Edited transcript of J.M.

Coetzee’s opening lecture at the ​Worlds Literature Festival Salon, Norwich, UK,
2012 :

In Australia, there is a state-funded radio and television service called SBS. SBS stands for Special
Broadcast Service, and is directed to Australia’s various immigrant communities. It runs news
programmes from foreign sources, foreign language films etc. Special Broadcast Service is not
particularly a catchy name. Two or three years ago, under the three-letter acronym SBS, a legend began to
appear on the television screen – ‘Six Billion Stories, and counting.’ Only a few months ago, the legend
changed – ‘Seven Billion Stories, and counting.’ The implication is clear – each human being in this
world of ours has a story, and the task of a service like SBS is to tell these stories as best they can. In the
lexicon of the Anglo-West, the words ‘story’ and ‘narrative’ have taken on new prestige of late.
Politicians and corporations no longer speak of presenting a case, but of presenting a narrative. The
connotations of disreputability or even falsehood, that used to cling to the word ‘story’ – “Have you been
telling stories again Tommy?” – have evaporated or being finessed. Truth? Who knows what that is, say
the new storytellers. In the meantime, we have stories, some of them more powerful and others more
persuasive.

In this new world of stories, scientists are having a hard time – the purer the science, the harder the
time. A man sitting in a room, drinking cups of coffee, thinking, taking naps, coming out after two weeks
with a sheet of paper covered in symbols which his colleagues opine represent an advance in grid
topology – that is not much of a story. And if a man emerges from this ordeal of pure thought, shaking his
head, his paper blank, that is not a story at all. Scientists at the other end of the spectrum, the impure end,
have better prospects. You are a marine biologist, you don your diving suit and plunge into tropical
waters… the boat creaks… they wait nervously… they check the telemetry, for you have been attacked by
a shark or by a giant cuttlefish… then at last your head pops up, they heave a sigh of relief and exchange
high fives. It is a story – a recognizable little story with a beginning, a middle and an end – part of a larger
story of a life of exploration and discovery. The purer end of science remains wedded to a conception of
the truth that sits uncomfortably in this new world of stories. We have our stock of scientific anecdotes –
young Isaac Newton wondering why the apple falls, kindly professor Kekulé seeing the structure of the
Benzene molecule in a dream. Yet there remains a fundamental difference between talking of Newton’s
theory of gravitation and talking of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The play Hamlet is forever tied to the
intentions of its author, whereas to the extent that it is true, that is, universally accepted, the formula
describing gravitation has broken its ties with the man who first wrote it down – it has become just part of
the way things are. The truths I am talking about here used to be called ‘objective truths’ – the term seems
to have fallen into disuse. The objective truths, on which science trades, sit uneasily among truths that are
relative to the subject – my truth and your truth, in a world of seven billion stories, all of them good!

But are there a mere seven billion stories? Even if we concede that one has to be human to tell a story,
does one have to be human to ​have a story? Don’t dogs and cats and mice and frogs have stories too?
What of microbes, bushes and trees? Are there in fact trillions of billions of stories? There are
philosophers who distinguish between beings that can be said to be the subject of a life, and beings whose
lives are determined from birth to death. Barnacles, for example, are living beings but are not the subjects
of lives. There is only one barnacle life, the same from one barnacle to the next. On the other hand, a
dog’s life may, to a degree, be unique, or at least may be felt by the individual dog to be unique.
Similarly, no matter how closely the life of one Bangladeshi rice farmer may, from the outside, resemble
the life of another Bangladeshi rice farmer, each life is felt by its subject to be uniquely his own. This
claim amounts to less than saying that each of us, man and dog, is ​master ​of our story, master of our fate;
but it amounts to more than saying that we are born into a life which we then blindly live out. It is the
space between these two positions – being the ​master of a life and being the ​vehicle of a life that I am
touching on here. My first question then is – ​What is it to have a life? Is there any difference between
saying ‘every dog has a life’ and saying ‘every human being has a life’? ​My second question – ​What
is the difference, in the case of human beings, between ​having a life and ​having a life story?​ ​In
particular, what cultural assumptions might I be making when I say “I have a life story, and it is
my own.” I ask this later question because among the seven billion of us, there are some who see it as no
source of pride or self-validation to be told that their life stories are unique, different from those of their
neighbours. “I live in society”, such people might reply, “my life is just a typical life.”

