SOURCE: Tilden, Norma. “Word Made Flesh: Richard Rodriguez's ‘Late Victorians’ as Nativity Story.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 40, no. 4 (winter 1998): 442–59.

[In the following essay, Tilden discusses Rodriguez's views on homosexuality and the role of the Catholic Church as both a censor and a solicitor in his essay “Late Victorians.”]

In his 1982 autobiography Hunger of Memory Richard Rodriguez writes that for him as a child the Catholic Church “excited more sexual wonderment than it repressed”: “I would study pictures of martyrs—white-robed virgins fallen in death and the young, almost smiling, St. Sebastian, transfigured in pain. … At such moments, the Church touched alive some very private sexual excitement” (84). In the autobiographical essay “Late Victorians: San Francisco, AIDS, and the Homosexual Stereotype,” which appeared eight years later in Harper's, Rodriguez works out a discursive embodiment of this sexual and religious “wonderment,” now complicated by the pressures of a rich literary tradition, both narrative and elegiac. Rodriguez's memoir evokes the inherited forms it retraces; these include classical and Christian elegies, spiritual autobiographies, American myths of westward expansion, and the emerging genre of AIDS memorials as performance art.¹

At the heart of Rodriguez's revisiting of these narrative sites is liturgy. In “Late Victorians,” under the guise of a memento mori, Rodriguez writes a nativity story suffused with the language and iconography of Latin Catholicism.² Drawing upon the Catholic liturgy of his Mexican American heritage, Rodriguez works out a liturgy of his own—an evocative, ceremonial prose through which he reasserts the sacramentality of material things.

When “Late Victorians” first appeared in Harper's, it was identified as a chapter in a forthcoming book to be called Mexico's Children. Two years later, however, the book was published as Days of Obligation, its title taken from the Roman Catholic calendar of annual “feast days” so important that they carry the obligation to attend mass. Taken together, these two titles encompass a dialectic of Catholicism and ethnicity within which Rodriguez constructs his autobiographical essay, shaping the narrative to serve, among other things, as both a subtle “coming out” story and a deeply ritualized elegy for those “late Victorians”—San Franciscans dead of AIDS—whose community he memorializes.

A folk religion most clearly reveals itself in what a culture celebrates. Rodriguez's essay, which celebrates a spectacle culture shared by Catholic and gay sensibilities,³ operates not merely on the level of reference and allusion but on the level of ethnopoetics: inherited structures, symbols, postures.⁴ Against a backdrop of San Francisco's Victorian architecture, Rodriguez juxtaposes seemingly disjointed reflections on everything from a friend dying of AIDS, to the mythic American journey westward, to the culture of bodybuilding. Rodriguez weaves these disparate concerns into a narrative performance that echoes the ritual of the Catholic mass, celebrating the Eucharistic ingesting of flesh and blood—the sacramental exchange through which the material becomes sanctified and the sacred, corporeal. Exploring his own relation to the gay community of which he writes—and thereby effecting his own subjectivity among the “late Victorians” whom he eulogizes—Rodriguez plots a nativity narrative that replicates the Catholic view of the Nativity as a “feast” celebrating God's condescension into human flesh and, in this case, human words.

At the very center of cultural Catholicism is a profound ambivalence about bodies. They are, on the one hand, earthbound things to be transcended; on the other, they provide the material sites where the believer works out salvation. Catholic iconography glorifies the martyred bodies of its saints: witness the hunkish St. Christopher, the languid St. Sebastian, the budding beauty of the virgin martyrs. Grace manifests itself in bodily perfection. In Catholic lore there is no such thing as a homely virgin. Despite the heavenward gaze of our statues and the upward trajectory of our salvation stories (Merton's “seven storey mountain,” Dante's conical paradise), Catholics are, for better or worse, hooked on bodies as the necessary instruments of salvation.

Bodies. In the old Latin-rite Mass, with its elaborate choreography of stand, sit, and kneel, there was one moment which always puzzled my childhood sense of decorum. After the sermon, the congregation stood for the Creed. Behind each classroom grouping of schoolchildren sat the nun who taught them, and each nun had a clicker to signal when it was time to change positions. “Credo in unum Deum …” With those words came the signal to stand tall, both feet on the floor, to testify to belief. But right in the middle of the Creed, the clicker sounded again: “Qui propter nos homines et propter nostram salutem, descendit de coelis” (“Who for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven”)—CLICK—“Et incarnatus est” (“and was made flesh”). “Et Homo Factus Est.” At this crucial point we were to genuflect in unison, falling to our knees in imitative homage to Christ who had, as we heard it described, “come down” to earth to take on flesh and blood.

The rubric called for a gentle flexing of the knee, but always we threw ourselves into it, vying to see who could hit the kneeler hardest. And inevitably there would be one boy, usually the biggest, who managed to miss the cushioned kneeler altogether, hitting the floor with a resounding thud that set all the kneelers bouncing.

