[In the following essay, Shuter examines Rodriguez's descriptions of the formation of new cultures in Hunger of Memory and Days of Obligation.]

Singular and somber, the voice of Richard Rodriguez has arrested the wandering attention of many viewers of the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour on the evenings when he is the guest commentator. (Whether it also arrests the attention of today's students I cannot be certain, but essays by Rodriguez appear in seven recent freshmen readers.) And just as firmly as it arrests attention, the voice resists characterization. Rodriguez can hardly be described as an “ethnic writer” in any usual sense of the phrase. His sense of his own ethnic identity is, as he repeatedly acknowledges, too conflicted, too uncertain. In fact, he is probably best known as a skeptic of much that has been undertaken in the name of preserving ethnic identity. It was as a minority student in graduate school that he first attracted public notice with several articles formulating his reservations about the cost of affirmative action programs to those who benefit from them as well as to those who do not, and his subsequent essays and his two books, Hunger of Memory and Days of Obligation, contain grim assessments of bilingual education and of the possibility of a multiethnic culture. Briefly put, his position is that an authentic ethnic identity cannot survive, and should not be expected to survive, either a public education or the acquisition of a public self.

But Rodriguez is neither an ideological nor even a particularly rigorous critic of the commitment to ethnic diversity shared by so many intellectuals and academics. He is both something less and something more. Something less, because his own ethnic characterizations are, if taken literally, often as suspect in their own way as those he questions:

The endurance of Mexico may be attributed to the realm of tú, wherein the family, the village, is held in immutable suspension; whereby the city—the government—is held in contempt … Mexicans are notorious in the United States for their skepticism regarding public life. Mexicans don't vote. Mexicans drop out of school.

(Days, 60–61)

Mexicans are always late or, refusing to be circumscribed by time, they resort to mañana. Mañana is the Mexican's gloss on the light of day. Mañana, by definition, will never come. Mañana intends to undo all the adages of the English language. Waste not, want not. Don't put off till tomorrow. A stitch in time.

(Days, 87–88)

One has learned to be cautious in speaking of these matters, but it seems safe to suppose that a more prosaic writer like Arturo Madrid would read such metaphorical probings of the Mexican psyche as at bottom no more than “stereotypes.” The Yuppies Rodriguez observes in San Francisco he describes as “gay camp followers” who have rejected the Northern European ethic “in favor of the Mediterranean, the Latin, the Catholic, the Castro, the Gay” (Days, 37). It is largely with the force of metaphor that Rodriguez arrests and retains the attention of his readers, but I have quoted enough to suggest how it is that what constitutes his characteristic strength as an imaginative writer would constitute his principal limitation if he were mistaken for a social critic. None of the ethnic figures in his narrative, not even Mamá and Papá, can entirely escape being subsumed on occasion into metaphor. At times one is compelled to entertain the supposition that the alienated ethnicity of Rodriguez himself is a trope. Of what, it is not easy to say.

Something less, then, than a critic of multiculturalism, Rodriguez is, in another sense, something more. That sense is harder to specify however, because what Rodriguez is not is always more apparent than what he is. We so regularly encounter his views on current issues in Harper's and The New Republic as well as on public television that it is tempting to suppose the present state of our critical discourse offers us the terms we need to characterize him. In fact, however, he is more accurately characterized by an analogy from the remote past. Richard Rodriguez is certainly no Saint Augustine, but he is admittedly his disciple, and there is something to be learned from tracing the analogies between the two men, since even the points at which analogy fails are instructive.

