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Male Confessions

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments..........................................................................................................ix1 Introduction: Male Confessions.........................................................................................1INTERLUDE On Mirrors.....................................................................................................292 The Confines of Male Confessions: On Ancient Vainglory and the Postmodern Gaze.........................................34INTERLUDE On Testimony...................................................................................................723 Non-absent Bodies and Moral Agency: Confessions of an African Bishop and a Jewish Ghetto Policeman.....................744 A Perpetrator and His Hagiographer: Oswald Pohl's Confession...........................................................100INTERLUDE On Tears.......................................................................................................1325 Sons of Tears: Displacing the Intimate (Female) Other..................................................................1356 Not from My Lips: From Annihilation to Nation Building.................................................................1617 On Spirit and Sperm: Eroticizing God, Sanctifying the Body.............................................................1908 Outlook: The Power to Name Oneself into Being..........................................................................231Notes....................................................................................................................239References...............................................................................................................269Index....................................................................................................................287

Chapter One

"I have become a problem to myself," writes Saint Augustine in the fourth century. "I shall nevertheless confess to you my shame, since it is for your praise."

"I have made the first and most painful step in the dark and slimy maze of my confessions," writes Jean-Jacques Rousseau at the beginning of modernity. "It is not crimes that cost me to speak, but what is ridiculous and shameful."

"I am disconcerted by an irritating tendency to blush," writes modernist Michel Leiris in the twentieth century.

"Finally I want to tell You what is meant only for Your ears," writes Calel Perechodnik, a Jewish ghetto policeman, to his wife already killed by Germans. "I have deceived You."

"The moment of transformation filled me with an ardent love," writes Oswald Pohl after his conversion to Catholicism and shortly before he is hanged as a Nazi war criminal.

"I no doubt wanted the sperm of Jesus, the mark of his unfailing affection, to cover me and save me just as his holy blood did," writes Donald Boisvert in the twenty-first century.

* * *

Voices of men from different centuries and different historical situations, men struggling to give testimony to themselves: they confess. They do so in writing, and they search for an audience. They confess their sins, their shame, their shortcomings, their deceptions, their desires. They confess because they imagine a dialogical "you": God, a wife, the public, other men. They confess because they feel an urge to share with us their intimate selves, because they have sinned, because they have experienced a transformative moment, because they want to be forgiven, or because they are self-absorbed and self-interested. This book is about these and other men trying to give a truthful account of themselves.

The field of associations evoked by the amorphous title Male Confessions reaches from questions of faith to pornography, from voluntary admissions of sins preceding a religious conversion to coercive techniques of police interrogations. The citations at the beginning of the chapter echo such ambiguity: Augustine seems to speak from within a framework of faith, whereas Boisvert seems to pursue an ecstatic fantasy. Pohl seems to tell of a successful conversion of his old sinful self, whereas Perechodnik seems driven by a guilt for which he wants to atone. The religious imagination plays an important role in these confessions. And where the religious imagination seems absent-as in the case of men like Rousseau and Leiris, who adopt a decidedly antireligious stance-we can learn something about the modernist loss of religious perspective, bringing into sharper profile the kind of questions pursued in this book.

If this book about confessions neither refers, in any narrow sense, to statements of faith nor to pornographic eavesdropping (after all, "male confessions" might be the title of a gay porn movie), what is it about? It is about confessions as a mode of self-examination. It is also about men. It is about men opening their intimate lives and thoughts to the public through the form of confessional writing. As public documents, these writings tell us something about the interior struggle that men are willing to share with a larger audience during particular personal circumstances and in particular moments of history. As texts, they speak to the sincere attempts of men to lay bare aspects of themselves that would otherwise have remained hidden.

A Gendered Reading

No study, so far, has undertaken the task of examining confessions by men as a particular style of gendered writing and of subjecting the latter to a reading that pays attention to issues of religiosity and masculinity. Male Confessions makes a first foray into this complex territory. The terrain is difficult to negotiate because I am bringing together four areas-men, religion, gender, confessions-which are, each for its own reasons, complicated and highly contested. I do not seek, however, to clarify the various theoretical and methodological claims on definitional authority for any of these four areas. Rather, Male Confessions is more humble in scope and ambition while, at the same time, no less daring in the complexity of its arguments. I wish to demonstrate that men are able to talk about themselves intimately, but I also want to examine critically the limits of such intimate male talk. On the one hand, I want to take seriously the vulnerability exposed in male self-disclosures and learn from those who dared to walk down this path. On the other hand, I offer a critique of the religious and gendered rhetoric employed in such discourse.

The religious imagination, I will argue, allows men to talk about their intimate selves, their flawed and sinful selves, without having to condemn themselves entirely or to fear self-erasure. When I refer to the "religious imagination" in the context of male confessions, I have in mind how men, given their personal religiosity in a given historical circumstance, imagine religion and how they call upon the "religious" to articulate themselves in a self-examining mode. By foregrounding the religious imagination rather than other forms of religious sentiment and practice (such as liturgy, worship, devotion, or doctrine), I am not evaluating these men's spiritual understandings against a perceived religious orthodoxy. Instead, I ask whether the religious imagination facilitates (or...