I first heard of J. M. Coetzee in the early 1980s when a friend gave me a copy of Waiting for the Barbarians. I do not think it retrospective fantasy to say that I can remember the experience of first reading it. I was shocked and taken aback and pulled in. I felt I was in the presence of truth. Not truth in the sense of getting the facts right, but truth in the sense of getting to the essence of the thing, of getting to the bottom of something, of ringing true. It was menacing. It seemed to me that the author must have suffered to put this image of evil into words. The author wanted to know how evil works in the human soul: how some can know and not know that they are participating in it, and others can wholeheartedly embrace it. He was not after merely theoretical but also practical and emotional understanding. And he wanted, insofar as he could, to communicate that understanding to his readers. Reading Waiting for the Barbarians puts pressure on one’s ability to tolerate truth. In the case of evil, ‘getting to the bottom’ of things meant coming to recognise there was no bottom. The book had historical specificity—in some sense, it was about apartheid. But it captured a fearful fantasy about ‘others’ that, unfortunately for us, seems to be timeless and contagious. Throughout the country today—and in countries all over the world—we are waiting for the barbarians. And we regularly assume not only that others are the barbarians, but that it is others who are doing the waiting. I have read that book repeatedly over the decades and my first experience has only been reinforced: this is a classic.
In the mid-1990s, John Coetzee joined the Committee on Social Thought, and we became colleagues and then friends. I would like to share with you two impressions of meeting him because they are so at odds with the public image. First, I have rarely met someone so open, so welcoming, so ready to talk, so generous—yet shrewd, blunt, honest and to the point; yet ready to have a good laugh. Our friendship was effortless. Second, I have rarely met someone so committed to students. Teaching, for him, was an affair of the heart as well as an ethical commitment.
So how could it be that John is publicly inscribed as ‘reclusive’? I have come to think the situation is simple: the false image is a distortion of something true. John knows what we ourselves already know, only he knows it better: that we are alive for a while. He bears better than most the knowledge that we are going to be dead for a long time. And though I do not want to identify him with any of his characters, I believe that he, like Elizabeth Costello, has a sympathetic imagination that can extend so far as to know what it is like—that is, to experience—being dead, extinct, no longer capable of experience. His life is an extraordinarily crafted answer to the question: what are we going to do while alive? He wants to understand how things are: what we humans are like, what animals are like, what numbers and mountains, music, spirits and children are like. And what ethical commitments spring from all that? His life is a witness to what he has learned and is learning—a life in literature and literary criticism that shines out to its readers and pulls us in with all the light and dark, the intensity, of a series of Rembrandt self-portraits. I think the comparison to Rembrandt is apt: for disciplining a craft to express an understanding of life and death.
I think this understanding provides a key to the false public image. John is not reclusive but he is impatient with living in clichés. Quite literally, impatient: he does not have time for it. And thus he does turn away from hollowed-out rituals that themselves turn us away from our inbuilt awareness of life and its preciousness. This reluctance to participate in distractions has itself been transformed into ‘fake news’: the cliché of being reclusive. I suppose he is also cliché’s enemy. Cliché and fashion provide a route by which we pretend to ourselves that we know what we do not know and, when it comes to evil, that we do not know what we do know. When one thinks of authors who have influenced Coetzee one regularly thinks of Defoe, Dostoyevsky and Kafka. I also think of Plato, who I suspect lies at the heart of it all.
Now when it comes to living in clichés, John and I had one close call. In October 2018 it fell to me to introduce John when he came back to the University of Chicago to deliver a lecture, ‘Growing Up with the Children’s Encyclopedia’. Is there anything more constrained and overly familiar than an academic introduction? Indeed, you can find excruciating accounts of such occasions in Elizabeth Costello. I dealt with the problem by deciding that my job was not to introduce John, but to welcome him back. That turned out to be a complex and emotionally demanding task. On the one hand there was the joy of remembering those years of teaching Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and Proust and Plato together, in the company of students and colleagues. In those days I felt there was no gap between what we were doing and what we ought to be doing. But on the other hand, in remembering, there was also the recognition that I was remembering: that time is over. And in the joy in welcoming him back I also recognised that part of what it is to welcome him back is to acknowledge that he left. And he left because he had other things, in his eyes better things, to do. I embraced his decision and our friendship has survived and deepened and taken its own route. But welcoming John back was anything but a cliché for me.
I mention this moment because I suspect it is not peculiar. This book is a collection of writings and art by friends and colleagues in honour of John on his eightieth birthday. I imagine that each of us who loves John has had the experience of departure and return. John is peripatetic: he moves on, explores other places, returns to other homes. But he also comes back, and lingers, and writes on his own, and talks about what is important. It is a very special form of fidelity, of truthfulness, for which in this book we all want to express heartfelt thanks.