The confessional mode of Hunger of Memory is only the most apparent point of resemblance. Like Augustine, Rodriguez was born an ethnikos and shaped by his education in the language of public life into a homo urbanus, the movement from cultural periphery to cultural center taking the form of a movement from south to north. Like the unregenerate Augustine, Rodriguez was ambitious. For status: “With money. Among people with money. And at leisure—a weekend guest in Connecticut; at a cocktail party in Bel Air” (Hunger, 3). “I tempt vulgarity to be reassured. I am filled with the gaudy delight, the monstrous grace of the nouveau riche” (Hunger, 137); but even more for a public voice, for his “own public identity” (Hunger, 25). And also vain: the reader recalls him studying his mirrored image on occasions opportune and inopportune. And, of course, proud: addressing a group of Catholic priests on multiculturalism: “I feel myself the only Catholic in this room” (Days, 196); and moving to San Francisco in 1979 (“To Carthage I came, where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves.” [Confessions, 36]) he “found the company of men who pursued an earthly paradise charming. Skepticism became my demeanor toward them—I was the dinner-party skeptic …” (Days, 41–42).

In retrospect these sins are always before him. His narrative mocks the desire for a public identity that impels it. At a party he is asked, “Have you ever thought of doing any high-fashion modeling? Take this card” (Hunger, 3). At a gallery opening he is mistaken for a tennis player from Bombay. His reflected image is often ludicrous or grotesque. A mirror in a Beverly Hills shop catches him uncertainly assessing the effect of orange shirt, black-and-white checked coat, and straw hat:

At that moment, the door opened and Cesar Romero walked into the mirror.

“Great-looking coat,” he said, tapping my shoulder lightly as he passed.

(Days, 157)

Inspecting his pumped body in the mirror of a San Francisco gym, he acknowledges: “From homosexual to autosexual … to nonsexual. The effect of the overdeveloped body is the miniaturization of the sexual organs—of no function beyond wit” (Days, 39). Pride, overreaching itself, totters and is abased:

I feel myself the only Catholic in this room.

No, that's not true. I understand these men well enough. I am their creation and they are mine. I still go to mass each Sunday. I go to a half-empty church. I go early—a “quiet mass,” a low mass, a cold mass—so as not to dispel the illusion that the fat, full life of the Church is going on elsewhere. …

(Days, 196)

Attending a commemoration service in a Castro district church during which volunteers from an AIDS Support Group are asked to step forward, he watches an “old monkey,” a “wizened butterfly,” a “powdered old pouf,” leave his pew and stride “into the sanctuary to take his place in the company of the Blessed … while I, barren skeptic, reader of St. Augustine, curator of the earthly paradise, inheritor of the empty mirror, I shift my tailbone upon the cold, hard pew” (Days, 46–47).

Original Sin. My childhood catechism—which was also that of Rodriguez—defined it with memorable succinctness: “Our nature was corrupted by the sin of our first parents, which darkened our understanding, weakened our will, and left in us a strong inclination to evil.” A traditional Christian doctrine, Original Sin was given its orthodox formulation by Augustine, for whom, however, it was as much a matter of psychological insight as of theological necessity. It distilled the sad wisdom he had acquired from his observation of the perversity of the human will and of humanity's blindness to the hollowness of all human aspiration and to the failure inherent in all human endeavor. Rodriguez memorized the Baltimore Catechism as a boy and read St. Augustine as a young man, but in his case it seems that the sense of Original Sin, like the sin itself, was inherited:

My father remains Mexican in California. My father lives under the doctrine, under the very tree of Original Sin. Much in life is failure or compromise; like father, like son.

(Days, 219)

Rodriguez has had frequent occasion to recall his father's skepticism: Californians “driven to despair by the relentless optimism of their state” (Days, xvii); educators seduced by the “foolish and certainly doomed” supposition that the “ghetto child can retain his separateness even while being publicly educated,” that “there is no private cost to be paid for public success” (Hunger, 34–35). And yet by subtitling his second book “An Argument with My Mexican Father,” Rodriguez signals his conviction that Original Sin is not the whole of moral wisdom. “I do not believe an old man's pessimism is necessarily truer than a young man's optimism simply because it comes after” (Days, 27). In the “debate between comedy and tragedy,” the “best resolution … is irresolution” (Days, xviii). (A more uncompromising skepticism will, of course, question even this “resolution,” for while the habitually irresolute may indeed secure themselves from disillusion, can they be said ever to have known either the “sappy wisdom” of spring (Days, 27) or the darker wisdom of age?)

