Annual Meeting: Keynote Address

Thank you, Philip, and good evening. It's a pleasure and an honor to be here. You picked a great time of year to visit Montreal, a city that is widely rumoured to have nine months of winter and three months of mediocre skating. I hope you feel at home here, and I suspect you will, because as 21st-century people who love and work with books, you may already feel that you belong to a minority, perhaps a beleaguered minority.

That sort of feeling is the air that English-speaking Montrealers breathe. As Canadians, we form a minority within North America; as Quebecers, we form a minority within Canada; and as English-speakers, we form a minority within Quebec. But that minority has produced, and continues to produce, distinguished work in many fields—if I mention the names Leonard Cohen, Charles Taylor, Steven Pinker, Saul Bellow, Oscar Peterson, Naomi Klein, Rufus Wainwright, Wilder Penfield, William Shatner and Arcade Fire, you'll perhaps gain a sense of the cultural vitality of this community.

Before I offer a few thoughts on the main topic of this gathering, I'd like to bring you fraternal greetings from the tribe of writers. Looking over your program for the next couple of days, I noticed with a certain grim amusement that one of the sessions is introduced with the words: "Authors often insist that a broad range of individuals in a variety of fields will want to purchase their books, but does that really happen?" I fear this is intended to be a rhetorical question.

From time to time, of course, my tribe likes to complain about publishers, and I confess we've been known to crack the occasional joke about you. My favourite is that old standby: "How many publishers does it take to change a light bulb?" The answer: "I'm sorry I haven't got back to you yet, but the question is surprisingly complicated, and it's taking me a bit longer to deal with than I anticipated. I plan to discuss funding arrangements with our granting agencies over the next few months, and if the board of directors is supportive, hopefully we can get a new lightbulb in place by next spring."

Of course most writers don't get paid enough to buy the new energy-efficient lightbulbs. I suspect there's not a country in the world where it's easy to be a professional writer, and Canada is no exception to the rule. A 2006 survey of freelance writers, conducted by the Periodical Writers' Association of Canada, showed that the average annual income of members was merely $24,000, an amount that had barely gone up over the past thirty years. So we buy the cheapest lightbulbs we can, and sometimes we work by candlelight.

But seriously, for all the complaints that writers have been known to make about publishers and editors, we also understand that we'd be lost without you. Our ability to touch an audience depends on your skill in making our work available to readers. We need your talents, your energy and your faith in words. I realize that the Internet is transforming the business of publishing, as of so many other things, but it would still be foolish for any author to imagine that he or she could somehow bypass the whole publishing process and make a fortune online. If you're a composer and you create a new symphony, you need to find conductors who believe in your score and who can transform its notes into living sound. Likewise as a writer, I need to find publishers who believe in my prose and poetry, and who can preserve it for the future.

It's a rich and fascinating topic you've chosen as the theme of this conference, and I want to turn now to a few issues this theme has raised in my mind. I won't try and deal with any of the technical or technological questions you'll be examining in the next couple of days, mostly because of sheer bloody ignorance on my part, but also because I'd like to explore one or two ideas that perhaps underlie the notion of preserving the future—ideas it may be worth keeping in mind as you delve into what are to me the arcane mysteries of XML, GBL, ISI and digital asset management. (In order to benefit fully from the sessions that await you, I'd need to take a crash course in acronym management.) The sheer pace of technological change means that in many fields of endeavour, not just computers, what was absurdly futuristic a couple of decades ago is now absurdly passé. Archives struggle to cope; so do people.

But let me focus on a scholar who succeeded, perhaps beyond his wildest dreams, in keeping the future alive. His name was John Swanton, and you may well be familiar with some of his accomplishments. He was a Harvard-educated anthropologist—born in 1873, he died in 1958 – who's known for his work with indigenous peoples of the southeastern United States. But when Swanton was a young man, the great Franz Boas suggested he should travel to the Queen Charlotte Islands, off the coast of British Columbia, so as to investigate the remnants of Haida culture.

The Haida had been among the most powerful, ruthless and feared peoples of the Pacific Northwest—their many surviving totem poles attest to the magnificence of their civilization. As Claude Lévi-Strauss once wrote, "Of all the art of which traces remain, that of the Indians of the Northwest Coast is certainly one of the greatest." He compared it to the art of the ancient Greeks and Egyptians—and, like those peoples, the Haida were slave-owners.

In the late 18th century, before they were exposed to foreign diseases, not to mention commercial, religious and governmental assault, there were probably about 12,000 Haida. By the time Swanton arrived, in the fall of 1900, their population had shrunk to 700. Such was the toll of smallpox, leaving so much history, so much knowledge, preserved in so few minds. Swanton worked with two people in particular, a blind middle-aged man named Ghandl and a crippled elder named Skaay. They fed him Haida myths, for want of a better word, of extraordinary richness. And Swanton made a remarkable choice: he didn't just record those myths in the English language; he transcribed them, phonetically, in a language he did not fully understand. In a year of fieldwork, he packed several thousand pages of his notebooks with stories, songs, histories and myths, jotted down in the original words of Ghandl, Skaay and a few other informants. This was not the usual thing for a young anthropologist to do in 1900, partly because anyone with any common sense would have said that the Haida language was doomed.

