The British writer Julian Barnes, winner of this 46th edition of the Princess of Asturias in the Literature category, has been in charge of giving voice to the people recognized this year, first of all, before the awards themselves are presented by the King and Princess Leonor.
The Briton, who has announced these days in Asturias that he will not write again (his last book was Farewells, Anagrama) has taken a tour of the importance of the arts and has 'corrected' authors who questioned the quality of his contemporaries.
"When I was young and began to acquire knowledge about books, art and music, I took it for granted without the slightest doubt that each of the arts, over the centuries, showed inevitable progress."
My presumption was based on the fact that everything else in the world had also progressed: science, technology, society, politics...
"It was a tacit presumption, based on the fact that everything else in the world had also progressed: science, technology, society, politics... And the same had to have happened with the arts. They were taught to us chronologically, and mere chronology implied progress: primitivism, classicism, romanticism, realism, naturalism, impressionism, symbolism and in the end, modernism, postmodernism, etc. And newer clearly meant better."
Barnes has used his readings to explain why some authors have nurtured the talent of others. "When I was about twenty years old I read that Voltaire disdained Shakespeare: he recognized his genius, but regretted that he did not have the slightest spark of good taste, nor the slightest understanding of dramatic norms; furthermore, his influence on the British theater had been disastrous. But around the same time I read a book called Shakespeare Our Contemporary (Shakespeare, our Contemporary) by the Polish critic Jan Kott in which he explained the clarity and authority with which the playwright had understood, described -and predicted- the modern world".
"This, to say the least, was a bit confusing, but solvable. The arts can give the impression of progress, although they often express new versions of ancient truths. When Impressionism was in vogue in Paris, Renoir visited Spain and shortened his stay for the following reason: 'When you look at Velázquez you realize that everything has already been said,'" he stressed.
The Princess of Asturias of Letters focused on Cervantes' magnum opus: "And most writers and artists have had perceptions as sobering as yours at some point in their lives. I, in my case, had a similar one the first time I read Don Quixote and discovered one of my favorite passages in universal literature.
The narrator stopped to detail how the figures of Don Quixote and Sancho have influenced him. "As you know, the first part of Don Quixote was published in 1605 and the second in 1615, but shortly before that an apocryphal and pirated second part had appeared. In the second authentic part, Don Quixote and Sancho encounter people who have read things about them not only in the original first part, but also in the second part, the apocryphal one. Knight and squire hear that these people despise them when they talk about them, and at one point they are approached by an individual who even allows himself to brand Quixote's own beard as an impostor because he claims that he had met the real one. What would we say about similar episodes? What are playful, postmodern, self-referential, intertextual, metafictions?"
"So I no longer think that the arts are progressive and that each evolution improves the preceding one. I prefer to think that we are all sitting at a huge round table, perhaps in a La Mancha inn, talking among ourselves about our work over the centuries: I imagine that Renoir asks Velázquez how the hell he painted his paintings, that Voltaire rectifies the disdain he once professed for Shakespeare, that Flaubert (who describes himself as 'an old romantic') expresses his veneration for Cervantes and also, perhaps, makes a bad face at that Englishman, sitting there in a stool, who had the insolence and madness, a century after the French author died, to write a book titled Flaubert's Parrot."