Nor was Original Sin the whole of moral wisdom for Augustine. To seek the origin of sin is to suppose there was a time when sin was not. “Whence is evil” in a world created by a supremely good God (Confessions, 128)? The question long perplexed Augustine as he struggled with his own inclination to Manichaeism. That in some sense evil does not exist he came only gradually to recognize: “whatsoever is, is good” (134). “And I enquired what iniquity was, and found it to be no substance, but the perversion of the will turned aside from Thee, O God” (137). Augustine's inquiry, the substance of his Confessions, was a self-inquiry, an incessant probing of the obscurer regions of his inner life. Under his relentless introspection whatever seemed stable in the soul—desire, memory, will—proved to be divided, contradictory, alienated from itself. His characteristic grammatical mood is therefore either interrogative or precatory—a chain of unanswerable because paradoxical questions concluding in prayer.

Nowhere is Rodriguez more the disciple of Augustine than in his protracted introspection into the insoluble paradoxes of conflicted and alienated selfhood. Of course, his confessions of alienated selfhood can no longer be conducted in the language of Augustine. The categories in which the soul of the late twentieth century seeks to know itself are, ostensibly at least, more ethnic than Platonic. But the quarry is no less elusive. (“There is no rest, where you seek it. Seek what you seek, but it is not there where you seek.”) For to seek one's ethnic identity is already to have lost it. There is, therefore, no such thing as “minority literature.” Alex Haley's Roots “tells us more about his difference from his illiterate tribal ancestors than it does about his link to them.” “Any novel or play about the lower class will necessarily be alien to the culture it portrays.” “The child who learns to read about his nonliterate ancestors necessarily separates himself from their way of life” (Hunger, 161).

“I felt that I had somehow committed a sin of betrayal by learning English. This original sin against my family told whenever anyone addressed me in Spanish and I responded, confounded” (Hunger, 30). Rodriguez has subtitled his first book “The Education of Richard Rodriguez,” but it might as well have been titled “The Confessions of Richard Rodriguez” because as he recounts it, the history of his education is the history of youthful transgression. His original sin was a sin against intimacy, a violation of the enclosed warmth of family life, of that private place to which, without reflection, one knew that one belonged. And the violation was an act of linguistic self-consciousness. He remembers the distress and apprehension with which he heard his father—confident and authoritative when speaking Spanish—struggle to make himself understood to a teenage gas station attendant. His sense of distance from his family only increased when his parents, following the advice of his teachers, undertook to speak English rather than Spanish at home. It was then he resolved to master “classroom English,” becoming a conscientious and successful student (Hunger, 22). Only much later could he confess his guilty secret: his alienation from his early family life was not merely the price of his success but the actual cause of it. (Our childhood catechism told us that one of the necessary conditions of serious sin was “full consent of the will.”)

And yet, Rodriguez insists, there was a kind of paradoxical necessity in his betrayal of early intimacy because without it (O felix culpa) the child would never have become a man. One might therefore suppose that the education that separated him from his family afforded him a sense of selfhood, of individuality. This is not, however, the way he remembers the value of his education. For a student like himself, “the best synonym for primary ‘education’ is ‘imitation’” (Hunger, 67). The admiration he once felt for his parents was transferred to his teachers:

The very first facts they dispensed, I grasped with awe. Any book they told me to read, I read—then waited for them to tell me which books I enjoyed. Their every casual opinion I came to adopt and to trumpet when I returned home.

(Hunger, 49)

Such habits persisted. As a graduate student of English literature he derived his opinions from “Frye or Empson or Leavis” or repeated the observations of his professor. He seemed “to have no thoughts of his own” (Hunger, 66). When he attempted to write up his notes for his dissertation on Renaissance literature he could produce only “sentences that were overly cautious, timid, strained brittle under the heavy weight of footnotes and qualifications. I seemed unable to dare a passionate statement” (Hunger, 71). He began to yearn nostalgically for that ethnic garden from which he had banished himself by his education. But what he could not return to he could remember. No longer at home either in the garden or in school, he at last found his own voice—that singular and somber voice we hear in Hunger of Memory.