After the fall came the expulsion. The nun would shoot out of her pew, veils flying, and be on him in a flash, dragging him down the aisle and out the side door by one ear. All the while, the unfortunate boy would protest in a loud whisper that he had fallen, that he hadn't done anything wrong, only dropped to the ground as we were supposed to do. And although we didn't yet have the theology to explain it, we knew he had a point. We were gathered to celebrate a fortunate fall, reiterating a singular ritual of descent in a Church otherwise focused on “offering things up.” In this rubric, we honored Christ who, as the nuns explained it (implicitly slipping into the language of social class), had “lowered Himself” to take on human flesh and thereby redeem human sin. Redemption required Incarnation.

Having grown up in that same Latin-rite Church,⁵ Richard Rodriguez is similarly fascinated by weight and physicality—by things that, like a big Catholic boy, fall hard and heavy. There is a passage in the “Credo” chapter of Hunger of Memory which could serve as an apology for the pervasively incarnational intuition of the “Late Victorians” essay. In this earlier, more explicitly religious testimony Rodriguez considers what it means to “profess Catholicism” as an adult living in a secular society. Here he claims the “materialist” impulse as a central legacy of his ethnic Catholicism, and he traces this legacy directly to his Church's reverence for the mystery of the Word made flesh:

In a cultural sense, I remain a Catholic. My upbringing has shaped in me certain attitudes which have not worn thin over the years. I am, for example, a materialist largely because I was brought up to believe in the central mystery of the Church—the redemptive Incarnation. (I carried the heavy gold crucifix in church ceremonies far too often to share the distrust of the material still prevalent in modern Puritan America.)

(102)⁶

If the Mexican culture of his home is persistently Catholic, so Rodriguez perceives America as persistently Gnostic and Puritan. Hyphenated identity places him, as cultural Catholic, on a materialist fault line. Ethnicity registers as shame, focused on the body. Not surprisingly, then, Rodriguez associates his childhood assimilation into American society with a progressive sense of separation from his physical self. In the “Complexion” chapter of Hunger of Memory, he connects his negative feelings about his own male body with his ethnicity, recalling how, growing up in California, he “grew divorced from” his body because of its dark complexion:

I denied myself a sensational life. The normal, extraordinary excitement of feeling my body alive—riding shirtless on a bicycle in the warm wind created by furious self-propelled motion—the sensations that first had excited in me a sense of my maleness, I denied. I was too ashamed of my body. I wanted to forget that I had a body because I had a brown body.

(126)⁷

Rodriguez's alienation from—and reclaiming of—the body expresses itself in the ethnopoetics of “Late Victorians,” and here is where a meditation on death by AIDS becomes, at the same time, a nativity story. In its conflation of feasts, Redemption and Incarnation, Rodriguez's essay takes on the paradoxical spirit of a richly sensational carnaval, at once a valediction for and a celebration of flesh.⁸ Out of an intricately textured background of shadowy folk religion, Rodriguez fashions a feast day liturgy, both darkly solemn and warmly celebratory—a processional in essay form.

In celebrating the weight and corruptibility of human bodies, Rodriguez traces a line of descent—a narrative trajectory that evokes the central Catholic mystery of Incarnation, the Word taking on flesh.⁹ He sets this pattern (downward, moving north to south) against the American frontier myth of optimistic progress (lateral, east to west) in which, still today, hopeful “teenagers arrive” in San Francisco “aboard Greyhound buses” looking for paradise at “Land's End.”¹⁰ He sets it, too, against another narrative paradigm in his American background: the arduous mountain of Protestant spiritual autobiography.¹¹ Countering the upward trajectory of the traditional “Pilgrim's progress,” Rodriguez plots a descent into the carnal. There he discovers a new communion of saints—not the virgins and martyrs who have transcended the desires of the body, but the motley company of AIDS workers who have, as he puts it, been “recalled to nature.” These saints have learned to caress Death in the flesh of the dying. “I have seen people kiss Death on his lips, where once there were lips.” These saints, he says, have come to know “the weight of bodies.”

In its structuring, and especially in the downward trajectory of its narrative line, Rodriguez's nativity story is recognizably Catholic, transposed out of the cultural Catholicism of his Mexican American home. In Hunger of Memory Rodriguez draws a clear distinction between the “gringo Catholic Church” (86) of his Irish Catholic schooling and the Mexican Catholicism of his family. School religion, he recalls, was dogmatic and systematized, a religion of the Baltimore Catechism where questions were formulated only to provide the occasion for answers (88) and liturgy was registered on a calendar printed by morticians (92). Religious instruction “stressed that man was a sinner” and God was a judge (83). Architectural form followed devotional function. The gringo church building was a cool, marble affair of “elegant simplicity,” free of the devotional confusion of pictures, candles, and trumpets that Rodriguez associates with the “warm yellow” Mexican church where his family worshipped on certain feast days (86). Against the astringent Catholicism of school, he sets the ethnic Catholicism of his Mexican American home, which he describes as a religion of “devotional clutter,” a “nighttime religion,” and, most significantly, “a religion of bedtime.” “Prayers before sleeping” he remembers, “spoke of death coming during the night. It was then a religion of shadows” (86–87). The shadows were crowded with presences: “A child whose parents could not introduce him to books like Grimm's Fairy Tales, I was introduced to the spheres of enchantment by the nighttime Catholicism of demons and angels” (87). In a recent essay on the Latin American novel in Days of Obligation, Rodriguez constructs a sustained meditation on the haunting persistence of the cultural Catholic narrative, and here he directly states what he performatively reiterates in “Late Victorians”: the posture of abjection at the heart of his ethnic-Catholic temper. He recalls an incident where he stands with tourists before a statue of “Christ humiliated” in a Mexican church, a crown of thorns piercing the head of the icon: “‘Yes, yes, yes,’ chimes the Mexican priest. ‘Christ was a loser. Catholicism is a religion for losers’” (183).¹²

