Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (review)

Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature. By Peter Brooks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. x + 207 pp. $24.00.

By comparing confession in law and literature, and by tracing its history in Western society, Peter Brooks seeks to challenge the value of confession in law and in American culture as a whole. The religious model of confession, according to Brooks, provides the cornerstone of the Western model of the self. More specifically, the requirement of annual confession on the part of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 helped to consolidate the concept of an interior, private self that was to be regulated, disciplined, and consoled. But when the apparatus of religious and therapeutic confession merge with the needs of the State, as Brooks convincingly argues they do in contemporary American culture, conflicts and contradictions abound.

Brooks' argument is that although law enforcement agencies and the courts, for the most part, take confession to be a fairly straightforward form of proof, literature shows otherwise. Literature and literary theory reveal the complexities that the law, at best, only partially acknowledges. According to Brooks, confession is "one of the most complex and obscure forms of human speech and behavior." Brooks juxtaposes cases and opinions well known to legal professionals with literary examples familiar to students of literature and criticism in order to make his point. The Miranda decision, which established the warnings familiar to everyone who watches police shows on television--was supposed to guarantee that a defendant could "tell his story without fear" (11). But the safeguards protecting the voluntariness do not hold up, and the relation between the confession and the truth may prove tenuous. Rousseau's famous description of his role in the affair of the stolen ribbon leads Brooks to question the validity of even uncoerced confessions. As Brooks shows, Paul de Man's analysis of the circularity of confession reverses the cause/effect relationship usually associated with confession. According to de Man, it is not guilt that leads to confession, but confession that "creates the guilt that the act of confessing requires." One of the main arguments is that literary confessions of the type authored by Rousseau and Dostoevsky are interlocutionary acts, requiring a confessor and a confessant, and that the addressee's involvement and even complicity in the confession may play a crucial role in its utterance. Brooks finds evidence in police manuals to show that police interrogators are trained to generate stories for defendants to complete, elaborate, and refine. The interrogator tells a story, and the confessant confirms it. Brooks points out that the interrogation is controlled by the fiction that it is better for a defendant to talk.

Coetzee's analysis of "Confession and Double Thoughts" in Dostoev-sky shows that the alleged truth of confession is unstable, because in a confession such as Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, the self-serving confessions of the underground hero mask the "final truth." Brooks is critical of the idea of "final truth," arguing instead that if there is a truth of confession, it is the truth of the confessing subject's desire, and not the verifiable truth sought by law-enforcement officials. Brooks finds the phenomenon of recovered memory, and the legal cases against re-discovered abusers as a telling instance of the conflict between therapeutic truth and verifiable legal truth.

Furthermore, this truth is the product of a particular relationship, "created by the bond of the confessant and the confessor." The most important example of this relationship comes from Dostoevsky's last novel, The Brothers Karamazov. Dmitrii, the oldest brother, fond of quoting Schiller and sowing wild oats, is accused of the murder of his father. The detailed description of his pre-trial interrogation provides ample evidence for Brooks' argument about the importance of the confessant/confessor bond. Dmitrii is reluctant to produce exculpatory evidence--the source of his seemingly new found wealth--because of the stain on his honor. He did...