The obvious lesson to draw from all this is that Swanton meant to preserve everything he could from the past. He was looking backwards. Or was he? He had no way of knowing that after decades of silence—decades of coming to terms with the shock and awe of recent history —Haida culture would experience a tremendous revival in the late 20th century. One of the key figures in that revival was the sculptor Bill Reid, whose massive bronze sculpture "The Spirit of Haida Gwaii" you can see on the grounds of the Canadian Embassy in Washington, DC. Reid drew on Haida mythology as the main catalyst for his own work. He was a good friend of Robert Bringhurst, a Los Angeles-born poet and author who immigrated to the west coast of Canada in the late 1960s. And Bringhurst became so fascinated by Haida culture that not only did he write one book with Bill Reid and another book about him; he also learned the Haida language. Between 1999 and 2002, he produced book-length translations of the myths —Bringhurst would prefer the term "epic poems"—that Ghandl and Skaay had narrated to John Swanton a century earlier. Those translations were published in the United States by the University of Nebraska Press. They are a superb achievement.

It's only fair to add that there are some Haida who resent the way Bringhurst adapted and publicized their stories outside their territory. (Given that the words "publish" and "publicize" are so closely related in etymological terms, I find it interesting that they have such different connotations.) Bringhurst had the misfortune to see his labour of love appear at the very moment when Canadian writers were embroiled in some bruising battles over appropriation of voice. Leaving that question aside, however, it's clear that if Stanton had not written down those words he plucked from the aging lips of Skaay and Ghandl, then those stories would now be inaccessible to Haida artists, Haida writers, Haida language-learners, Haida teachers and so on. The words that Swanton preserved will serve as an inspiration for decades or centuries to come, as they already have done for Bill Reid and Robert Bringhurst. Because, against all odds and supposed common sense, the Haida language is not dead yet.

And so, if we look back from the perspective of the early 21st century, we can say that when John Swanton sat beside the ocean in 1901 doggedly recording the words of Skaay and Ghandl, he was also breathing life into a good part of the Haida future. He was salvaging from oblivion artworks that would be created several decades later, when he himself was dead. Perhaps this is one of the hidden meanings of our phrase "for posterity." When we write or publish something with an eye on posterity, we are nourishing the unborn future. We are giving the future a chance.

After Swanton had moved back home, he did most of his fieldwork in the southern United States. The year 1915 found him conducting research in Oklahoma, a state that had recently been created out of what was supposed to be Indian Territory. There he met a man named Earnest Gouge, and encouraged him to write down the myths and legends of his nation, the Muskogee Creeks, in his own language. The resulting manuscript would languish for 85 years in the National Anthropological Archives. Finally two Creek-speaking women and a professional linguist decided to translate Earnest Gouge's manuscript, and it was published in 2004, in a bilingual edition, by the University of Oklahoma Press. Here again, in a very different landscape and against the background of a very different history, we can glimpse John Swanton's influence at work in the safeguarding of a particular future.

What I mean by the future, you see, is not some dreamed-of realm powered by scientific innovations and engineering devices that are to me, and perhaps to many of you, almost unimaginable. The future, I fervently hope, is not destined to narrow into a technological Singularity—that word is usually spelled with a capital S, as if to highlight its quasi-religious nature—via a leap of faith and micro-machinery that defies understanding. By the future, I mean a world that remains unpredictable, a world whose possibilities have not been closed off. To me, the future is a place of debate, of contestation. It is, by definition, an open realm.

That openness is what, I hope, your work and mine can help preserve. And yet events and choices that occur every day can have the effect of closing off that realm—depriving the future of oxygen, if you like. I want to turn now to a few of these.

In recent years, because of human activity, the Yangtze River dolphin in China and Miss Waldron's red colobus monkey in West Africa have officially been declared extinct. To think about those species, we must now imagine a distant past in which they flourished, along with a more recent past that made their life untenable. For those species, the notion of a future has become impossible.

It follows, then, that conservation is a classic act of maintaining possibility, often against higher and higher odds. I can't resist mentioning a local example. Canada has very few endemic vertebrates – creatures which are found nowhere else in the world – but one of them, a large, slow-moving fish called the copper redhorse, used to thrive in the St. Lawrence River around Montreal Island. Now it has vanished from most of its old haunts, probably because of pesticide runoff and "development." Today the copper redhorse is believed to survive in just two rivers here in southwestern Quebec. The scientists, citizens and children who are fighting to save the fish are not merely struggling to keep alive a few dozen, or perhaps hundred, immune-weakened individuals. They are also trying to preserve a future for the entire species.

A few years ago I wrote a non-fiction book called Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, in which I looked at the worldwide effort to keep minority languages alive. It occurs to me now – I only wish I'd thought of it then – that the most succinct way to sum up the hard work of language activists in a host of countries is to say that they too are fighting to preserve a future. There's a paradox here, because people who don't think it matters if a language dies often accuse the activists of hanging on the past. That view can be traced all the way back to the Victorian philosopher John Stuart Mill, who wrote the following: "Nobody can suppose that it is not more beneficial to a Breton or a Basque … to be a member of the French nationality, admitted on equal terms to all the privileges of French citizenship … than to sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage relic of past times, revolving in his own little mental orbit, without participation or interest in the general movement of the world." I don't suppose Mill actually knew any Basques or Bretons, or he would not have dismissed them as half-savage relics. My dislike for what he says is matched only by my distaste for his patronizing tone.