In contrast to the dogmatic Catholicism of school, the Mexican Catholicism of home was most concerned “with man the supplicant.” “My family,” Rodriguez reflects in Hunger of Memory, “turned to God not in guilt so much as in need” (85). Here at home dogma was submerged in liturgy. He remembers his first Communion as the occasion where “the idea of God assumed a shape and a scent and a taste” (92). Through the reciprocity of the sacramental exchange, God became sensory, the object of hunger; Word became flesh. Conversely, flesh become Word; ordinary life, when channeled through ritual, could be sacramentalized. Indeed, Rodriguez asserts that it is the Catholic Church—and only the Church—that has provided his parents with a vision of quotidian existence as sacramental:

It has been the liturgical Church that has excited my parents. In ceremonies of public worship, they have been moved, assured that their lives—all aspects of their lives, from waking to eating, from birth until death, all moments—possess great significance. Only the liturgy has encouraged them to dwell on the meaning of their lives. To think.

(91)

And in a line that provides a clue to the processional patterning of “Late Victorians,” he reflects that for Mexican Catholics, the sacred dramas of Catholic liturgy “redeemed the routine” (93). Just so, the sensory details of daily life in San Francisco move Rodriguez's prose processional into the realm of spectacle.

Liturgy, of course, provides a script for performance, and here we discover another key to the structuring of Rodriguez's prose. In “Late Victorians” Rodriguez scripts what performance artist Laurie Anderson calls “a field situation,” in which stories, images, theories, facts, and sounds resonate against each other.¹³ Rodriguez's field encompasses seemingly disconnected aspects of his daily life—the city of San Francisco; its postmodern architecture; the renovated Victorian house where he lives (a house “converted to four apartments; four single men”); the stereotype of the queer decorator and the stylistic aesthetic of “the small effect”; the life and agonizing death of Cesar, a friend suffering from AIDS. All these elements come together in a narrative performance that aspires to the significance of liturgy. And like the liturgies that Rodriguez recalls from High Mass feast days in the wooden Mexican church, this liturgy is “cluttered” with sensational effects and shadowy presences.

The performance begins in a spirit of high camp. In the first of the essay's thirteen sections, Rodriguez plays with the “epigraph” of the traditional essay form. Parodically, he brings together two “authorities”—St. Augustine and Elizabeth Taylor—to establish the opening motif. First he paraphrases Augustine, telling a kind of sacred immigration story: “We are restless hearts, for earth is not our true home. Human happiness is evidence of our immortality. Intuition tells us we are meant for some other city.” Augustine's restlessness is echoed by Taylor, speaking of “cerulean Richard Burton days on her yacht” and reflecting darkly: “This must end.” By invoking these two authorities, representing spiritual and corporeal extremes, Rodriguez sets the tone for the contrasts that define the essay's opening scene. Like most feast day liturgies, this one begins with a procession. Rodriguez reconstructs the spectacle of San Francisco's Gay Freedom Day Parade as he first witnessed it, some ten years earlier, on his way home from Sunday mass.¹⁴ Rituals converge: the “Latin Mass” he had just attended and the ritual march of San Francisco's gay community, complete with marching bands, banners, floats, and what he describes as “consortiums” of saints. Rodriguez makes the connection explicit: “Banners blocked single lives thematically into a processional mass, not unlike the consortiums of the blessed in Renaissance paintings, each saint cherishing the apparatus of his martyrdom: GAY DENTISTS. BLACK AND WHITE LOVERS. GAYS FROM BAKERSFIELD. LATINA LESBIANS.”

Immediately, religious ceremony intersects with American myth. “From the foot of Market Street they marched, east to west,” he observes, “following the mythic American path toward optimism,” a national narrative that still exerts a powerful pull in the present, despite AIDS, ARC, “the acronyms of death.” His next observation draws on both parades: “Lonely teenagers still arrive in San Francisco aboard Greyhound buses. The city can still seem, I imagine … paradise.” On that word the procession halts, having reached the sacred ground where the liturgy will be performed.