During the 19th century, a kind of fiction flourished in Europe. It was, in retrospect, given the name
‘Realism’. To theorists of the Realist novel, novels like those of Balzac and Tolstoy and Zola, a key
concept is ‘representativity’ or ‘typicality’. Character needs to be both representative (typical) and unique.
In the best Realist novels, characters manage to be historically representative and yet are not trapped by
their representativeness, their typicality, in some sort of social allegory. They are not, for example, just a
typical workman struggling for justice against a typical factory owner. They are individuals, they exercise
individual freedom. Behind the SBS formula, we can detect a primitive version of this same conception of
Realism – that our seven billion stories should at the same time be representative (tell us what it is like to
be a Bangladeshi rice farmer or a Moldovan sex worker) and unique, the story of one particular man or
one particular woman, for, the theory goes, the stories of others become meaningful and relevant to us by
a process of sympathetic identification. It is not with the farmer as farmer or the sex worker as sex worker
that we identify, it is with the underlying man or woman, the being with whom we share humanity. If we
identify with a stranger, then his story or her story becomes ​our​ story.

Thus far, I have been talking about life stories and the generality and uniqueness of life stories. I now
turn to the question of truth.

Nancy is 33 years old, divorced, has a 9-year-old daughter who lives with her father who has remarried
and emigrated to Canada. Nancy now works at a travel agency. She doesn’t like her present job. She had
wanted to go to art school but her parents wouldn’t let her. Now it is too late. Nancy goes through a black
phase. She finds herself eating compulsively. She cries herself to sleep at night. On the advice of a friend,
she sees a therapist. She is encouraged to talk about her childhood. Gradually, a story begins to take form
out of the mists of the past – the story of Nancy’s mother, bitter about being trapped in the life of a
suburban housewife, envious of her daughter, her daughter’s looks, her daughter’s talents, her daughter’s
freedom, and determined that her daughter should suffer as she has suffered. It was her mother, Nancy
discovers during the course of her therapy, not her father, as she had previously believed, who was
responsible for the decision that she should go to secretarial school, not art school. Nancy’s therapist
encourages her to face up to her new-found life story, and to use the self-awareness she has gained to free
herself from the mother figure inside her, the mother who does not want her to succeed. Nancy re-enters
the world, armed with new self-understanding. She feels stronger and more confident. She enrolls for
evening classes and discovers she has talent in pottery. She sells some pieces; she has her first exhibition.
She begins to come out of her shell. The reawakening of Nancy can most certainly be attributed to her
happy decision to see a therapist. The therapist has enabled her to see the shape of her life, to tell her life
story, which, up to this point has been a repeat of her mother’s story of defeat, but which she is now able
to transform into a different story, a story of success. By understanding the past, Nancy has been
empowered to escape the past. She understands the past by seeing the shape of the past, that is, by seeing
it not as just one thing after another, but as a story with a shape to it.

We call on Nancy’s therapist and discuss the case with her. Wouldn’t it be prude to ask Nancy’s mother
whether it is true that she was envious of her daughter’s looks and talents and prevented her from going to
art school? That is not the way therapy works, the therapist replies. The therapist’s consulting room is not
a court of law. It is not up to me as a therapist to pass judgement on Nancy or her mother. Nancy is my
patient. Therefore it is Nancy’s story that is before us, not her mother’s. Can’t you see the change that has
taken place in Nancy since she began therapy? Nancy is a new person! Nancy may indeed be a new
person, we reply, but what if she is a new person on the basis of a falsehood? What if Nancy’s mother is
actually a nice woman who never wanted anything but the best for her daughter? I don’t want to get
bogged down in some philosophical discussion about truth and falsehood, replies the therapist. What
matters is ‘subjective truth’. The truth for Nancy is that her mother tried to reproduce her own failed life
in her daughter. Now that Nancy has recognized that, she is able to liberate herself from the past, to
liberate not only herself, but her young daughter too. If Nancy’s truth is good enough for her, it is good
enough for me, and should be good enough for you too. Now, the question with which I end – ​If we are
going to be authors of our own life stories, are we free to be authors of their truth as well?