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As the title suggests, in his recent book, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature, Peter Brooks examines the role of confession in American cultural and political life from the dual perspective of the legal and the literary worlds.
Given the popular confusion of confession with the analytic session, as well as the legal and literary aspects of several texts by Freud and contemporary work on psychoanalysis and the law, this book is of some interest. Its topic also appeals to the prurient in recent public discourse, and this is not a judgment of Brooks, for, like many Americans, he pays some attention to the confessional “moments” in the Monica Lewinsky-Bill Clinton sex scandal, thereby demonstrating the high/low pervasiveness of the confessional mode. Of course, Clinton's twelfth hour deal with the Independent Prosecutor, as well as his own slew of pardons, only further fills the air of public discourse with confessional words such as “admission,” “apology,” “forgiveness,” and “healing.”
Of course, there are more serious and dire examples of confession, notably the recent spate of state executions of murderers who allegedly confessed to their crimes. On August 7, 2000, the front page of the New York Times featured an article about mentally retarded inmates on death row, with special attention to the case of Oliver Cruz. Cruz's lawyer commented that given time his client would confess to almost anything—by August 9 Cruz was dead, executed by order of Texas Governor George W. Bush.
Brooks is the Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities at Yale University and a well-known figure in literary criticism circles. He is the author of many books, such as The Melodramatic Imagination, Reading for the Plot, and Body Work, and co-editor of Law's Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law. Much of Brooks' work is