In 1868, about the same time that Mill was writing his scornful polemic, a federal commission on Indian affairs in the United States released a report urging that rapid steps be taken to abolish indigenous languages. The report said: "Through sameness of language is produced sameness of sentiment and thought." That wasn't a threat; that was a promise. Therefore, the report went on, the Indians' "barbarous dialect should be blotted out and the English language substituted." North Americans are still living with the after-effects of that policy, although it's rare now for people to advocate sameness with such unbridled enthusiasm.

What I want to pass down to my two children is a world blessed by diversity, not a world in which languages and cultures are routinely blotted out. Against Mill's image of a half-savage Breton sulking on a rock, I'd prefer to set my memory of an afternoon in a town in north Wales. There I watched teenaged actors taping an episode of a Welsh-language soap opera, Rownd a Rownd, which tackles issues like drugs, homelessness and adolescent pregnancy in a way that speaks directly to young people—using a living language that is probably older than Latin.

So when I use the verb "preserve," I'm not thinking of pickling, sealing and setting aside in a dark cupboard. I'm not even thinking about preservation orders. What we need to preserve, I would say, is not just a respect for the past but also a freedom of imagination that makes the future a more welcoming place than it often seems.

The desire to be contemporary, hypermodern, up-to-the-minute—our language comes with many adjectives for this urge—this desire, when acted upon, has consequences. It's not an innocent wish. In the early 1920s the celebrated French architect Le Corbusier had the urge to build a hypermodern city called Ville Contemporaine that would house 3 million people. At the heart of Ville Contemporaine would be its transportation hub, composed of several layers below a central airport; around the airport would rise a collection of sixty-storey skyscrapers. Lousy idea, right? What I haven't mentioned is that Le Corbusier also dreamt of bulldozing entire neighbourhoods of Paris to create space for his new city, whose airport would have been located near the River Seine. Thank goodness the French refrained from putting his vision into practice. Restraint succeeded in preserving Paris from a particular kind of future.

One thing I find very revealing about our current attitude to the future is that, on the evidence of the English language, we now peer forward with immense foreboding. Last fall I happened to catch a TV interview with William Gibson, the novelist who invented the term "cyberspace" in his 1984 novel Neuromancer—that novel was also, by the way, where the notion of the matrix originated. Gibson's 2007 novel Spook Country is set in the present, not the future, and it features things like "spatially tagged hypermedia" that show how cyberspace is turning itself inside out, moving from the computer screen into the world at large. In that TV interview, Gibson described life in the 21st century as "invariably stranger than anything I or any other science-fiction writer have ever made up."

Back in the 1950s and '60s, when science fiction was generally a cheerful genre featuring astronauts who zipped around the galaxy finding new worlds to explore, the words "jet" and "astro" were often used to evoke the ultramodern. Phrases like "jet set," "jetport" and "jet age" showed a gleaming confidence in the future. Now, a couple of generations later, most of those phrases sound kind of creaky. Who talks about a "jetway" any longer? The term that has lasted best from that period is the only negative one: "jet lag." Today we have a new favourite prefix to denote where society is heading: "cyber." William Gibson is often identified as a cyberpunk writer. And when you think of all the compounds that have been minted with that prefix, you find words like "cyberbullying," "cybercrime," "cyberstalk," "cyberterrorist" and "cyberwar." The English language suggests that if we're hoping to escape our woes, the Internet is not a good place to look.

Throughout history, oppressive regimes have understood the power of the word, and they have often tried to create a society where reading could be controlled. In 1740, the South Carolina legislature passed a Slave Act making it illegal for any white person to teach a slave how to read or write. South Carolina also had a law forbidding black people to assemble after sundown "for the purpose of mental instruction." Any slave caught writing could have the index finger of his right hand cut off. When Joseph Goebbels addressed a massive crowd in Berlin in 1933, he incited his listeners to burn books—and they did, more than 20,000 of them. "Tonight you do well to throw in the fire these obscenities from the past," Goebbels declared. "This is a powerful, great and symbolic action that will tell the entire world the old spirit is dead. From these ashes will rise the phoenix of the new spirit."

That was one vision of the future. Heaven preserve us from it. Being temperamentally inclined to pessimism, I need to remember that ideas of the future can equally well inspire those who are downtrodden, those who are oppressed, those who are imprisoned.

But what can also inspire, as well as threaten, is the truth. I write non-fiction because I believe in telling it, and I'm sure you publish books because you believe in disseminating it. So long as we are willing to speak truth to power, then as publishers, editors and writers, we can serve as the bearers of inspiration. I apologize if I've gone on for too long, and I'll simply end by quoting a line from one of Gustave Flaubert's letters: "Read, in order to live." "Read, in order to live."

Questions about the Web site?