Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature.(Review)

Peter Brooks Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature. University of Chicago Press, 192 pages, $24

Confession is all the rage these days. During one recent week, The New York Times Magazine ran an "Endpaper" about the emotionally blighting effect of a man's failure to admit an adolescent crime, expiated only by a deathbed confession to his children; The Wall Street Journal ran a front page story about Japanese police practices that end up eliciting false confessions from suspects; Court TV ran a trailer for a program showing police interrogation videotapes of confessing perpetrators; even the nearby subway stop featured a billboard that suggested passersby dial a telephone number--I think it was 1-900-CONFESS --to have their jaws drop at the ensuing revelations. It seemed only fitting that by the end of the week--right before the pledge drive--my local public radio station invited listeners to visit its website and view an execution by lethal injection: an offer of consequences after all this truth.

In his recent book, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature, Peter Brooks, Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities and Director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University, takes this fascination one step further and concludes that confession--the personal revelation of otherwise hidden and frequently shameful facts about the self--is at the heart of the modern identity. Citing Foucault, he tells us that "the practice of confession creates the metaphors of innerness that it claims to explore: without the requirement of confession--one may overstate the issue --there might be nothing inward to examine." In a "world of massification," confession fulfills the function of assuring each of us that he is still "a unique individual with a unique story to tell."

Professor Brooks traces this "confessional model" of society and self to the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, which, at one and the same time, issued a profession of dogma, established an inquisition for the extirpation of heresy, and imposed the requirement of yearly auricular confession on the faithful. Since then, he argues, confession has occupied a central place in our culture, with its rituals of self-revelation, punishment, absolution, rehabilitation, and eventual reintegration into the community. Today, Professor Brooks observes, the confessional mode permeates every corner of life, from the popular media, literature, and psychiatry, to the law, where confession retains its ecclesiastical status as the "queen of proofs."

Now this is all well and good, but it certainly gives Professor Brooks a lot of ground to cover in 171 pages of text, not including notes. His stated aim is nothing less than to consider the role of all these confessional practices in our culture, as well as our attitude toward them and--the citations to de Man, Lacan, and Foucault are the dead giveaway--the different kinds of truth we associate with them. To achieve this, he proposes "to cross-cut between confession according to law and confession according to literature," not to mention "the religious tradition of confession," in order to "illuminate the kind of cultural work we expect confession to do and whether we are, or should be, entirely comfortable with the results."

In fact, what seems to interest Professor Brooks most is something that every cop on the beat knows firsthand: for reasons known only to themselves, people voluntarily confess to plenty of things they haven't done. And, while under duress, people confess to plenty of things they have done as well as a lot of things they haven't. The law deals with this untidy situation by setting a threshold requirement that a confession be voluntary--hopefully ensured by the "Miranda warnings" familiar to everyone who has ever seen a detective show --and assigning any further issue of truth to a jury of the defendant's peers.

For Professor Brooks, this approach presents deep existential problems. He brings to bear on the legal opinions that embody it the mechanisms of literary criticism, the full weight of contemporary psychiatric theory, and a smattering of other disciplines. He wants to compare the law with everything from old Hitchcock movies and modern performance art to Rousseau's Confessions and Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. He pronounces that law cannot be treated as an hermetic discipline sealed from outside influences--a position that no one has taken seriously since 1908 when Louis Brandeis first presented the Supreme Court with a brief full of sociological data and one that would come as news to all the economists and philosophers who currently populate our law school faculties.