William Styron claimed that he “entered the consciousness” of a black slave to write The Confessions of Nat Turner; in 1988 the televangelist Jimmy Swaggart's church (the Assemblies of God) fought to control the meaning and dissemination of his confession; and in 1998 the Clinton administration and Kenneth Starr's Office of the Independent Counsel publicly debated whether Clinton's various speeches on Monica Lewinsky counted as legitimate confessions.
Despite all the differences among these episodes, they share decisive commonalities. In each instance, cultural politics demanded the reclassification of a text as a confession. Further, in each instance this reclassification sparked vigorous public debates over what we might call confessional hermeneutics, a shorthand term I use to designate the collaborative but always contested activity of deciding which texts do, and which texts do not, qualify as confessions. Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America is premised on the belief that these debates—or in my terms, these confessional crises—teach us four specific lessons about the politics of confession.
First, these debates underscore the intense political power of labeling a text as a confession. Simply by repeating Wilkins's strategy of claiming politically convenient texts as confessions, scores of partisan advocates have brought new force to their arguments. Thus it is hardly surprising that confessional crises have been clustered around twentieth-century America's most intractable issues—not only race, but also sexuality, class, violence, religion, and democracy. Indeed, the central argument of this book is that confessional hermeneutics—the act of determining precisely which texts count as confessions—has been one of the most powerful, and most overlooked, forms of intervening into American cultural politics. Confessional Crises thus offers what Steven Mailloux has called a “specifically rhetorical form of cultural studies”: a form premised on the assumption that historical acts of interpretation “extend and manipulate the social practices, political structures, and material circumstances in which they are embedded at particular historical moments.”4 In other words, Mailloux argues that the interpretation and classification of texts is not innocent; rather, it is itself a form of cultural intervention. Herein, I argue that the interpretation and circulation of six specific texts as confessions has concretely shaped the public understanding of six intractable issues: sexuality, class, race, violence, religion, and democracy.
Second, if confessional hermeneutics is a powerful mode of cultural intervention, the converse is also true: American cultural politics have massively influenced what texts count as confessions. In surprising but concrete ways, Confessional Crises demonstrates that political commitments have shaped and reshaped the boundaries of the confessional genre. While the work of Robert W. McChesney and others have made the intrication of the media and political culture commonplace, it remains far too easy to think (mistakenly) that the genre of confession exists apart from the political struggles of American culture.5 It remains far too easy to think that the confession is an autonomous genre, its boundaries marked off by a secluded professoriate. Quite the opposite. Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America stresses the political economy of confession; it stresses the fact that, historically speaking, the boundaries of confession have been subject to revision by activists interested primarily in cultural politics. The NAACP, Black Power, Mississippi's Citizens' Councils, two major New York publishing houses, a right-wing fundamentalist church, President Clinton's administration, and the Office of the Independent Counsel—these are just a few of the twentieth-century organizations (all of which are treated herein) that have sought to advance their politics by retrofitting the confession, adjusting its boundaries so that it would better serve their politics.
Third, the confessional crises of twentieth-century America suggest that virtually any text can circulate as a confession. Because political exigencies have consistently proved more pressing than checklists of textual characteristics, partisan advocates of all stripes have consistently done what Wilkins did: blatantly ignored textual characteristics and labeled any text a confession, so long as doing so promised political advantage. Indeed, the most conspicuous characteristic of the confessional crises I examine is that they were incited by texts that did not look like confessions at all: a magazine, an expose written in the third person, a novel, a legal interrogation, and an investigative report—in sum, texts that were turned into confessions despite their substantive and formal characteristics rather than because of them. Taking the long view, and looking at the sheer diversity of texts that have been turned into confessions solely on the promise of political gain, it becomes apparent that there are, theoretically speaking, no limits to the confessional genre. Questions of composition, authorship, sincerity, formal features, and substantive content have proven almost irrelevant—so long as it is politically advantageous, it seems that any text can be claimed as a confession and circulated as such. For this reason, understanding the politics of confession in twentieth-century America requires an incredibly broad definition of the genre. In order to better understand these politics, I have counted as a confession any text that has been called a confession.
Fourth, America's confessional crises suggest that the power of confession resides in its claim to authenticity. Returning once more to Wilkins, he needed the Look article to be a confession because he recognized that the label itself was a powerful mode of authenticating the text. The label “confession,” in other words, gave the Look account a claim to truthfulness it would not otherwise have; so categorized, the racial atrocities Look described could not be dismissed as mere partisan maneuvering. Taking the long view once more, Wilkins is hardly alone. Historically speaking, partisan advocates have claimed dozens of texts as confessions in order to bring the political cachet of authenticity to both important causes and trivial pursuits.
Confessional Anxiety
In 1966, Supreme Court Justice Byron White dissented from Miranda v. Arizona, claiming that it was based on “a deep-seated distrust of all confessions.”6 In the intervening years, it seems that this distrust has multiplied tenfold. Indeed, evidence of the confessional anxiety mentioned at the outset abounds. In the last twelve years alone, prestigious academic presses (e.g., Chicago, Princeton, Oxford) have joined forces with established commercial houses (e.g., HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, Penguin) to turn the confession and its related genres into one of the most talked about rhetorical practices of our time. From Peter Brooks's Troubling Confessions (Chicago 2000), to Aaron Lazare's On Apology (Oxford 2005), to Susan Wise Bauer's Art of the Public Grovel (Princeton 2008), to Ben Yagoda's Memoir: A History (Riverhead 2009), to Andrew Potter's Authenticity Hoax (HarperCollins 2010), to Suzanne Diamond's Compelling Confessions (Fairleigh Dickinson 2011), studies of confession, its history, its relatives, and its relevance have been appearing with increasing speed. If Peter Brooks's comment that “our social and cultural attitudes toward confession suffer from uncertainties and ambivalences” remains applicable, this is certainly not for lack of effort.7
Words like “nervousness,” “confusion,” “uncertainty,” “irritation,” “unreliability,” “ambivalence,” and “anxiety” punctuate the literature on confession at regular intervals, constant reminders of the psychological perils that attend a confessional culture. The very title of Peter Brooks's Troubling Confessions is telling. Brooks gives eloquent voice to the confessional anxieties that plague contemporary America. He argues that confession is a “difficult and slippery notion” and implores his readers to exercise caution and restraint before demanding a confession: “Our sense of what confession is and does hovers in a zone of uncertainty.” For this reason, Brooks wonders whether we would not be better served if every confessional text came pre-labeled with its own warning: “This is a confession, handle with care.”8 Voicing a related anxiety, Book World's Jonathon Yardley worries about the sheer number of “confessions.” The market is so saturated with them, he notes, that “it is just about impossible to separate what little wheat there may be from the vast ocean of chaff.”9
Further, an array of popular books situate the “uncertainties and ambivalences” over confession within a larger set of anxieties over the notion