Although the paradoxes of ethnic identity are never far from the surface of Rodriguez's writing, they are hardly the only paradoxes the reader finds there. Rodriguez's confessions of divided selfhood often uncover fissures too deep for a purely ethnic geology to chart. His Catholic identity above all must be distinguished from his ethnic identity. Early in his parochial school education he learned that others shared the faith of his parents (the nuns, in fact, made him something of an Irish Catholic), that Catholicism was the religion of his school as well as of his home, that “Catholic” named his public as well as his private identity. Rodriguez still calls himself a Catholic (a practicing Catholic, a “loyal son of the church”) in a sense in which he does not call himself a member of an ethnic minority, but he is no longer certain what his profession means. He, like the church to which he belongs, has changed. Both have lost faith in “communal Catholicism” (Hunger, 106). Whereas Catholics once defined their world by their Catholicism—those who were not Catholics were “non-Catholics”—to be a Catholic today is to be “defined by a non-Catholic world” (Hunger, 80). The problem of an American-Catholic identity is, I have been told, one that troubles even the American bishops. In what sense can an American be a Catholic, or a Catholic an American? Catholics are by tradition the most “communal of Christians” (Days, 176); Americans, however, profess individuality, choice, social mobility, pluralism, egalitarianism, self-reliance. Having embraced these values himself, Rodriguez recognizes that he has become “like a Protestant Christian” (Hunger, 110).

The Catholicism of his youth was a quite different matter. (What other Catholics old enough to remember recall with amused indulgence as immature enthusiasms, Rodriguez describes with unembarrassed longing, with something like desire.) There was a time when Catholicism shaped his whole day, his whole year. Morning and bedtime had their proper prayers. Prayers divided the segments of his school day. Altar cloths and vestments changed color with the liturgical seasons. On the Catholic calendar in his bedroom (as opposed to the secular calendar in the kitchen), “every day was something” (Hunger, 93). Living in Catholic time, one knew who one was and sensed one's difference from those for whom Ash Wednesday, All Saints Day, and Good Friday were days like any other. Nothing confirmed the Catholic sense of identity more than the Mass. Nowhere else were his parents treated with the respect their inherent dignity deserved. “Only the liturgy has encouraged them to dwell on the meaning of their lives. To think” (Hunger, 91). The Latin Mass encouraged private prayer, but one knew that the Mass was also the great public prayer of the church, celebrated in Latin to signify that the church was universal and timeless.

At the time of Vatican II Rodriguez was a student at Stanford. A liberal Catholic, he favored the Council's efforts to bring the church into a closer relation with the modern world. But the reformation of the liturgy he consistently deplored. His reflections on the revised liturgy are mordant but just and confirm the theological principle lex orandi, lex credendi (how we pray is a reflection of what we believe). The bishops would do well to ponder them. The vernacular liturgy divides Catholics. A multiethnic parish that offers one mass in English and another in Spanish is really two parishes. (He proposes restoring Latin.) At the Kiss of Peace, an action meant to symbolize fellowship, Catholics “shake hands like figures on a music box,” and Rodriguez feels “isolated sitting in half-empty churches among people I am suddenly aware of not knowing” (Hunger, 101). He entertains the shrewd surmise that the pressure to “de-Europeanize” the Roman Church came not so much from Third World Catholics as from middle-class Catholics in North America and Western Europe, inhabitants of the “secular city” (Hunger, 107). The initial word of the Creed—once Credo, “I believe”—has been changed to “We believe” in an effort to assure Catholics they are not alone or solitary in their faith. “This assurance is necessary because, in a sense, it no longer is true” (Hunger, 106).