The “paradise” which is San Francisco is, however, a “heaven on earth” and as such is governed by material forces of weight and gravity. In the next section of “Late Victorians,” Rodriguez meditates on “expulsion,” and here he shifts from the lateral, east/west processional of the opening scene to the vertical story line which will ultimately control the essay. The spatial pattern is cruciform—a Sign of the Cross. To introduce the intersecting narrative of descent, Rodriguez recounts an event he witnessed four years earlier while jogging in spring. He watches a young woman climb over the rail of the Golden Gate Bridge: “Holding down her skirt with one hand, with the other she waved to a startled spectator … before she stepped onto the sky.” Then he writes to a fragmentary paragraph of nine words: “To land like a spilled purse at my feet.” Weight and gravity enter the essay's performative field: we are not meant to walk the sky. “San Francisco,” he tells us, “toys with the tragic conclusion,” and so does he:

My compass takes its cardinal point from tragedy. If I respond to the metaphor of spring, I nevertheless learned, years ago, from my Mexican parents, from my Irish nuns, to count on winter. The point of Eden for me, for us, is not approach but expulsion.

Throughout the rest of this section, Rodriguez retraces the Sign of the Cross over the city, alternating between the lateral, comic reading of San Francisco as a paradise on earth and the downward pull of “tragic conclusions.” To close the section he directs the spectator's gaze sharply downward into the particular “dreamscape” which, over the course of the essay, comes to define the center of Rodriguez's earthly city:

It was the view from a hill, through a mesh of electrical tram wires, of an urban neighborhood in a valley. The vision took its name from the protruding wedge of a theater marquee. Here Cesar raised his glass without discretion: To the Castro.¹⁵

Then follows another sharp torque as the narrative shifts to architectural history in a long section describing the restoration of the city's “Late Victorian” clapboard houses by gay men. Pointedly, Rodriguez uses his own house as an example: “By California standards I live in an old house. But not haunted.” The house may not be haunted, but the story of its restoration is charged with deeply personal revelation. In recounting the history of the rooms where he lives, Rodriguez expands upon the metaphor of “coming out of the closet,” quietly merging the history of the Victorian house with the gay movement of the 1970s and ultimately with his own personal story. Abruptly, he conflates the three histories with a line that seems to come out of nowhere: “To grow up homosexual is to live with secrets and within secrets. In no other place are those secrets more closely guarded than within the family home.” Four lines later, Rodriguez presents us with a richly evocative paragraph consisting of one shadowy sentence: “I live in a tall Victorian house that has been converted to four apartments; four single men.” At this point, architectural history opens into memoir. Speaking of the house, Rodriguez himself supplies metaphors for the ways in which private lives become public: his rooms, he says, have been “gutted, unrattled, in various ways unlocked” by skylights, windows, new doors. So, too, with this one matter-of-fact sentence, the public essay has been “excavated,” “gutted,” opening into private revelation on the pages of a national magazine.

In the next section Rodriguez extends the intersecting narratives—Victorian houses, sexual identity, the gay aesthetic—into a bold, frontal construction of what he calls in the title the “homosexual stereotype.”¹⁶ He opens the discussion with a flat statement on the “sin” of homosexuality, then moves into a crude moralistic interpretation of it: “The age-old description of homosexuality is of a sin against nature. … The homosexual was sinful because he had no kosher place to stick it.” Expanding upon the against-nature theme, Rodriguez rehearses the old argument that society's condemnation of the homosexual as unnatural allowed him to appropriate a mythical province of artifice, to “drape the architecture of sodomy with art”: “The impulse is not to create but to re-create, to sham, to convert, to sauce, to rouge, to fragrance, to prettify.” In effect, the homosexual seeks to transcend nature through the aesthetic ordering of the mundane.

By foregrounding the homosexual stereotype, Rodriguez introduces into the performative field of the essay a new kind of stylistic pattern: a series of inversions.¹⁷ Here again, Rodriguez's own domestic space serves as the site of a queer performance. He plays at being the decorator, wittily inverting the spheres of his private and public spaces:

I live away from the street, in a back apartment, in two rooms. I use my bedroom as a visitor's room—the sleigh bed tricked up with shams into a sofa—whereas I rarely invite anyone into my library, the public room, where I write, the public gesture.¹⁸

This revelation is a tease, an extended and perverse conceit based on sounds and verbal repetitions. Having asserted that the homosexual impulse is “to sham, to convert,” he shows us his own bed, designed to look like a sleigh (“sleigh” bed, the sounds conjuring an erotic death scene) now “converted” to a sofa and “tricked up with shams.” By such verbal trickery, Rodriguez establishes a nervy rhythm of inversion which eventually takes hold, allowing him to extend the private/public inversion of the house to his urban narrative. In San Francisco, neighborhoods, too, have been inverted—gutted, turned inside out. He contrasts the daylight sexuality of the Castro district, where homosexuality is recognized as an ordinary way of life, with the outlaw sexuality of Folsom street—“an eroticism of the dark” posed against an eroticism of the ordinary. Ironically, ordinary sexuality proves the more dangerous. In yet another inversion of the expected, Rodriguez reconstructs the perverse morality drama in which the allegorically named Dan White, “ex-cop, ex-boxer, ex-fireman, ex-altar boy” who had grown up straight in the Castro, murdered the mayor and a homosexual bureaucrat.

