The roots of compulsion
Finding our voices

Two kinds of eloquence

Two acceptance speeches; two ways of responding to the occasion.  

On 8 December, 1962, John Steinbeck spoke to receive his Nobel Prize.  (Thanks to Jens Kjeldsen for pointing me towards it.)  Read the text here.

On 11 June, 2014, actor Kerry Washington spoke to receive the Women in Film Lucy Award for Excellence in Television.  (Thanks to Denise Graveline for her astute analysis.)  Read the transcript here.

Compare, as they say, and contrast.

Both speakers were nervous about speaking.

Hqdefault"I wrote the damned speech at least 20 times,” Steinbeck wrote. “I, being a foreigner in Sweden, tried to make it suave and diplomatic and it was a bunch of crap. Last night I got mad and wrote exactly what I wanted to say. I don’t know whether or not it’s good but at least it’s me.” [This passage taken from here, with thanks to J F McKenna.] 

His nervousness shows, I think, in the film of his speech. 

Kerry Washington was clearly nervous at the start of her speech (you can see a short clip here) and rose wonderfully above it. 

Steinbeck speaks on behalf of his craft.  His speech pleads for writers “to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit.”  For all his protestations of authenticity, Steinbeck delivers a literary speech, uttering noble (sorry) sentiments for a grand occasion.  The speech is chock full of traditional tropes: antithesis, metaphor, tricolons, personification, and more.   

“Literature,” he said, “is as old as speech.” (Ok, not true.  But doesn’t it sound great?)  “It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.”

Washington speaks on behalf of women.  Improvising (no notes are visible), she transforms the customary gush of a showbiz acceptance speech into something calmer and deeper.  She, too, uses groups of three, contrasts and striking imagery (about light, for example); but they emerge as part of the thinking process. 

Her theme, as it turns out, is the fear women feel about speaking in public.  She tells a story against herself about turning down a TED talk, and then reflects on it:

And I realized that what that meant is that we as women put ourselves in this situation of feeling like we can’t take a risk, like in order to step out there we have to be perfect, because we’re scared that if we don’t say the right thing, or do the right thing, that we’ll reflect poorly on ourselves and our community, whether that community be women, people of color, both.

Enhanced-14921-1402597507-1Steinbeck had it all worked out; Washington is working it out in front of us.  (And embodying her theme in doing so.)  She’s discovering the words as she utters them.  She finds a way to place the key words at the ends of phrases, and to repeat them with variations, establishing a rhythm in the moment of making it.

It might be hackneyed to say that Washington is jazz to Steinbeck’s sonata form.  But so much of a speech’s success is in its music.  And the analogy is, in fact, apposite.  Steinbeck’s speech does have two themes, stated in sequence and then combined in a development section.  Washington does tell a story from which a theme emerges, picking up phrases and playing with them, echoing key words like key centres as she develops her material.   

Interestingly, both speakers, for all their stylistic differences, construct sentences similarly.  Subordination is out.  With a few exceptions, all their sentences are additive: they assemble ideas into sequences rather than tying them in knots.

And both end with a bang.  Steinbeck chooses to paraphrase the opening of Revelation, no less.

Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope.

So that today, St. John the apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man - and the Word is with Men.

Washington, too, ends by finding an arrestingly strong last line.  She presumably coined it on the spot.  Note the reflective placing of ‘extraordinary’ and ‘exceptional’ (that’s just about chiasmus, I’d say), and the carefully balanced shaping of the very final sentence.

So, I thank Women in Film, and I thank you, Shonda, and I just thank each of you for sharing in this   extraordinary evening. And while I do love the word ‘exceptional,’ I hope that it is no longer exceptional very, very soon for women to do anything extraordinary in this business.

Two kinds of eloquence.  Take your pick.

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