Nobel Prize in Stockholm

I thought it would be interesting to read a speech that was not given in America; I chose the presentation speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004 given in Stockholm. Comparing this speech to the one given by our president, several things immediately come to mind. First, President Bush is not known for his eloquence of speech, and he is addressing an audience ranging from past presidents all the way to people like you and I. Professor Engdahl is addressing a notably distinguished crowd and, as a professor in literature, is probably trained better in the art of rhetoric. Keeping those things in mind, the main difference I found was the plan of attack: Bush clearly used pathos as his main tool for persuading people to stand beside him. Engdahl used the opposite approach, with an intense interlacing of logos and ethos references, with hardly any reference to pathos at all.

Engdahl’s use of ethos surprised me – in his compliments of the author to receive the award, Elfriede Jelinek, Engdahl does not sound very complimentary at all. He says things like, “The author is everywhere and nowhere, never quite standing behind her words…” and, “Elfriede Jelinek’s social criticism is formed not from the safe distance of superior knowledge but from the depths of an unqualified contamination.” He describes the author’s dark style, which is not pessimism, but “perhaps give us a dark picture of life…a scandalous joviality without hope, rays from a black sun.” The credibility of the author, at least according to the speaker, lies in the fact that she is female and yet presents such a non-feminine tone in her works. He ends his speech saying, “If literature by definition is a force that bends to nothing, you are in our day one of its truest representations.”


What really grabs me is that the speech really is pretty honest; if I were Jelinek, I don’t know how I would feel walking up to the front of the room after such a prelude. It is honest, and yet its honesty is what makes it so very convincing – the speaker wouldn’t have made such an effort to portray Jelinek as dark unless he had a very good reason to, otherwise he would have helped her to save face a little. Engdahl is saying that Jelinek, bends to nothing – but he, as a rhetor, does bend. He puts that last little paragraph in to appeal to whatever logos or pathos he missed in talking about the author’s credibility the whole time. Bush, however, hides the dark things – his audience doesn’t want to hear dark things! In that sense, too, I have to agree with Leff in that rhetoric is based around timing – there are only certain moments when things are effective, certain audiences who will hear. Engdahl’s speech was, of course, of much less consequence than Bush’s, so he had the luxury of no having to hide from his audience.