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Gore vs. Faulkner
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Nobel speeches should be memorable events, and Al Gore just delivered his in Oslo.
It is time to make peace with the planet,” Gore said in the prepared remarks. “We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war.”
Probably the most famous Nobel speech belongs to William Faulkner, who accepted his (for literature, of course) on this date in 1950. Gore’s and Faulkner’s speeches can be compared rather easily.
Faulkner’s speech came in the beginning of the cold war, when nuclear war and the A-bomb were about to start scaring the you-know-what out of everybody. Faulkner’s speech and Gore’s are eerily similar in that they both speak about a Big Problem and What’s To Be Done in Face of It. Some think Faulkner was being a little progressive and utopian in his speech, but I think the Christian, even the Calvinist, can see that Faulkner understood something about the soul when he said this:
I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
Gore’s speech was full of dire prediction. Faulkner’s, while dealing with a more immediate and explosive problem, was full of optimism in the creative abilities of mankind to be redeemed. I take Faulkner’s.
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A matter of life
Gore’s speech is all Sound and Fury…wait a sec!!
Gore
Rhymes with B…
“signifying nothing.” (I finished Wiglaf’s quote.)
Gore’s was a Billy Graham “Hour of Decision” speech. Quit smoking or you’ll loose a lung. Gore didn’t question the endurance of the human spirit — which only requires one drunk left to write about humans dying in the dust — but the prognosis of our planet and the affect on our bodies.
Harrison must have felt better about what came after the speech. When Gore sat down, the program continued with Don Giovanni seducing Musetta with “La ci darem la mano.” The Nobel prize committee tried to assuage the many conservatives who resent pied pipers.
Oh gee, Gore got “beat” by William Faulkner in a made up “contest” judged by Harrison. How embarrassing for him!
He must be mortified that a conservative Christian completely ideologically opposed not just to his politics but to him developed such a rounded and blasting critique of his speech as, “It’s not as good as William Faulkners.”
For someone who claims to know a lot about rhetoric, Harrison, are you familiar with the term false dilemma?
Is it supposed to mean something to us that Gore has failed to “defeat” Faulkner (clearly his arch rival) in the Nobel Speech “contest”?
alGore is an environmental terrorist - besides being oh so wrong about the facts. He has no self control, no shame and can never be satisfied - the hallmark of any terrorist.
Oh gee, Gore got “beat” by William Faulkner in a made up “contest” judged by Harrison. How embarrassing for him!
I’d say, how embarrassing for you since you seem to have failed to understand Harrison’s simple point.
Enlighten me, Graceland.
Someone like Colbert might decide to declare a long standing rivalry with William Faulkner, but I don’t think that Al Gore has. Harrison’s simple point can be witnessed in execution in post 6. He wants to provide a platform for Gore bashing, but he has to get there by “reporting” on a Gore related story and then making a negative judgment on AL Gore.
That is the only rhetorical process that justifies asserting that Faulkner and Gore’s respective speeches are comparable in opposition.
Or maybe Harrison has just been watching Colbert without getting the joke long enough that his writing style has adopted some of Colbert’s rhetorical jests as rhetorical devices?
Luke,
I don’t claim to know a lot about rhetoric, but I do claim to know your address. Stop criticizing me before I Google Map you and show you how Faulkner used to beat his mules.
Love,
Harrison “I hate Gore” Scott “Almost As Much as Myself” Key
I think your fair game for criticism, Harrison.
Don’t worry though, even if you can’t tell me what “simple point” Graceland alludes to in post 7, I’m sure you’ll manage to turn this into a commentary about how the world abuses writers. The trade off is more than fair.
Harrison won’t tell you his simple point, because it’s nothing more than a lazy potshot. The object of his antipathy is beneath him. Harrison’s agenda is plain: Christian resentment over a cultural critique that comes out of left field and suggests that humanity needs to make a choice about something besides whether to accept Jesus as Lord and Savior. A humanist who says “Choose life!” must be crushed like a snake in the garden who says “Eat!”
