No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays

Sins of Confession

Sins of Confession he confession, as a literary genre, is based on one simple convention : the writer purports to admit to the reader (who may represent society at large, or a particular segment of it) some act or sentiment that the reader can be expected to find immoral, shameful , and/or shocking. The implicit claim of the confession is that the writer is braving condemnation, ridicule, ostracism to tell us something important; its implicit demand is that we suspend our reflex condemnation and hear the writer out. It is not the content of a personal revelation that determines whether it's a confession, but the writer's attitude toward it. Critics who loosely (and almost always pejoratively) label as"confessional" anywriting about personal (read emotional, sexual)experienceareprojecting their own attitude—that the act of publicizing "private" matters is inherently shameful—onto the writer. A confession always makes a moral point or raises a moral issue; the prostitute who reveals all about life in the brothel simply because it's a titillating subject is not confessing, though she may go through the motions for the sake of redeeming socialvalue. In the classic confession—St. Augustine's is the paradigm—the writer fully concurs in the reader's moral judgment, and accepts a system of moral or religious values that upholds it. The confession, then, becomes at once a depiction of the protagonist's struggle for redemption, an integral part of that struggle, and an argument for the values that make the struggle possible. Turn the argument on its head and you havethe anti-confession, in which the writer challenges the values by which he or she expects to be judged, and so recasts the transgressor as a rebel against oppressive norms. The challenge may be political (as with feminists "confessing" to their illegal abortions ); or nihilistic, insisting that morality is a sham, that the only T Sins of Confession 2.01 law is naked power; or antinomian, taking an aggressive"evil be thou my good" stance. In the soft version of the anti-confession—call it "guilty with an explanation"—the writer's admittedly bad behavior is seen as socially or psychologically determined; the transgressor is recast as victim. Like the traditional confession, the anti-confession is a brief for a particular world view, and it is also concerned with redemption—whether from an unjust social order, or simply from illusion and false guilt. But there is yet a third confessional mode—pioneered by Rousseau —whose impulse is, on the surface at least, less polemical than documentary: its emphasis is on examining transgressions, rather than condemning or justifying them, and its premise is that the exposure of dirty secrets is in itself a moral act. It's hard for a postenlightenment person to quarrel with that premise.Who among us does not believe that the truth will make us free? That looking unpleasant realities in the face is the first step to understanding and perhaps changing them? Yet in practice self-exposuredoes not necessarily lead to understanding, or understanding to change. Often, at the end of a documentary confession,one is left feeling confused and a bit cheated, wondering what, exactly, is the point. More likely than not the point is a polemic (and with it a bid for redemption) that the writer doesn't want to acknowledge. Bad faith is the great pitfall of all confessionalwriting. The form offers built-in temptations to justify the unforgivable, abdicate personal responsibility ,or demand that the reader's sympathiesfocus on the confessor's anguished guilt and courageous honesty, rather than on the victims of the acts or attitudes confessed. Many confessions are little more than manipulative pleas for absolution, or covert expressions of anger at victims for provoking guilt ("I've made a clean breast of it, I've said I'm sorry, what more do you want?"). The documentary confession lends itself especially well to such abuses, since it can sneak in all sorts of hidden moral agendas in the guise of pursuing truth for truth's sake. In her memoir Ghost Waltz,Ingeborg Day haswritten aconfession whose method is documentary and whose object is openly redemptive . She resists, succumbs to, wrestles with the temptations of the form, and ends up with a book that is as much about the process of E X I L E O N M A I N S T R E E T 2...