Confession is all the rage these days. During one recent
week, The New York Times Magazine ran an “Endpaper” about the
emotionally blighting effect of a man’s failure to admit an
adolescent crime, expiated only by a deathbed confession to his
children; The Wall Street Journal ran a front page story about
Japanese police practices that end up eliciting false confessions
from suspects; Court TV ran a trailer for a program showing police
interrogation videotapes of confessing perpetrators; even the
nearby subway stop featured a billboard that suggested passersby
dial a telephone number—I think it was 1-900-CONFESS
—to have
their jaws drop at the ensuing revelations. It seemed only
fitting that by the end of the week—right before the pledge
drive—my local public radio station invited listeners to visit
its website and view an execution by lethal injection: an offer of
consequences after all this truth.

In his recent book, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in
Law and Literature, Peter Brooks, Chester D. Tripp Professor of
Humanities and Director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale
University, takes this fascination one step further and concludes
that confession—the personal revelation of otherwise hidden and
frequently shameful facts about the self—is at the heart of the
modern identity. Citing Foucault, he tells us that “the practice
of confession creates the metaphors of innerness that it claims to
explore: without the requirement of confession—one may overstate
the issue
—there might be nothing inward to examine.” In a “world
of