The pattern of inversion continues in the next section as well, as Rodriguez's processional weaves its ragged way through his earthly city. In San Francisco even the architecture of the “straight” downtown can be read as inverted and gay. “Shadows were legislated away. …” Rodriguez points to the city's postmodern buildings as emblems of its playful spirit: skyscrapers in “party hats, buttons, comic mustaches.” These images work as visual caricatures of postmodern design, but they also relate the city's center to the clowns and clones in the Gay Freedom Day Parade of the essay's opening scene. This section moves playfully to a closing image of postmodernist toys epitomized by some pointless angels that Philip Johnson has perched on one of the city's skyscrapers.

With another sharp turn, Rodriguez pulls the essay down and close in, moving to the center of his nativity narrative. He begins to talk about his body. “In the 1970s,” he says casually, “I joined a gym.” With this announcement, the essay moves from city building into bodybuilding. Here, too, the idiom is playfully perverse: “Bodybuilding is a parody of labor, a useless accumulation of the laborer's bulk and strength. No useful task is accomplished.” The now well-established pattern of public/private inversion peaks at the gym, “at once,” he confesses, “a closet of privacy and an exhibition gallery. All four walls are mirrored. I study my body in the mirror.” At this point, Rodriguez reaches the sacramental focus of his narrative. As he begins to reflect upon bodies, the barely submerged language of Catholicism reenters the performative field. Studying his reflection in the mirrors, he sees an image both Christic and graphically carnal: his own body “shrouded in meat.” He watches himself lifting weights, baring his teeth “like an animal.” At that moment, in a thoroughgoing inversion of the term “bodybuilding,” he achieves a paradoxical vision of angels:

Lats become wings. For the gym is nothing if not the occasion for transcendence. From homosexual to autosexual … to nonsexual. The effect of the over-developed body is the miniaturization of the sexual organs—of no function beyond wit. Behold the ape become Blakean angel, revolving in an empyrean of mirrors.

In effect, immersion in the body has banished the body. He sees himself reduced to an angelic ornament—a toy.

Mirrors and angels lead back once more to Rodriguez's own rooms, where he points to a nineteenth-century mirror that was “purchased by a decorator from the estate of a man who died last year of AIDS.” The description proceeds casually—he mentions a frieze of Graces and Angels—but suddenly the tone darkens. The mirror has a “cataract”; distortedly, it “draws upon the room” and perhaps holds to itself some ghostly “memory not mine.” Regarding the mirror with its frolicking angels in their painted landscape, Rodriguez is reminded of “figures disappearing from our landscape,” as did the former owner of the mirror.¹⁹ He reflects that, ironically, mirrors are “less fragile than we are.” AIDS and death have entered the performative field, drawn in through the image of the cataract in the mirror. At this point, Rodriguez returns darkly and dramatically to St. Augustine of his opening invocation: “I imagine St. Augustine's meditation slowly hardening into syllogism, passing down through centuries to confound us: Evil is the absence of good.” The word “absence” rings—tolls—through the prose of this section and the next. As Rodriguez meditates on absences, the word gathers up all the losses he has catalogued: the genitals lost to bodybuilding, the jogger in a red baseball cap, the painter who left his sponges and rags and never returned to finish the job. Through the cataract in the mirror, Rodriguez brings absence home: “AIDS, it has been discovered, is a plague of absence. Absence opened in the blood. Absence condensed into the fluid of passing emotion. Absence shot through opalescent tugs of semen to deflower the city.”

With that description Rodriguez pulls the essay heavily back to earth. There will be no more talk of angels perched on skyscrapers or the perfect artifice of faux masonry and shams. AIDS, Rodriguez admits, “is a non-metaphorical disease, a disease like any other. … fever, blisters, a death sentence.” Like the spilled purse of its opening lines, so “Late Victorians” takes on the weight and gravity of all fleshly things. The essay is recalled to nature.

In the prose of the final two sections, where he directly considers this “non-metaphorical” disease, Rodriguez pulls back from the verbal wit and flashy artifice of the essay's earlier parts. Here he reconstructs a death scene—sexually charged, graphically corporeal, and, in its shadowy backdrop, deeply Catholic. Rodriguez recalls moving back to the “earthly paradise” of San Francisco in 1979, already “a wintry man,” “a firm believer in Original Sin and in the limits of possibility.” He finds himself quickly charmed by the city's playfulness and particularly by one friend, Cesar, a teacher. Rodriguez portrays Cesar as one who fully embraces the sensual delights of this earthly Eden. Cesar was “ruled by pulp” and “loved everything that ripened in time. Freshmen. Bordeaux.” “Cesar,” he tells us in a line that recalls the ability of Mexican Catholicism to sanctify the ordinary, “could fashion liturgy from an artichoke.”²⁰

