Most writers, handed a royal stage and a Joan Miró sculpture, would be forgiven a lap of honor. Julian Barnes used his to tell the audience that art does not get better. On the evening of Friday, October 23, at the Campoamor Theater in Oviedo, before King Felipe VI, Queen Letizia, Princess Leonor and Infanta Sofía, the English novelist received the 2026 Princess of Asturias Award for Literature and opened the laureates’ speeches with a quiet demolition of the idea of progress. “The arts may give the impression of progress,” he said, “but are often expressing versions of old truths in new ways.”
The award comes with the Miró sculpture, a diploma, an insignia and €50,000. Barnes, who turned 80 in January, shared the evening with a rather eclectic set of fellow laureates, among them Patti Smith, the historian Timothy Garton Ash, the astronaut Christina Koch, Studio Ghibli and Leo Messi.
A round table in a Spanish inn
As a young man, Barnes explained, he had assumed the arts marched forward like everything else, from classicism to romanticism to modernism and beyond, “and newer meant better.” Then came the doubts. Around the age of twenty he read Voltaire’s complaint that Shakespeare had not “the least spark of good taste,” and at about the same time a book by the Polish critic Jan Kott arguing that Shakespeare had understood the modern world better than anyone. Later Renoir supplied the clincher. After seeing Velázquez in Spain, the painter cut his visit short: “When you look at Velasquez, you realise that everything has already been said.”
For Barnes, the chastening moment came with Don Quixote. In the second part, published in 1615, the Don and Sancho Panza meet people who have read about them, not only in the genuine first volume but in a pirated sequel that had appeared in the meantime, and one character from the fake book even insists that this Quixote is not the real one. “What might we call such scenes?” Barnes asked. “Ludic, post-modern, self-referential, intertextual, metafictional?” In a theater full of Spaniards, it was a compliment that landed beautifully.
He closed with an image worth framing: all the artists of history around one enormous table, Renoir asking Velázquez how on earth he did it, Voltaire being put right about Shakespeare, and Flaubert paying his respects to Cervantes while scowling at “that Englishman sitting over there on a low stool, who had the impudence, and the folly, a century after the Frenchman’s death, to write a book called Flaubert’s Parrot.”
“I prefer to think of us all sitting at an enormous round table, in a Spanish inn perhaps, discussing our work with one another across the centuries”
The last chapter
The jury, chaired by Santiago Muñoz Machado, director of the Royal Spanish Academy, chose Barnes in June from 37 candidates of 24 nationalities. It praised an “extraordinary narrator and essayist” with a “lucid, warm and compassionate” view of humanity, and borrowed his own description of his temperament: “melancholy optimism and cheerful pessimism.” He succeeds the Spanish novelist Eduardo Mendoza.
The career being honored began in 1980 with Metroland, after a spell compiling the Oxford English Dictionary. Flaubert’s Parrot made the Booker shortlist in 1984, and The Sense of an Ending finally won it in 2011. Along the way he wrote crime novels as Dan Kavanagh, essays on art and a memorable book about cooking. This year’s Departure(s), he insists, is the last. “Many people don’t believe me,” he told reporters in Oviedo, “because I write fiction, so they think I’m making it up.” He has written 15 novels, he said, and does not want to become “the kind of writer who writes weaker and weaker stories.” He will go on writing about art, “as long as magazines want to publish me.”
His week in Asturias was busy. He spoke to some 2,000 students, a crowd he likened to a meeting of the Chinese Communist Party, and told local reading groups that Flaubert is the best writer of all time. He also mentioned that he read La Regenta, the great Asturian novel, in 1986, the year it first came out in English, which must have pleased the room enormously.
A word from the desk
There is something rather perfect about a writer who spent his career in conversation with dead masters taking his leave by pulling up a chair beside them. We will take his retirement as we take any good novelist’s word, with great affection and just a little doubt.
News Editorial Desk, Pine Tree Shilling Publishing