A Narrative of Motives: Solicitation and Confession in Linda Hogan's Power

I confess. This is no simple statement. It is a declaration, an illocutionary act, and a technique for the production of truth.¹ It is an ecstatic utterance, outside the usual stasis of statement, residing within what Michel Foucault calls a "ritual of discourse" (61). Confession is not made to the void. It is a discursive exchange between the subject who speaks and the object who listens. Whether the listener is God, a priest, a judge, a doctor, or a psychiatrist, confession always takes an object/listener.

In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault notes that "the confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner" who serves a corroborative function to the confession (61). "I confess" simultaneously constitutes an I and a you. The confession constructs an intimacy between both "the one who speaks and what he is speaking about" and the one who speaks and the one who is spoken to (62).

In the act of confessing, the subject/confessor is dramatized while the confession itself is verified, deciphered, and consolidated by the object of the statement, the listener. Thus the confession also constitutes a hierarchy in which the apparent subject of the statement, the confessant, is subjected to the confession that the confessor—the listener—transforms into discourse. In this transformation of confession into discourse, the confessant becomes the object of the listener's discourse, becomes encoded by the laws of the discourse in which she stages her subjectivity—the discourse in which she becomes discernible. Thus, in accepting the conventions of the confessional contract, the speaking subject repeats a text that has already been written. She repeats rather than expresses a truth about herself. She speaks into the discourse already waiting to receive her. The role of the listener is to knit the speaker's confession into discourse.

Linda Hogan's novel Power explores the attempts of three scientific discourses—law, anthropology, and environmentalism, all of which rely on empirical evidence and search for causality in the object of study—to articulate the subjectivity of both the Native American (in this case, the Taigas) and the endangered Florida panther. I will argue that Hogan's narrative stages a rupture whereby the connection cannot be made between confessor and listener and wherein the testimony of the authority is continually confounded and interrupted by the subjects whose testimonies are solicited. More specifically, the connection cannot be made between anthropologist and Taiga Indian, between lawyer and witness, or between environmentalist and panther.

We confess to figures of authority. This relationship between speaker and listener constitutes the confession. The listener serves a corroborative function, holding the power to constitute a discourse of the subject; she contains the subject in language, and it is she who decodes the confession and who possesses the map of the confessor's subjectivity. According to Foucault, our confessions want to be spoken; they want to be drawn out and remembered (71–83). Our confessions give voice to our subjectivity. In the end, "I confess" articulates both the desire of the confessor and that of the listener to express the inexpressible, which is precisely the subjectivity of the self. Confession thus provides a stage for the ritualized production and maintenance of subjectivity. Through ongoing "performances" the human subject finds and exercises discursive existence in the world.

Subjectivity is born of the confessional. Foucault sees the normalization of the process of confession in Western societies as one technique through which we are made known to each other—and to ourselves—as subjects. The confessor is filtered through the listener, whose own subjectivity is not simply staged through the process of hearing confession but is consolidated by the assimilation and recording of the truth of the other. Confession engenders knowledge and power in the listener, and the confessional is an ephemeral structure whose shape is cast the moment a...