The productive power of confessions of cruelty

The ideological work of narratives of extreme violence is the subject of this essay. The apocryphal confessions of Henry Lee Lucas will be examined in order to show that narrative authority has greater power than fact, even where that fact is at issue in law. What maintains Lucas's reputation as one of the world's worst serial killers--even after the debunking of the majority of his confessions by the Attorney General of Texas--is the typicality of his self-spun narrative of serial killing. The cruelty to which he confessed eclipsed other more "ordinary" homicides, cases cleared on the basis of his confessions. In this way the "ideological work" of Lucas's confessions is the construction of a horizon of "unacceptable" violence beneath which more ordinary cruelties vanish from sight.