It was stupid of Harrison to write as though Gore could make a reference to “mutually assured destruction” without having learned anything from his predecessor’s Nobel speech about a previous threat to survival. The only thing Gore expressed any fear about was that his words would fail to “match this moment.”
Faulkner would have applauded the line: “But there is hopeful news as well: we have the ability to solve this crisis and avoid the worst - though not all - of its consequences, if we act boldly, decisively and quickly.”
Faulkner celebrated endurance, not passivity. Faulkner and Gore had a shared theme of work, struggle, and survival. Neither offers comforting assurances that we can expect “to be redeemed,” in Harrison’s words. Harrison’s belief that Providence will do for us what we will not do for ourselves is profoundly pessimistic about man’s capacity to prevail, let alone endure. It certainly was not a belief that Faulkner peddled.
To see these two names even mentioned in the same sentence gives me a bad case of indigestion. The only reason Gore should be referred to in the context of any Nobel Prize is to demonstrate how pathetically meaningless the prize has become. It’s handed out these days for little more than strident liberalism. Faulkner’s someone to take seriously. Who’s Algore?
Faulkner wrote for the ages, in that he understood both the hope and tragedy of men. He with the Snopes of the world understood the reality of life; yet, he wrote:
There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed–love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Gore, one of the more shallow alumni of Harvard, writes mostly from the politically correct glands with a dubious thesis that is questioned by eminent scientists, most especially Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of atmospheric science at M.I.T.
Algore is a Sutherner who knows something about causes and defeats, but is not bound by fate like a character in Yoknapatawpnah County. Algore made for himself a purpose which Faulkner denied to his characters (especially Black characters). Gore maintains we can change ourselves and will the fate of nature itself. Algore is the algorithm by which which can impliment a better future.
My point in the post was to point out how both Gore and Faulkner dealt with The Big Problems of Civilization in their speeches, but how Faulkner’s speech, even when dealing with a far more immediate problem (nuclear war), was far more optimistic and inspiring and elevating than Gore’s speech. Gore, like most of the climate enthusiasts, used the rhetoric of “scare tactics,” of pessimism - and thus, his remarks were not inspiring or optimistic. It was a compare and contrast. And it was awesome.
Faulkner didn’t “deal” with the problem of nuclear war. He got the prize for literature. His rhetoric denigrated contemporary authors while avoiding his own racism. I don’t think Faulkner’s negroes could consider his treatment of them to be awesomely optimistic. Faulkner talked about feeling better about ourselves, not about our capacity to change the future. Gore “deals” with global warming. He got the prize for peace for laying the foundations for change. Faulkner said humans are capable of struggle and sacrifice. Gore took Faulkner up on that, and said it’s time. Harrison ignores the comparison and goes for a phony contrast.
Martin Peretz, a fan of George Bush, still wants Al Gore to run for President, the office he and the nation were “cheated” out of in 2000, if you can get your mind around that. Peretz finds Gore “exhilarating.” Peretz attended the Nobel ceremony and writes in the TNR that “Gore . . . seems to have touched the Europeans . . . like no one since Dwight Eisenhower and, perhaps, further back to FDR.” Peretz starts out with this:
“Al Gore may have given one of the finest speeches of his career. It had poetic resonance but was rooted in real science. It was politically visionary but was animated by an, alas, secure sense of climatic disaster. It was quite plain-spoken about the economic realities that made global warming so ordinary but argued the hope that suicidal habits were good for no one, not even the greatest suicidalists, China and, most significantly, the United States. “
Oh my, here are some things that are wrong here.
[1] Every skilled high school English teacher should be telling their students that when writing a “compare and contrast,” they should not only say how they are similar and different but also tell the reader why those similarities and difference are significant. In other words, we should know why it is particularly appropriate, useful, or meaningful to compare Gore to Faulkner. Are the two emblematic of their times, issues, communities? Those are the compare and contasts
that are awesome.
[2] Richard Lindzen is an oil company shill who is rather fortunate to have tenure.
“Gore maintains we can change ourselves and will the fate of nature itself.”
???