was that, despite its manifold inaccuracies and partisan origins, Huie's version of Till's story became the authoritative account for nearly fifty years.
Confession and Violence: William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner
Twelve years after the death of Emmett Till, the question of confession was once again at the center of American racial politics. On October 9, 1967, William Styron published The Confessions of Nat Turner, a historical novel based on Nat Turner's 1831 insurrection. Styron's white critics argued that his novel was a confession, his black critics argued it was not, but both sides returned to the generic question repeatedly, approached it from a variety of angles, and marshaled a wide range of resources to support their generic claims. The question I pursue in chapter 4 is why? Why were both sides preoccupied with the genre of the novel, and what does this preoccupation teach us about the genre of confession and the question of violence? In order to answer these questions I suggest the following: In the context of the 1960s, to take a position on the genre of the novel was, simultaneously, to take a position on two hotly contested, racially coded debates: first, a historiographical debate over the relative violence of American slaves; second, a postcolonial debate over the capacities of rhetoric to bridge the experiences of black and white Americans. Chapter 4 thus demonstrates how the genre of Styron's novel came to function as a heuristic within these larger debates over the role of violence in America's past and present.
Confession and Religion: Jimmy Swaggart's Apology
Twenty-one years after Styron's novel was released, Jimmy Swaggart incited another confessional crisis when, on February 21, 1988, he publicly confessed to the more than eight thousand people crowded into his Baton Rouge Family Worship Center. Although thousands may have witnessed Swaggart confess, precious few knew precisely why he chose February 21 to do so. Reverend Marvin Gorman, the across-town pastor whom Swaggart had publicly disgraced two years earlier, was getting his revenge by blackmailing Swaggart into making a confession. It might have played out in a church, but this was old-fashioned power politics. Armed with pictures of an escorted Swaggart entering and leaving a pay-by-the-hour motel, Gorman demanded Swaggart's confession.
Yet Swaggart had financial incentive not to confess. By 1988 he was raising more money than any other televangelist.26 Moreover, his ministry was expensive and could not, as the Houston Chronicle put it, “afford his absence.”27 Swaggart was thus in a fix. On the one hand, he faced the photo-armed Marvin Gorman, who was demanding a public confession. On the other hand, the disclosures involved in a traditional, Christian confession threatened the economic stability of his ministry and, by extension, the spiritual vitality of numberless souls. How Swaggart negotiated this situation is the question of chapter 5. I argue that his response has much to teach us about the secularization of confession and, more generally, the place of religious discourse in public life.
Confession and Democracy: Bill Clinton Versus Kenneth Starr
By September 1998, Bill Clinton had confessed to an inappropriate relationship with Monica Lewinsky so many times that the news media began listing the confessions catalogue style. The listing of confessions, however, is never an innocent exercise. For, as I demonstrate in this chapter, the political debate over the guilt or innocence of Bill Clinton was indexed to a rhetorical debate over the definition of confession. For this reason, the seemingly innocent activity of listing certain texts as confessions was weighted with a new importance: to choose which texts counted as confessions was, in effect, to weigh in on Clinton's guilt. Chapter 6 asks which political positions required which texts to count as confessions. I argue that the Clinton administration radically expanded the list of texts that counted as confessions. It then aligned particular types of confession with the needs of a democratic polity and condemned other types of confession as a product of the invasive politics of Kenneth Starr. The result was not only the exoneration of Bill Clinton, but also a compelling redescription of public confession undertaken in the name of democracy itself.
Conclusion: Confessional Crises and Citizen Critics
Taken together, these six case studies bear witness to the power of the genre of confession. In each instance, the simple act of labeling an otherwise non-confessional text as a confession was an important (and always contested) tactic in American cultural politics. The sheer diversity of texts that have been turned into confessions is a trenchant reminder that the cultural power of public confession cannot be explained with recourse to textual characteristics or formal properties. The only way to study the politics of confession in twentieth-century America is to study what people call a confession, no matter how unlikely a candidate it seems. For no established formal definition of confession—not Augustine's, not Rousseau's, not Freud's, not Foucault's—could possibly encompass Styron's novel or Starr's report. Each of these texts became confessions because confessional hermeneutics was driven not by academic questions regarding recurrent formal characteristics, but by patently political motives. This suggests that although the temptation to posit a substantive definition of confession is strong, it is a temptation that must be resisted. By determining in advance what counts as a confession, we will be closing ourselves off to the mainspring of confession's cultural power, a power that includes the ability to turn virtually any text into a confession.
In the pages that follow, I tell the stories of how and why politically motivated journalists, celebrities, writers, politicians, and ordinary citizens turned themselves into ad hoc literary critics, or what Rosa A. Eberly has called “citizen critics.”28 These “citizen critics” recognized clearly that confessional hermeneutics was an activity fraught with political ramifications. For this reason, these citizen critics have repeatedly refused the proprietary claims of the academy over the practice of genre criticism. At least when it comes to the genre of confession, there has simply been too much at stake to leave such demarcations to academics. As few academics have, these activists understood that confession is a product of its political economy and, accordingly, that the re- or declassification of a text as a confession is a particularly powerful mode of intervening in that economy.
As a means of reflecting on this last point, the conclusion to Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America examines the twenty-first-century confessional crisis incited by James Frey's Million Little Pieces—a brouhaha about which the New York Times' Frank Rich was fantastically wrong. Wrote Rich, “No one except pesky nitpickers much cares whether Mr. Frey's autobiography is true or not, or whether it sits on a fiction or nonfiction shelf at Barnes & Noble.”29 The fact of the matter, of course, is that nearly everyone cared. The controversy over Frey's so-called memoir was no different from the confessional crises that on six occasions punctuated twentieth-century American life. In every instance, the genre of confession demonstrated an incredible capacity for transforming political activists into literary critics and making virtually everyone care about the shelf on which a text is placed. I close with the story of Frey and the competing ways his book was classified as a concrete reminder that confessional politics are present politics. The rhetorical strategy of advancing partisan aims by controlling which texts count as confessions is alive and well. If, however, we are to understand Frey and the contemporary confessional crisis for which he has so often been made to stand, it is imperative that we look first to our twentieth-century history of confessional crises.
1
CONFESSION AND SEXUALITY: TRUE STORY VERSUS ANTHONY COMSTOCK
In May 1919, the eccentric American health crusader, sexologist, and entrepreneur Bernarr Macfadden published the first issue of True Story Magazine—and thus “the modern confessions industry came into being.”1 Within years True Story had dozens of imitators; George Gerbner reports that by mid-century the confession magazine industry boasted some forty titles.2 The eventual ubiquity of the industry, however, must not occlude the fundamental importance of True Story. As the Saturday Evening Post put it, “The $10,000,000-a-year, I'm-Ruined! I'm Ruined! school of belles-lettres
