AL Kennedy whose novels frequently feature dysfunctional characters with strange or perverted emotions readily describes herself as an intuitive

AL Kennedy, whose novels frequently feature dysfunctional characters with strange or perverted emotions, readily describes herself as an “intuitive” writer. One male reviewer complained of her last novel: “All she does is cling to her precious feelings”. The poet Michael Hofmann also uses his work to exorcise feelings of a dark, even malevolent nature towards his recently deceased father, prompting some critics to complain of excessive bitterness.Although it would be unfair to accuse either Hofmann or Kennedy of sacrificing art to their emotions, it is true that many of our best-known confessional writers, particularly those who practice their trade in newspapers, are open to the charge that they are more concerned with profit than with genuine revelation. A common facet of this kind of writing is its tendency towards exhibitionism.Not surprisingly, it is the Americans who lead the market. To give just two egregious examples, it is difficult not to conclude that Elizabeth Wurtzel, who remorselessly catalogued her drug-addiction in the best-selling book Prozac Nation, and Kathryn Harrison, who did the same in a notorious book about incest, were not doing it primarily to make a name for themselves. While such writers do reveal certain kinds of weakness or malice, it is usually so self-dramatising that it makes them more attractive than real. In this sense, Woody Allen is the perfect emblem of the neurotic artist who engages in excessive self-analysis.

For while professing to be honest about his feelings, he manages to display remarkably little self-understanding either in his life or in his work.None of this is to say that expressing one’s emotions in public is necessarily unnatural or undesirable. But what we seem to lack today are the kind of rituals and codes that gave our forbears a structure with which to handle their emotions more discriminatingly. In his classic work Western Attitudes Toward Death: From The Middle Ages to the Present, the social historian Philippe Aries argued that the rituals surrounding death have gradually been eroded and replaced by a tendency in industrial society to hide death, as if it were an embarrassing secret.The ritual of dying in the past was organised by the dying person himself, who invited his friends and family to the deathbed in order to bid them farewell. In the 19th century, passers-by who met the priest bearing the last sacrament formed a procession and accompanied him to the sickroom.

Such an approach, wrote Aries, “in which death was both familiar and near, evoking no great fear or awe, offers a marked contrast to ours, where death is so frightful that we dare not utter its name”.Equally, customs such as wearing mourning clothes were instrumental in signalling to others that a pivotal moment in one’s life had taken place. The function of formal customs such as these was not dissimilar to that which persists in Oxford today of wearing gowns for exams. Apart from anything else, they offer those who meet the encumbered a guide as to how to behave without fear of embarrassment. It is the absence of these codes that makes today’s funerals a particularly gruesome experience and renders many people unable to shed tears when they would clearly like to do so.In a sense, one of the reasons why confessional writing has become so popular now is that it acts as a kind of substitute for these rituals. Paradoxically, it leaves many people living out experiences that are at best vicarious. The best recent example of this kind of displaced emotion was in the extraordinary outpouring of grief at Princess Diana’s funeral, with its bizarre intimations of Greek tragedy.