Rodriguez still attends mass, regretting the loss of his childhood faith, marveling that he once “so easily prayed with others—not simply alone” (Hunger, 100). A “citizen of the secular city,” he no longer shares his daily life with members of what we used to call the “Household of the Faith.” “By choice I do not confine myself to Catholic society. Most of my friends and nearly all of my intimates are non-Catholics” (Hunger, 107–8). As an older Catholic I too often go to early mass, a “quiet” mass, a “cold” mass, nostalgically remembering the old rite (I once gave a videotape of the Latin mass to my parish church—for the archives, as it were). Like Rodriguez, I am unmarried, but sometimes I attend a later mass and am reminded that what makes it a “noisy” mass, a “warm” mass is that it is a family mass. In one respect at least the church has not changed. It still insists on the sanctity of the family and on the obligation of parents to transmit their faith to their children. Still, something has been lost. The church Rodriguez and I remember so affectionately knew better how to comfort those who are alone. The daily mass at dawn (attended mainly by a handful of older women in black) the devotions, novenas, and benedictions seem in retrospect like so many consolations reserved by a compassionate church for the widowed, the unmarried, and the childless.

What is the genre of Hunger of Memory? Rodriguez, whose doctoral dissertation dealt with literary genres in the Renaissance, has addressed this question and has offered more than one answer (Hunger, 71). At one point, he describes his book as a “middle-class pastoral,” in the sense that it exhibits the ambivalent self-consciousness of a middle-class writer reflecting on the lower class (Hunger, 6). But the title page advises bibliographers, librarians, bookstore clerks, and the Library of Congress that Hunger of Memory is to be classified as “an autobiography,” a designation he later qualifies as “essays impersonating an autobiography” (Hunger, 7). Both descriptions are accurate. I would only add that, as I suppose Rodriguez is aware, the first autobiography of the inner life was written by Augustine and that in its literal sense, the word “essay” designates a tentative, often inconclusive effort. Taken in this sense, it aptly describes the mode in which Rodriguez, like Augustine, undertakes his exercise in self-knowledge.

Like Augustine, Rodriguez must answer the question, To whom does a man address his spiritual autobiography, his “confessions”? Augustine of course addressed his confessions immediately to God (“Let me know Thee, O Lord who knowest me; let me know Thee, as I am known,” 196) and indirectly to his “fellow-citizens” or “fellow-pilgrims,” “sharers of my joy, and partners in my mortality” (199). Rodriguez writes, can write only, to a reader who does not know him, someone “with a face erased,” a “gray presence. Unknown, unfamiliar … All that I know about him is that he has had a long education and that his society, like mine, is often public (un gringo)” (Hunger, 182). Those who do know him will not recognize the divided self to which he confesses in his public voice. A close friend, a woman “who knows who I am,” mocks the somber voice of his autobiographical essays, “‘All that Spanish angst,’ she laughs, ‘It's not really you.’” “From such an intimate one must sometimes escape to the company of strangers, to the liberation of the city, in order to form new versions of oneself” (Hunger, 190).

What he writes will also be incomprehensible to his parents, in more than one sense. The distinction between public and private life, between one's public and one's private self, is, for his parents, perfectly clear and never to be compromised. When she read one of his earlier autobiographical essays his mother wrote him in protest (Like Augustine, Rodriguez has an insistently prayerful mother, although her prayers, unlike Monica's, have remained unanswered.):

“You say too much about the family … Why do you have to do that? Writing is one thing, the family is another. … Especially I don't want the gringos knowing about our private affairs. Why should they? Please give this some thought. Please write about something else in the future. Do me this favor.”

(Hunger, 178)

To Rodriguez, however, the distinction is less clear because it is more paradoxical. He shares his parents' contempt for all public displays of intimacy, but he insists that there is a place in public life for the “deeply personal.” Indeed, the most “deeply personal” things can be “revealed only to strangers.” “There are things too personal to be shared with intimates” (Hunger, 185). What is remarkable in such passages is not Rodriguez's suppression of the distinction between the public and the private—many writers would acknowledge its necessity—but the erection of a new distinction between the personal and the intimate. A public expression may well be more personal than private, but in what sense are we to understand an intimacy from which what is “deeply personal” has been withheld?

In fact, the Latin voice of Augustine discloses more and withholds less than the gringo voice of Rodriguez, which is never, like Augustine's, the voice of a convulsed heart. Here is Augustine after the death of a youthful friend:

I wondered that others, subject to death, did live, since he whom I loved, as if he should never die, was dead; and I wondered yet more that myself, who was to him a second self, could live, he being dead.