In the essay's closing passage, Rodriguez describes Cesar's death from AIDS in a three-word paragraph: “Cesar experienced agony.” As happens frequently in “Late Victorians,” the final word of a short phrase serves to reassert a controlling motif. So “agony” introduces a shadowy reference to the corporeal Christ in the garden of Gethsemane: “Four of his high school students sawed through a Vivaldi quartet in the corridor outside his hospital room, prolonging the hideous garden.” Throughout the scene describing Cesar's death, the language of Catholicism is particularly dense: the prolonged Agony in the Garden, Cesar “unconvincingly resurrected” at his memorial service, and finally a paragraph in which Rodriguez himself seems to “fashion liturgy from an artichoke.” While speaking of ordinary, daylight things—restaurants, new books—Rodriguez evokes an allusive, Christic death scene: “Sunlight remains. Traffic remains. … And the mirror rasps on its hook. The mirror is lifted down.” The sounds carry subtle references to the redemptive Passion of Christ: “remains,” suggesting the body after death; “rasps on its hook,” suggesting the suffering of crucifixion; and finally, “lifted down.” To be “lifted down”—the phrase, an oxymoron, recalls the deposition of Christ from the cross and provides an emblem for the descending movement of the essay's final section where Rodriguez stares down the spectacle of death by AIDS.

The close of “Late Victorians” is graphically physical and earthbound. Rodriguez smashes at the “mock-angelic” stereotype that would find “spectacle” in the death of a beautiful young man: “This doll is Death. I have seen people caressing it, staring Death down. I have seen people wipe its tears, wipe its ass; I have seen people kiss Death on his lips, where once there were lips.” In the final inversion, Rodriguez describes the descent into nature which serves as a “lifting down” of the gay community into the “company of the Blessed.” “Men who sought the aesthetic ordering of existence were recalled to nature. Men who aspired to the mock-angelic settled for the shirt of hair.” In this paradisal company he finds no angels, no images of physical transcendence; on the contrary, “the saints of this city have names listed in the phone book.”

The essay closes as it opened, with a parade—a recessional. Rodriguez describes a ceremony for AIDS workers that he witnessed one Sunday in Advent in a Catholic Church “at a time in the history of the world when the Roman Catholic Church still pronounced the homosexual a sinner.” The consortium gathers, an unlikely and ragged band, in the sanctuary, “facing the congregation, grinning self-consciously at one another.” Rodriguez represents this saintly company as a motley band of the sort that medieval Catholicism loved to portray—what Piers Plowman called a “fair field full of folk.”²¹ For Rodriguez, the “fair field” reemerges as “a lady with a plastic candy cane,” “a Castro clone with a red bandanna,” “an old pouf,” “a pink-haired punkess,” a “black man in a checkered sports coat,” the “gay couple in middle age.” He gathers them up in a rough summary that captures the banality of the scene: “Blood and shit and Mr. Happy Face.” And then immediately, with another of those rapid swerves that propel the essay, comes the beautiful line: “These know the weight of bodies.” And then, even more pointedly, “These learned to love what is corruptible.”

The performance is not quite over. Rodriguez constructs one more inversion, a litany of titles, except that in Catholic tradition the litany is a rite of supplication, and these titles are all reflexive, self-accusatory, and confessional: “These learned to love what is corruptible, 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.” And yet, despite Rodriguez's confiteor, isn't this pew exactly where the devout Catholic belongs during the ritual performance? The liturgy draws to a close, as it always does, with the Catholic seated on the “cold, hard” pew, at once spectator and supplicant.

Ultimately, “Late Victorians” is a reiterative performance, enacted from the posture of all rituals: abjection suffused with hope. Once again, as in the “Achievement of Desire” chapter of Hunger of Memory, Rodriguez shapes a transformation of indefinite, unfocused longing into articulated desire—into a liturgy that celebrates the sacramentality of bodies.²² Rodriguez's ritual performance, an echo of the Catholic Mass, enacts a discursive ingesting of flesh and blood through which spiritual longing becomes physical—and thereby perceptible, uncloseted, and, most importantly, redemptive. Exploring his own relation to the gay community of San Francisco, Rodriguez plots a nativity story that replicates the Catholic view of the Nativity as a “feast” celebrating God's descent to human flesh and, in this case, human words. In the culture of Latin Catholicism, as Rodriguez affirms, a feast is also an obligation.

Notes

1. On memorial performance as ritual, see Sayre (101) and Rothenberg (10). On the AIDS quilt as an unorthodox, “nontranscendental” form of elegy that evokes “the absent bodies of the dead through clothing they once wore” (363), see Ramazani (361–65).

