Oregon Humanities Spring/Summer 2007

Cover of Oregon Humanities Spring/Summer 2007
Kathleen Holt
EDITOR
Jennifer Viviano
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Leigh van der Werff
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COPY EDITOR
Editorial Advisory Board
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Julia Heydon
Marianne Keddington-Lang
Guy Maynard
Win McCormack
Camela Raymond
Kate Sage
Linny Stovall
Rich Wandschneider
Curt Yehnert

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Confessional Culture

What's at stake when we give in to the compulsion to tell all?

By Michael Clark

According to classical Greek myth, the Titan Prometheus so loved humans that he passed the secret of fire to them. He was also rumored to know the way in which Zeus would one day die. When Zeus demanded that he divulge that secret, Prometheus refused. For these perceived acts of treachery he was imprisoned to a rock in unbreakable and "adamantine" chains, and each day an eagle "red with blood" descended upon him and devoured his liver. Overnight, his liver would grow back, and the daily torture began again, a ceaseless tide of suffering, death, and rebirth--first, for divulging, and second for refusing to divulge, a secret.

Western literature and culture are replete with such tales of secrets held and told. Again from the Greeks we have the tale of Pandora and the infamous box that held the secret ills of humankind. Unable to resist the temptation to look inside, she inadvertently released the ills that plague us still (the story adds that she closed the box before hope could escape). And there are more pedestrian tales of secrets told: that of Marie Antoinette's diamond necklace (purportedly a gift from one of her lovers) over which she lost her head and which started the Reign of Terror. More recently, we have the tale of Monica's blue dress, which someday may be seen as the seed of Al Gore's failed candidacy and at least one source of an ongoing five-year war. All of these secrets share something: their ultimate value was greater than that of the individual who held them, and the consequences of revealing them were enormous, even mythic. Because secrets have the power to save, as well as the power to destroy, they must, as Pandora learned, be handled with care.

But we need not look far to see how we have ceased to take care of our secrets. Today, secrets have become consumer goods to be bought and sold, stacked like so many cans of Campbell's soup. Tabloids line our supermarket checkout counters with lascivious tales of marital betrayal. It is no longer possible to purchase one's daily fare without being inundated with tales of celebrity couples and their latest contretemps. And it doesn't stop there. Dr. Phil displays the most intimate therapeutic secrets before millions of viewers. The Y-Generation regularly places the most private information on myspace.com. We live in an era in which the secret has been cheapened--and risks absolute devaluation, like a coin worn flat--through the sheer repetition of our impulse to receive attention and fame by imitating the latest fallen Hollywood hero. We live in an era during which our most fundamental presumptions about our right to have secrets--in other words, our right to privacy--are confronted by our impulse, indeed by our compulsion, to confess and bare our secrets to the world.

The history of Western literature, philosophy, and law is marked by struggles against forces that have aimed to invade our innermost thoughts--actualized most overtly in religious, political, and ideological persecution. During such struggles, what was at stake was the right to have and hold an idea in private, and the subsequent right to publicly express it when and how we saw fit. What is at stake today, in any discussion of secrets, is our right to privacy.

When we bemoan the invasion of privacy, we tend to cite the usual suspects: the oddly disembodied forces of the government, the machinery of a vaguely pervasive "system," the nameless and faceless hum of an inhuman and often virtual bureaucracy, or the prying eye of the mass media. All of these accusations seem to ring true, but they mask a central irony of our present condition: we love our new digital world too much. We have allowed the machinery of mass media and digital culture to hijack our privacy through invisible networks that seem to compel us to broadcast the most intimate details of our everyday lives to the most distant places. And instead of fighting this threat, in many ways we have come to embrace it; we have willingly become voyeurs and exhibitionists. We have diluted the sanctity of the secret. We are starting to lose sight of what it means to have a secret and sacred space at the core of our being.

In her best-selling 1983 book, Secrets, the philosopher Sissela Bok writes that the defining trait of secrecy is concealment. Indeed, the very notion of a secret implies a world of non-secrets, a world of public information, ideas, aspirations, and desires. To have a secret, then, one must carve out a place--be it in a diary, the psyche, or the soul--that is distinct from the outside world. The divide between concealment and unconcealment, Bok tells us, is the logical and philosophical premise upon which secrets are drawn. The very idea of having a secret makes no sense unless we grant that there is division between private and public, or between the veiled and the revealed.

Because secrecy implies privacy, the idea of a private space is a cornerstone of our most cherished ideas about personhood. "To be," in Western thought, has come to mean, first of all, that we are private subjects, individuals with rights to secluded and sacrosanct inner spaces. The tradition can be found in the works of thinkers as ancient as Sophocles' Antigone, whose private anguish was the foundation for her public renunciation of the State. Descartes, generally considered the founder of modern philosophy, based his inquiry into human nature and knowledge on the simple premise of private subjective space: cogito ergo sum, "I think, therefore I am." For Descartes, the fact that we are thinking beings--with an internal, private, and secret territory--provides us with the very proof of our existence.

