Chancellor of the University, Vice-Chancellor, staff, graduates, whanau, ladies and gentlemen, it is my great privilege to address you on this very proud and optimistic occasion, and to join with you in celebrating the achievement of all those honoured today. I am an affectionate alumna of Victoria University, having been inspired in the English Honours programme to set down the first ideas for a first novel; supported by the International Institute of Modern Letters to write that novel; and lucky enough to have then been published by Victoria University Press. VUP is unique in New Zealand for many reasons; but one of the most admirable, I think, is the predominance of debut authors on their list. Every debut author is a financial risk, and in the current climate most publishers are reluctant to take any financial risks at all, let alone scores of them, gladly and gamely, year after year. When I last crossed this stage, seven years ago, I had only lately met the publisher of Victoria University Press, Fergus Barrowman, at our rented writers’ studio on Tennyson Street, where I made him a cup of tea in a mug that leaked, and stirred it with a pencil because we were out of spoons, and we sat on two chairs salvaged from the landfill and he offered to take a risk on me. I owe a profound debt of gratitude to Victoria University for fostering and supporting me from the very beginning of my writing career, and to Fergus especially. I am honoured by our association.
I know that I have gained a reputation, in recent months, for being somewhat long-winded; and to prevent this speech from running on to an excess of eight hundred pages, I would like to focus my remarks upon one word only—in fact the most important word I have ever learned. To utter this word requires great courage; to use it properly requires great discipline; and to protect and uphold it is the task and responsibility of every university and government around the world. Without it, I believe we would all be lost. The word is ‘if’.
In Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It the clown Touchstone says, ‘“If” is the only peacemaker; much virtue in “If”.’ Touchstone is describing a hypothetical situation in which two people disagree. Each party has a range of weapons: the Retort Courteous, the Quip Modest, the Reply Churlish, the Reproof Valiant, the Countercheck Quarrelsome, the Lie with Circumstance, and the Lie Direct. All of these rhetorical strategies are as caustic and as insincere as they sound; and all can be avoided, Touchstone says, with an ‘If’. To begin with an ‘If’ is not to quarrel about what is, but to propose what could be—and this, the free exercise of the imagination, is not a weapon at all. ‘If’ is a form of conjuration; it calls a new world into being, at first an unformed world of shapes and shadows, that over time will thicken and evolve, becoming law, and art, and science. ‘If’ is a herald of peace and virtue; it helps us to a better conversation, a better world. Every discovery or advancement in human knowledge began, in the first instance, with an ‘If’.
What if the Earth wasn’t the centre of the solar system? What if Newton’s conception of gravity was only approximate? What if a poem didn’t have to rhyme? What if a computer could be made small enough to fit in a single room?
Questions of this kind rarely have simple answers; instead, and much more excitingly, they give rise to more questions. If so, then what? If so, how come? If so, then what about me?
There will always be more possible connections between things than there are things themselves. There are more possible relationships between people in this room than there are people; there are more things that could possibly be true than things we know are true already; there are more possible sentences that have not yet been written than there are sentences that already exist; and so too with possible stories, possible songs, possible speeches or any other possible act of creation in any of its possible forms.
Of course, none of this is easily codified or regulated. Inspiration is mysterious, and will not answer to a formula—no more than a couple can produce an identical second child by replicating the conditions in which they conceived the first. But the purpose of a university is not to replicate, but to enlarge; not to simplify, but to understand; not to reflect or serve the world in which we live, but to enrich it through the creation and exploration of an infinity of possible other worlds, some corrective, some cautionary, some preservative, some prophetic, some subversive, some strange, and all conjured from that fearless, formidable Big Bang of a word, If.
To all those graduating today: infinities await. May you continue to ask what if, and may that question give rise to many more. Thank you.