2. For a 1995 interview in which Rodriguez discusses Catholicism, see Crowley. In a direct reference to “Late Victorians,” Rodriguez describes the transformation wrought by AIDS on the gay movement in San Francisco as the movement from a “circus of egoism” to a “circle of compassion around the deathbed. … Very Catholic” (10). Although no one has focused critical attention on the cultural poetics of Rodriguez's Catholicism, general treatments of religion and immigration have been helpful, particularly Giles on the clash of the American Puritan and the Catholic tempers (35–53; 120–21); DeLeón on Catholicism as contributing to anti-Mexican bigotry in Texas history (3–4); Liptak on the history of the Mexican migrant church in the early twentieth century. The best treatment of the ways in which religion manifests itself as a “cultural system” remains Geertz: “A synopsis of cosmic order, a set of religious beliefs, is also a gloss upon the mundane world … more than gloss, such beliefs are also a template” (124). See Fischer for ways that components of “disseminated” ethnic identity are “recollected” in autobiography (195–98).

3. See Nunokawa on “the venerable tradition of sacred drag” (317–30).

4. The term was coined by Rothenberg, “circa 1967” (5) for intercultural verbal performance.

5. Born in 1944. Rodriguez would have participated in the identical Latin-rite liturgy which continued into the late 1950s. In Hunger he waxes nostalgic for the place of Latin in the “ceremonial” church and acknowledges that he still stands for the Creed (98–102). “Late Victorians” opens with the scene of Rodriguez “walking home from the Latin Mass at St. Patrick's” (57). Speaking of Hunger, Paredes sees Rodriguez's “preference for the traditional Latin liturgy” as evidence of his “rigid conventionalism” (282).

6. On the materialist legacy of Catholicism, see Giles on Aquinas (36) and Scarry (“Donne”) on the “volitional materialism” of God as manifest in certain verbal artifacts of John Donne. Scarry (The Body in Pain, 281–326) provides the best theoretical discussion of ways that the artifact can represent a projection of the physical body.

7. In Rodriguez's discussion of his brown body, Danahay finds evidence of repressed sexual desire (299) and Paredes discovers ethnic self-hatred (291).

8. The word draws its double-edged meaning from its origins in medieval Latin; carnaval, denoting the day of festivity that precedes Ash Wednesday, derives from carnem levare, the putting away of flesh.

9. Following Sollors, who identifies “consent and descent” as the defining dramatic tension in American culture (6), Ferraro consistently uses the image of “descent lines” (196) to describe forms of ethnic persistence. This coinage intersects in interesting ways with my use of “descent” to describe a spatial trajectory. In “Late Victorians” Rodriguez alludes to the self-“excavation” of Freudian analysis as a “descending architecture” (59), and this image describes one of the essay's controlling patterns as well.

10. All references to “Late Victorians” are taken from the Harper's text.

11. For a detailed discussion of this tradition, see Hammond, chapter 1. To distinguish this optimistic pattern from the “un-American pessimism” (44) of American Catholicism, see Giles (35–53).

    Many critics have discovered in Rodriguez's autobiographical essays the patterning of the conversion narrative; for example, Paredes (281). R. Saldivar describes Hunger as structured “in the archetypal pattern of redemption, albeit in Rodriguez's case a secular redemption” (“Ideologies of the Self,” 28; Chicano Narrative, 160); Saldivar's description of redemption is recognizably Protestant in its reference to the conversion experience. He claims that Rodriguez dramatizes two images of the self: “that of the sinner before rebirth and that of the saint after crisis and rebirth” (“Ideologies of the Self,” 28; Chicano Narrative, 160); J. Saldivar concurs (“The School of Caliban,” 308).

    What Rodriguez's critics identify as a “redemptive” paradigm closely corresponds to the ascent pattern of the traditional immigrant assimilation narrative. (See Ferraro for the “up-from-the-immigrant colony” [15–16] pattern in ethnic fiction.) This coincidence may help to explain why Rodriguez has become known as, in the words of Ruben Martinez, “the Mexican-American Chicanos Love to Hate” (“My Argument with Richard Rodriguez: Or, a Defense of the Mexican-American Chicanos Love to Hate,” LA Weekly, 2 October 1992, 18). Eakin counters the criticism that Rodriguez is a “coconut,” faithless to his culture, by asserting that although Rodriguez follows the “rise spells success” formula, his “sense of the costs of acculturation” distinguishes him (119). Sollors concurs, citing Rodriguez's Hunger as a “sophisticated thwarting” of the new exodus typology (46). Fine argues that, in both Hunger and Days, Rodriguez “dons competing identities” (135) to resist what she terms “other-imposed identities.”

12. This spirit of abjection at the center of Rodriguez's ethnic Catholic temper directly correlates with the mystery of the Incarnation. This connection is carefully established in Steinberg's study of Renaissance visual representations of the sexuality of Christ: “If the godhead incarnates itself … it takes on the condition of being both deathbound and sexed” (13). For a critique of Days of Obligation's “binary opposition of Catholic Mexico versus Protestant America as an essential difference distinguishing the two nation-states,” see Sánchez (165–67).