These philosophical presumptions of a private, inner space are well established in Western societies today, and they have been institutionalized in American law. Even though a right to privacy is not explicitly mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, its existence has been firmly established in landmark Supreme Court cases from Griswold v. Connecticut, which holds that a right to privacy extends to the birth control decisions of married couples, to Roe v. Wade, which holds that a woman's autonomy and privacy permit her to terminate a pregnancy. Indeed, most of us are quick to conclude that we have a right to privacy, and we are just as quick to object to what we feel are intrusions upon it. We have extensive laws restricting just what can be released or repeated: the law of defamation, for instance, prohibits the transmission of information that is false and injurious (provided, of course, that the information was truly private and secret). We have laws protecting trade and business secrets, patents, and the unauthorized use of our physical image or name. On a more mundane level, we have property laws, which mark off a physical private sphere. And as any casual viewer of a detective show knows, the 1964 Supreme Court decision in Miranda v. Arizona marks off a legal space protecting one's right to retain information--that is, the right to have and hold a secret.

The very fact that we no longer feel the need to prove that we have a fundamental right to privacy or its corollary--secrecy--suggests just how far the idea of secrecy has embedded itself in our culture: Americans presume the right to keep information to themselves--both as persons and as institutions.

But if we presume that we have a right to privacy, and if we presume therefore that we have a right to keeping the content of that private place secret, why do we seem to have a compulsive desire to confess? What has happened to the sanctity of the private space? Why has the impulse to tell all trumped the impulse to consecrate our innermost secrets?

In his studies of how individuals in Western cultures define and think about themselves, the philosopher and historian Michel Foucault suggests that a quiet yet fundamental transformation took place more than two hundred years ago, long before the legal challenges and concerns over government invasion of privacy alluded to above. Foucault suggests that with the development of the human sciences, like medicine, psychology, pedagogy, and criminology, we have internalized a relentless impulse not only to know but also to express our secret truth. As he describes it, the advances we take for granted today--like physical and psychological health care, universal education, DNA sampling--have turned us into unending subjects of inquiry. We are always under scrutiny of some kind, and our private vaults have started to crack. According to Foucault, we have internalized the idea that we are under constant surveillance, and we seem to feel as if we must tell our inner truth. Most important, this impulse includes as its central mechanism the impulse to speak that truth to someone else. To be human has become the opposite of Descartes' vision. While Descartes founded our personhood on our innermost private space, Foucault points out that we now seek our identity by announcing it to others, at all times, and in as many ways as possible. In his landmark History of Sexuality, Foucault writes:

We have singularly become a confessing society. The confession has spread its effects far and wide. It plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relations, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday lives, and in the most solemn rites; one confesses one's sins, one's thoughts and desires, one's illnesses and troubles; one goes about telling, with the greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell. One confesses in public and in private, to one's parents, one's educators, one's doctors to those one loves; one admits to oneself, in pleasure and in pain, things it would be impossible to tell to anyone else.

Under the guises of rational inquiry and self-help, we have unwittingly become addicted to confessing to others. This impulse, in and of itself, is neither good nor bad. It simply marks a shift in the way individuals in Western cultures represent themselves to themselves and to one another. The shift manifests itself in literature with the epic and the romance giving way to the diary and the memoir. The styles of Homer and Dante metamorphose into the styles of Rousseau and Proust, a kind of literature that, in Foucault's words, is "ordered according to the infinite task of extracting from the depths of oneself, in between the words, a truth which the very form of the confession holds out like a shimmering image." And the novel, which told the stories of others in a richly imaginative light, has given way to the memoir, in which telling wholly private secrets is the greatest laurel. Concern with humanity has given way to concern with self, and the ticket is having a secret to sell.

The debasement of the secret today is clearer if we take a look at the history of memoir writing itself. Jean-Jacques Rousseau begins his Confessions, which many hold to be the prototype for the modern memoir, with the exclamation, "Myself alone! I know the feeling of my heart, and I know men. I am not made like any of those I have seen; I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those in existence." But more than just an extraction from his private depths, The Confessions is a work that announces a Romantic notion of individuality that, like Descartes' cogito ergo sum, became a foundation for contemporary notions of personhood. While it is a cry for the sanctity and virtue of self-expression, it is also a cry for the fundamental right to privacy, along with its corollary, the right to have and hold secrets. At the heart of Rousseau's statement is the notion of the individual as a sphere of unique and private sensations, a sacrosanct and reflective place where the inner life asserts its claim to autonomy and value.

