Impacts of Truth(s): The Confessional Mode in Harold Brodkey's Illness Autobiography

Abstract

The essay establishes the centrality of the confessional mode to Harold Brodkey's autobiography of terminal illness, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death. Used ambivalently, both in earnest and as a literary ploy, the confessional mode in Brodkey's text serves to demonstrate how narratives of terminal illness may adopt the textual practices of the confession as a way of negotiating between the cluster of associations and feelings that surround and govern our culture's response to the experience of terminal illness and, by way of metonymy, toward the terminally ill. Countering the strong constructivist view of confession as a reproduction of hegemonic relations of power, the analysis shows that Brodkey manipulates the power relations that structure the confession in a way that overcomes the audience's resistance to illness stories and subverts the authority of the public constructions of AIDS shared by his own audience. Brodkey's attempt to negotiate between the ways illness is felt and the constraining cultural narratives reveals how the confessional structure paradoxically gives the writer license to recall the sick body not as textual construction, as a metaphor, but in terms of concrete circumstances and embodied experience.

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