13. As quoted and discussed in Sayre (99). The word “field” directs attention to the way that “Late Victorians” also fulfills Tyler's notion of a postmodern ethnography as “a text of the physical, the spoken, and the performed, an evocation of quotidian experience … that uses everyday speech to suggest what is ineffable, not through abstraction, but by means of the concrete” (136). Compare, also, Judith Butler on the performative structures of impersonation by which gender is assumed (“Imitation,” 18–24; “Performative Acts,” 282; Bodies).

14. Interestingly, from the first scene of the essay, Rodriguez places himself in what J. Saldívar has termed the “participant-observer” position that most often characterizes the narrator in Chicano border narratives (Dialectics, 62–84). Speaking of Rolando Hinojosa, Saldívar cites “strategies of ellipsis, concealment, and partial disclosures” as ethnographic techniques that define the cultural poetics of the genre (73–74). Fine, too, directly addresses Rodriguez's role as participant-narrator, “distinguishing himself from the gays he analyzes” while he “hints at his membership in the group he takes pains to distinguish himself from” (129). Alarcón and Sánchez follow Fine in describing this spectator role as “chosen” (Alarcón, 146); Sánchez draws a parallel between Rodriguez's spectator stance and his “self-satisfaction with … his chaste gay existence (in consonance with the Catholic church's encyclical censure of active homosexuals as sinners) …” (156). Perera compares Rodriguez to Octavio Paz in his “aphoristic, pyramidal” structures (63) and his distancing masks, but “his alienation is very much a Catholic alienation, in a way that Paz's is not” (65).

15. Fine links Rodriguez's convoluted style to his “autobiographical self divided,” arguing that in “Late Victorians,” he “disassembles his self by distributing it across the landscape he inhabits. … Like the City's discrete identities which meld into no whole, Days of Obligation witnesses the autobiographical self divided” (131). In contrast, Kaup convincingly demonstrates that Rodriguez “reconfigure(s) the agonistic duality of descent and consent into a triangular shape” through the architectural metaphors of pre-modern family houses in the Castro: “Homosexuality, Rodriguez is saying, is like migration. It is constituted (as is feminism) as a journey from the house of one's birth to a substitute home” (390; see 378–91).

16. David L. Kirp, “The Many Masks of Richard Rodriguez,” San Francisco Examiner, 15 November 1992, “Image” section, pp. 10–16. Kirp complains that in “Late Victorians” Rodriguez parades all the outdated stereotypes at the same time that he flaunts the new homophobia that would see AIDS as punishment for irresponsible behavior (16).

17. In an essay on “Sexual Inversions” (1992), Judith Butler traces the trope of the homosexual as “invert” through a long-standing discursive tradition. Rodriguez's pattern of inversions becomes, then, part of his construction of the “homosexual stereotype.”

18. In his playful inversion of “public” and “private” gestures, Rodriguez almost seems to be teasing critics who have complained of the “dichotomy between the public and private self” (J. Saldívar, “The School of Caliban,” 315) in their discussions of Hunger. R. Saldívar finds in Rodriguez's separation of the “individual private inner self over the social public outer self” a “rhetorically highlighted, publicly apologetic voice” with no consistent dialectical interplay (“Ideologies,” 27). In the best discussion of public/private voices, Eakin characterizes the voices as “one expository and one narrative … with distinctly lyric overtones,” observing that their interplay “reenacts the split that is their common theme” (120).

19. Rodriguez's shadowy representation of the homosexual as “angel” and “disappearing” figure foregrounds another negative stereotype: that of the homosexual as “specter and phantom, as spirit and revenant, as abject and undead” (Fuss, 3). See also Nunokawa (320) and Butler (“Sexual Inversions,” 345–46).

20. In the version of “Late Victorians” published in Days, this section is followed by a brief scene in which Rodriguez recalls Cesar's description of finding “paradise” at the “baths” (43). In its resistance to the representation of the homosexual as specter, this section anticipates the sensory and sacramental vision of the essay's final lines. Both sections recall the image of paradise which Mark Doty constructs in the beautiful AIDS elegy “Tiara”: “I think heaven is perfect stasis / poised over the realms of desire.”

21. The essay thus begins and ends with two explicit references to Catholicism—two Catholic liturgies.

22. Medieval Catholicism, for all its aspirations to towers of truth and Dantesque visions, had its roots in a folk religion similar to the ethnic spirituality which underlies Rodriguez's essay. There is a passage in Piers Plowman which describes the Incarnation through a wonderful inversion of the Scholastic idiom. It, too, plots a nativity story, one that anticipates Rodriguez's narrative line in “Late Victorians”: a “lifting down,” full of weight and gravity. And, like “Late Victorians,” it celebrates both a nativity feast and an immigration story.

    For heaven could not hold love. It was so heavy of itself.

    But when it had eaten its fill of earth

    And taken flesh and blood

    Then was it lighter than leaf upon linden-tree

    More subtle and piercing than the point of a needle

    (74)

I wish to thank Jeffrey Hammond, John S. McCann, Rebecca Pope, and Amy Robinson for valuable assistance with this essay.

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