The great works of early confessional writing--from Rousseau to the major confessional poets of the 1960s, like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Robert Lowell--were produced in such a spirit of vital self-reflection. Marcel Proust's tortured recollections in Remembrance of Things Past reflect his incapacity to fully comprehend his own desires and testify to the secret core that inspired his work. Rousseau's insults--hurled at all those he paranoically perceived to be his enemies--express how his desire to tell the truth was beyond his powers. These authors' works are testament to the grandeur--and danger--of authentic self-reflection.

But the intimate and agonizing self-reflections of the past have given way to a new phenomenon: the secret as box-store consumable. Today's memoirists and bloggers seem motivated by the immediate, and even ignoble or sordid impulses: their works genuflect before the altar of the tabloid. Tainted by the lure of big sales, or even better, a seat on the dais of Oprah Winfrey, the memoir has abandoned the quiet (and sometimes turbulent) waters of inner reflection to participate in a chase for bland notoriety.

The intimacy of the memoir has given way to what we might call "extimacy": the desire to project everything, without reserve or review, into the public world. We seek to confess not only to those whose views we revere, but to anyone who will listen or watch. We tell everything, then we tell it again, but with contrition. And when we run out of secrets to tell, we invent new ones. We no longer possess secrets as we might a sacred code; rather, we display them like cheap jewelry. Confession has moved from its role in religion to one in the marketplace. And so too has the privilege of secrecy. Perhaps we need to relearn the sanctity of the secret held in silence. Perhaps we need to reconsider the importance of quiet private places, the sanctuaries in which secrets rest.

A recent controversy illustrates our craving for revelation and confession over imagination and privacy. Most readers are familiar with the storm around author James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, the memoir that was exposed as factually untrue and that led to his mea culpa on Oprah. But many people do not know that Frey originally submitted the book as a novel. The publishers at Doubleday, aware of the market's demand for confessional writing--the more debased the better--asked that it be issued as a memoir. According to Frey, an editor told him that the work was a memoir as long as it was 85 percent true.

What resulted was a literary and public relations scandal. As Laura Barton of the Guardian put it, "Arguably, our recent desire for facts is an indication that we are recoiling from a culture that has grown increasingly synthetic. Perhaps it's not entirely unconnected that, in a period of enormous political uncertainty, the bestselling publications at the newsagent are reality magazines." In short, our boundless, prying curiosity, combined with our impulse to confess, has created a new kind of Pandora's box.

With the aid of media mechanisms beyond the imagination just a century ago--television, the Internet, the blogosphere--we are under the thrall of machinery that virtually compels us to say everything to everybody. Through the quiet hum of the hard drive and the invisible networks of wireless technology, Foucault's prognostication has metastasized. Our long-sought right to privacy hasn't been taken away; we have surrendered it willingly. Each individual confession, created by the same machinery and subject to instantaneous scrutiny, has become more and more like the next. Confession, by becoming the universal norm, has become mere imitation, one-upmanship, narcissistic aggrandizement, and seemingly endless repetition. Telling a secret, which once conveyed special, dangerous knowledge, now only makes the embarrassingly trivial available to all. What was once the product of sometimes agonizing self-reflection is now akin to the revelation of a hairstyle gimmick. Rousseau's pursuit of individuality through the written word is dead.

There is a memorable scene in David Lynch's Fire Walk with Me when Laura Palmer, the troubled eighteen-year-old protagonist of the film, comes home to discover that some pages from her hidden diary have been torn out. She reacts with horror at the thought that her private space has been invaded, and one could argue that the rest of the film--which ends with her murder--is the awful consequence of this violation. It is as if the trespass upon her private space, along with the revelation of her secrets, resulted in her psychological and physical annihilation.

It is the sanctity of this private space that we must somehow restore. In a world that craves the sensational, and in a world that craves the revelatory--no matter how trivial--the enormous cost of the right to have and hold a secret has been tarnished. Our secrets no longer glisten like polished stones; rather, they litter the streets like the beer cans left over from last night's party. We must make secrets noble once again by treating them with sacred, gentle care. We need to stop telling all.

If Foucault is right, if we have become a singularly confessing society, if we feel the need to tell everything to everyone, perhaps it is time to return to the thoughts of the great reflective poet, William Wordsworth. In the early 1800s he noted that the world had become too noisy, too busy, too fascinated with quotidian immediacy. In his words, by "getting and spending, we lay waste our powers." Wordsworth pointed out the tension at the core of Romantic thought by noting that the writer's central concern--the intensities of emotional life--could only be properly reiterated in a state of "quiet contemplation." As writers, as thinkers, and as authors of our very lives, we need to reacquaint ourselves with the need for silence, for quiet contemplation, and for reflection. In doing so we may rediscover how to keep at least some of the discoveries we yield safely preserved within the secret and private chambers of the spirit.

Published in the Spring/Summer 2007 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2007 Oregon Council for the Humanities