(60)

This is Rodriguez at the bedside of a dying friend:

César said everyone else he knew might get AIDS and die. He said I would be the only one spared—“spared” was supposed to have been chased with irony, I knew, but his voice was too weak to do the job. “You are too circumspect,” he said then, wagging his finger upon the coverlet.

(Days, 42–43)

César's was a sin of vanity, a belief in the possibility of an earthly paradise, but the “greater sin” was, Rodriguez confesses, “my unwillingness to embrace life” (Days, 43). It is his original sin in another form. To write, to address his gringo reader, to assume his public identity, he must disconnect his phone and avoid “complex relationships” with “troublesome” lovers or “troubled” friends (Hunger, 176).

Although Rodriguez does not, like Augustine, confess to actual sins of the flesh (“Give me chastity and continency, only not yet,” 158.), his confessions are hardly devoid of erotic sensibility. They are, in fact, suffused with it. The erotic feeling, however, is elusive, unfixed, refracted. He is hardly the only Catholic to observe that the ritual of the church “excited more sexual wonderment than it repressed” (Hunger, 84). (One recalls the sensual, perverse, or blasphemous reveries not only of Camille Paglia but of Baudelaire and even of Augustine: “I dared even, while thy solemnities were celebrated within the walls of Thy church to desire [concupiscere], and to compass business deserving death for its fruits” [39].) More characteristic is his allusion to the Catholic part of himself as “ancient, cynical, feminine,” or his sense of Protestantism as male and of Catholics as children. Or his “first conscious experience of sexual excitement” observing the frankly physical admiration with which his mother regarded his father diving into a public swimming pool (Hunger, 123). Or the adolescent grown divorced from his body now in his thirties admiring the “torso, the soccer player's calves and thighs, the arms of the twenty-year-old I never was” (Hunger, 136). Or the young man's attraction to the physicality of Mexican gardeners: “I tried to deny it by looking away. But what was denied became strongly desired” (Hunger, 126).

The divided self to which Rodriguez confesses is fissured sexually as well as ethnically. He can no more serve as the spokesman of a sexual minority than as the spokesman of an ethnic minority. A reporter's unhappy description of him as a “gay man from a macho culture” dissipates his alienation in an attempt to name it. His own response to the question “Are you gay?” was more truthful than evasive: “No, I'm morose” (Yaco, 2). The singular and somber voice of Richard Rodriguez is unforgettable because it is unclassifiable. Although it resembles Augustine's in a number of ways, it lacks Augustine's emotional and psychological range. Nor has Rodriguez made his confession, as Augustine made his, in the hope of edifying his readers. In the final analysis, he has no program to offer them. There are moments, however, when, like Augustine, he seems to ask for their prayers. To a priest who asks for his “agenda,” he replies, “I have no agenda, Father … I have no prescription, I have no intention. I am lonely” (Days, 197).

References

Augustine. The Confessions of Saint Augustine. Trans. Edward P. Pusey. New York: Modern Library, 1949.

Grossman, Ron. “Richard Rodriguez.” Chicago Tribune, January 26, 1993, sec. 5:1–2.

“Richard Rodriguez.” Bill Moyers: A World of Ideas II. Ed. Andie Tucker. New York: Doubleday, 1990, 82–90.

Rodriguez, Richard. “An Education in Language.” The State of the Language, Ed. Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1980, 129–39.

———. Days of Obligation New York: Viking, 1992.

———. “Going Home Again.” The American Scholar 44 (1974–75): 15–28.

———. Hunger of Memory, 1982. New York: Bantam, 1983.

———. “Leo Carillo as Andy Hardy.” The Columbia Forum 2 (1973): 35–40.

Teller, Mary E. “Rodriguez, Richard.” Contemporary Authors. Ed. Hay May. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 429–30.

Yaco, Link. “Godfather of Latin Punk Addresses Cultural Identity.” Ann Arbor News November 28, 1993, F1–F2.