Notes on Richard Rodriguez and Autobiography
Rodriguez, Richard. Darling:
A Spiritual Autobiography. New York:
Viking, 2013.
As a writerly act of defiance and discovery, Rodriguez
published Hunger of Memory: The Education
of Richard Rodriguez in 1982. In the
contexts of stereotyped machismo and socially imagined American desire, the
book was a triumph of ethnic spirit. It
exploited the seductiveness of American literary history. The main title was a slantwise echo of
Richard Wright’s American Hunger; his
subtitle, an appropriation of The
Education of Henry Adams. It reiterated the indeterminate properties of
autobiography as a genre as well as the articulation of ethnicity. One could
read the book as a post-modern signifying on Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery, if one deemed both
autobiographies to be success stories. An uncommon reader might contrast Hunger of Memory with Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s
Beginnings (1984) to ponder gender, ethnic and class differences in
American writing. One imagines Rodriguez
took a tip from Wright in meditating on alienation, especially in distancing
himself from the assumptions of Mexican American Catholic decorum and from
parents who were “always mindful of the line separating public from private
life.” Rodriguez wanted a consumed cake
to remain intact.
There was daring in his belief that he could “scorn those
who attempt to create an experience of intimacy in public” while he willed
himself “to think there is a place for the deeply personal in public life.”
Such ambivalence comes with a price tag. It puts its thumb on the psychological
sundering associated with fictions of double or triple consciousness. Like a
brutal collection agency, it demands a reckoning from the autobiographer
----“Pay up or else….”
Thirty-one years after his noteworthy success with Hunger, Rodriguez pays up with
accumulated interest in Darling. He
commits unclad intimacy in public. His scorn boomerangs, knocking him into a
pool with Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.
Not having read Brown and Days of Obligation, the books he wrote
after his secular autobiography, I only guess that Rodriguez experienced a
crisis of Catholicism. Darling
suggests that he found himself standing on sand, attempting to learn desert
religion and getting no response from Allah, Yahweh, and God. The Semitic trinity
mocks him by abandoning him. Such justice is the reward for those who are not
acquainted with Egyptian monotheism or the “Great Hymn to the One God Aten.”
Unfortunately, Rodriguez’s
concept of the spiritual is too manipulative and commercial, too camp and crass,
and too theatrical to inspire conversion and enlightenment. In that sense, Darling is a brilliant exposition of how,
with the singular exception of James Baldwin, Americans understand little about
spirit and soul.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
April 23, 2014
