Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature

by Peter Brooks

The constant call to admit guilt amounts almost to a tyranny of confession today. We demand tell-all tales in the public dramas of the courtroom, the talk shows, and in print, as well as in the more private spaces of the confessional and the psychoanalyst's office. Yet we are also deeply uneasy with the how can we tell whether a confession is true? What if it has been coerced?

In Troubling Confessions, Peter Brooks juxtaposes cases from law and literature to explore the kinds of truth we associate with confessions, and why we both rely on them and regard them with suspicion. For centuries the law has considered confession to be "the queen of proofs," yet it has also seen a need to regulate confessions and the circumstances under which they are made, as evidenced in the continuing debate over the Miranda decision. Western culture has made confessional speech a prime measure of authenticity, seeing it as an expression of selfhood that bears witness to personal truth. Yet the urge to confess may be motivated by inextricable layers of shame, guilt, self-loathing, the desire to propitiate figures of authority. Literature has often understood the problematic nature of confession better than the law, as Brooks demonstrates in perceptive readings of legal cases set against works by Rousseau, Dostoevsky, Joyce, and Camus, among others.

Mitya in The Brothers Karamazov captures the trouble with confessional speech eloquently when he offers his confession with the anguished this is a confession; handle with care. By questioning the truths of confession, Peter Brooks challenges us to reconsider how we demand confessions and what we do with them.

Genres: Nonfiction, Law

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Peter Brooks is the author of Henry James Goes to Paris, Realist Vision, Troubling Confessions, Reading for the Plot, The Melodramatic Imagination, and a number of other books, including the historical novel World Elsewhere. He taught for many years at Yale, where he was Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature, and currently is Andrew W. Mellon Scholar at Princeton.

Reviews

[Liam Guilar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Starting with the privileged role confession plays in modern culture and in modern legal proceedings, Brooks investigates the problems of confessional speech from a number of angles.

There are simple but debilitating conundrums: If, in American legal cases, confession is only admissible if it is voluntary and non coerced, how can any confession produced by a suspect after hours of questioning be regarded as either? What happens with confessions that are false? The strength of Brooks work has always been his close reading of his texts, whether the texts are Freud's case studies, 19th Century French fiction or high court rulings.

But the book nags at more profound issues: Tracing the obsession with confession back to the Lateran council of 1215's decision to make private confession mandatory, Brooks suggests that modern concepts of the self are built on the habit of confession. The metaphors of interiority and depth we use to talk about character are developed in the confessional and the confessional process. Confessors were taught "to dig". And what they dug for defined the private, the shameful and the secretive. (Sex mostly in the case of the Church in general, heretical beliefs in the more specific Inquisition).

Brooks then tracks this through to psychoanalysis. This isn't that new. But he then makes a crucial point: both the catholic Confessional and the Psychoanalytical process privilege confession, but the "truth' they aspire to is not the kind of 'truth' that works in a court of law. The Catholic confessional leads to redemption, confession is inherently "good for you" (even if it meant you were burnt, it was for your own good!) Once Freud realised his seduction theory couldn't possibly work, he came to believe that in analysis the "truth' of a memory or a story was whether or not it healed the patient. Brooks is very good on what happens when this crucial distinction gets forgotten, in particular with the issue of "repressed memories" which may be the product of a healing process which has little to do with referential truth.

He also points out that modern theorised concepts of the self simply don't work as far as the law is concerned. The law requires that there be an individual who acts of his or her own free will, who has intentions which can be known by a third party after the event. Without such a version of self the law cannot operate. And that says something important about theoretical constructions of the fractured subject.

Why not five stars? I'm on my way to reading almost everything Peter Brooks has written and I'm thinking I don't need to reread Rousseau because I've read so much about him in Brooks' books. He tends to recycle his literary examples.

[Annie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another from my Guilty Subjects syllabus...great read, powerful points applicable to so many realms of life.

[Trisha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting treatment of the role of guilt and confession in literature but it focused too much on the legal aspect of it instead of the literature. Fell a little shot of really good

[Lauren Wild]

read for class on narrative and legal theory