorra. So funny.

Ah yes, this brings me up to yesterday evening. A week before due date, and all I had to show for my efforts were a fiction novel about a highly fictionalized Andorra, a fiction novel about a questionable Andorra, two chapters about the real Andorra, and a Wikipedia article. Oh, and Llibre D'Andorra. I'd ordered it at the very beginning, hoping against hope that it would be in English. Jokes on me, it's actually in Catalan, and in my desperation I opened the book and started reading. I knew I couldn't get through the whole book. And even if I did, what could I write about it? That's the scary thing about reading in a foreign language, especially a very foreign one - it's somehow frightening, like reading through a tunnel. You can't easily flip through or skip ahead and understand the work as a whole - maybe the dust jacket helps. My copy doesn't have a dust jacket. So I start at the beginning, and read, and hope that this Andorra isn't fiction, that it will give me some ideas, that it isn't 100% useless just because it was written 50 years ago when Andorra was almost unrecognizable compared to what it has become today.

I think fate respected my efforts, because things got easier. Just a little easier, just enough. I started feeling a tiny bit of hope, I felt that if nothing else I might have enough information to compare and contrast the influence of Spain and France in the culture/economy/politics etc of Andorra. It wasn't a good enough topic, but it was a topic. I could write that paper and turn it in and Monica probably wouldn't even say she was disappointed, she just wouldn't be too excited. I'd get my credit. I'd prefer to do better, but at least I now had a plan, and some security. With renewed hope, I threw myself at the project all day today, basically wading through Llibre D'Andorra and looking up all the proper nouns I found. City names, mostly. With these came snippets of more information, and one thing led to another. I tried every source I could think of for information. If it worked, I saved URLs and quotes. If it didn't, I kept moving. I looked for information about Andorra during the World Wars, Andorra during the Franco years. Andorra's current relationship with Catalunya, their shared linguistic heritage. I didn't find any one motherlode of data as much as a bit here, and bit there. When I say bits, I mean it. Sometimes only a single useable sentence would come from a URL. Often, there wouldn't even be that. Most useful of all were the sites that would reference a book and its reference to Andorra, however big or small. I went onto Ellis and found that many of these books were in the reserve, and ordered them. They should arrive by Monday, a nice little booster once I've started. While searching for some of these books, Ellis also showed me a few articles from periodicals. Periodicals!?! Why hadn't I thought of that? So there was another avenue.

I went to Dobbs with no books and just a sheet of paper and a pen. And I wrote down everything. All the sources and types of information that were available. It wasn't a lot, but it was something. There had to be some paper I could write using that information that would say something, that would be interesting. I still wasn't sure.

I went back home and did more research. And I think I figured it out. It's still a bit hazy. Tomorrow, after I turn in the German portfolio, I'll write it into a clear thesis. Right now I'm going to give it a little more time to ferment.

Basically this - Andorra. How it's changed. Brief historical overview since forever, till now. Mainly contrasting the Andorra of 100 years ago - the hidden mountain kingdom, mysterious, remote, reachable only by mule and in which only adult males without living fathers could vote - and the Andorra of today - tax haven, shopping scene, good skiing and cheap booze, world's longest life expectancy... more importantly, how the public perception and, if possible, the self identity of the Andorrans, fits in with this. How is Andorra represented in media and literature today, and how has it been in the past? In regards to France, Spain, other Catalan speaking areas, and the influence of public perception, where is Andorra culturally?

Let's see if I can pull it off...

1 comment:

anyanon said...

I wish you all the luck with your paper.