Life (HarperCollins 2004), Andrew Potter's Authenticity Hoax, and David Shields's Reality Hunger (Knopf 2010) each document the growing cultural sensitivity to anything marketed as authentic—confessions, memoirs, autobiographies, reality TV. As David Shields put it, the “very nearly pornographic obsession with [James Frey] and similar cases reveal the nervousness on the topic.”10 On Mendelsohn's account, our culture's confessional obsession reveals not nervousness, but irritation. The uncertainties surrounding confession, he argues, have given rise to a “critical and public irritation” with confessional writing—an irritation that has recently “reached a new peak.”11
Yardley, Shields, Mendelsohn, Potter, Brooks, and Yagoda—these are not writers who otherwise share much in common. Their shared impulse to emphasize the anxieties of confessional culture is telling. Taken together, their common testimony is powerful evidence that despite our cultural fascination with confession, and despite the outpouring of books on the subject, we are not yet comfortable with the cultural power of this now-ubiquitous rhetorical form. Given this palpable discomfort, perhaps it is time to approach the study of confession with questions and methods designed to account for these anxieties.
Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America does just this. It is, to my knowledge, the first reception history of confession. Reception history has a deep and varied intellectual history. Nowhere, however, have the trajectories of rhetorical criticism and reception history been better articulated than in the work of Steven Mailloux. For this reason, I lean heavily on his 1998 volume Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and American Cultural Politics. In this text (along with the earlier Rhetorical Power), Mailloux argues that the primary task of a reception history is the placement of historical acts of interpretation within larger questions of cultural politics.12 Following Mailloux, I examine historical interpretations of texts as confessions and attend to the political climate that influenced (and was influenced by) these classifications. As such, my primary concern is neither establishing the formal characteristics of the genre nor adjudicating what counts as a confession. Rather, my primary concern is with the historical relationships binding schemas of classification to investments in cultural politics.
As a reception study, Confessional Crises is the only study of the genre that does not begin with a predetermined, substantive definition of confession. From the smart, conservative work of Susan Wise Bauer, to the smart, nontraditional work of Michel Foucault, every significant study of confession in the last fifty years begins with a predetermined definition. For Bauer, a confession is an admission of sin; for Foucault, it is a discourse of identity. For both thinkers, however—and in this they are representative of the wider field—the boundaries of their studies are determined in advance by their definition of confession. Their efforts have certainly been productive. Bauer can measure the reach of secularization, and Foucault can explain confession's complicity in identity politics. But by virtue of their methodology, neither of them can do what Confessional Crises does: explain the power of the genre by focusing a wide range of texts—serials, novels, exposes, interrogations—that, for political reasons, became confessions despite their textual characteristics. Thus Confessional Crises is uniquely attuned to the public power of confession in ways that the works of Bauer and Foucault could never be. Rather than drawing a definition of confession from religious traditions (Bauer) or from the confluence of legal and psychiatric traditions (Foucault) and then measuring public discourse against it, I assume that public discourse is trustworthy: I count as a confession any text that has been called a confession. From this perspective, True Story, Styron's novel, and the Starr Report are just as much confessions as Jimmy Swaggart's bleary-eyed apology or Clinton's defiant admission of an improper relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Although these texts share little at the level of formal characteristics, they share a decisive commonality at the level of popular reception: each was reclassified as a confession for political purposes.
From certain perspectives, my willingness to treat as a confession any text that is called a confession will smack of critical naiveté—of taking public discourse at face value instead of submitting it to careful scrutiny. In his recent study of apology, for example, Aaron Lazare began by charting the popular “misuse of the word ‘apologize.’” From Lazare's perspective, the public is “confused” and their use of the word “apologize” cannot be trusted. As a means of correcting popular confusion, Lazare provided a definition of a “true apology” and then demonstrated the shortcomings of popular usage.13 From my perspective, however, understanding the public anxiety that now surrounds the genre of confession requires respecting the public use of the term. In this respect, Confessional Crises is indebted to Raymond Williams. No one has more eloquently made the case for granting credence to the actual words used by men and women to describe their experience. In his landmark 1958 Culture and Society, Williams explained that he was seeking to understand culture, industry, class, democracy, and art by paying attention to what was labeled “culture,” “industry,” “class,” “democracy,” and “art.” His account of his personal commitment to the words used by people to capture their experience is unsurpassed:
I feel myself committed to the study of actual language: that is to say, to the words and sequences of words which particular men and women have used in trying to give meaning to their experience. It is true that I shall be particularly interested in the general developments of meaning in language, and these, always, are more than personal. But, as a method of enquiry, I have not chosen to list certain topics, and to assemble summaries of particular statements on them. I have, rather, with only occasional exceptions, concentrated on particular thinkers and their actual statements, and tried to understand and value them.14
There could hardly be a better description of my own methodology. I have granted credence to the statements of particular individuals—even when they applied the word “confession” to the unlikeliest of texts—and tried to understand these statements in their political contexts. Following Mailloux, I have called this methodology a reception study: rather than focusing on formal characteristics or the authors' designs, I am focusing on how texts were talked about by people who encountered them.
Significantly, because it is a reception study Confessional Crises is uniquely situated to speak to the palpable confessional anxieties of our time. Confessional Crises tells the stories of how the genre of confession has, over the course of the twentieth century, been constantly retrofitted and refashioned, constantly pressed into the service of various political agendas. And after a century of activists claiming any text as a confession merely to serve the political need of the hour, is it any wonder that contemporary America is shot through with anxieties about which sorts of texts count as confessions? In other words, Confessional Crises demonstrates that the anxieties the New Yorker called “genuinely new” are more likely the product of a long history. At the least, we can say with certainty that such anxieties have been cultivated by a century of opportunistic partisan actors willing to turn virtually any convenient text into a confession.
Confessional Crises has no pretensions of being a panacea; it certainly will not quell America's confessional anxieties, and it may exacerbate them. But by showing where they came from and why they arose, by unveiling the powerful political impetus to play fast and loose with the genre of confession, by demonstrating the political incentives pushing activists to call any self-serving text a confession—and thereby undermine any sense of certainty about what precisely counts as a confession—Confessional Crises may help us better understand our current confessional culture and its attendant psychological anxieties. It certainly suggests that the answer to our confessional anxieties does not lie in a Lazare-styled pursuit of a “true” or correct definition of confession. Nor does it lie with Peter Brooks's desire for clearly labeled confessional texts. So long as confessional hermeneutics remains an ideological resource, and so long as partisan advocates have a vested interest in claiming a wide variety of texts as confessions, no system of labels can be definitive and no “true” definition of confession stands a chance.
Politics
