Public confession makes a half-century leap from John Edwards’ mea-not-so-culpa to a sudden exercise in self-revelation by Charles Van Doren, who was caught in the quiz show scandals of the 1950s.
But perhaps the most telling truth about public soul-searching comes, not from Edwards on Nightline or Van Doren in the New Yorker, but in a New York Times blog by the scholar Stanley Fish about “autobiographical writing that tells and hides all at the same time.”
In a sympathetic rumination, Professor Fish points out that Van Doren, now 80, proffers the title, “All the Answers”: “But there are no answers, at least to the questions most readers would want to ask: Why did you do it? What was going on in your mind? What about the moral issues? The moment of decision…seems not to have occurred, or to have occurred off-stage when no one, even the person most concerned, was watching.”
It is likely that even now Van Doren doesn’t know, but Fish credits him with an honest attempt at self-discovery: “He does not cast himself as a victim, or as a reformed villain or a misunderstood hero, three narratives that are quite popular in these days of compulsive self-discovery.”