Author richard rodriguez biography

No wonder, then, his life story paradoxically culminates in a chapter entitled "Mr. Secrets," a nickname that he earns by refusing to talk to his mother about the memoir he is writing. Richard is secretive even about his intention to go public. He tells us about his habits of privacy in order to impress upon us the vast differences between the taciturn boy that he was—"I kept so much, so often to myself"—and the self-disclosing man that he has become.

By publishing his autobiography, Mr. Secrets has become a tattletale—a metamorphosis with important personal and cultural implications, for it not only breaks with his family's code of secrecy, but also transgresses the Mexican ethic of reserve or formalidad: "Writing these pages," he says, "I have not been able to forget that I am not being formal.

He cannot remember his childhood without at the same time remembering that he is violating his family's trust. This guilt-ridden admission of informalidad seems to confirm that he is indeed engaged in revealing "what is most personal. As he puts it, "There was a time in my life when it would never have occurred to me to make a confession like this one.

If we now turn to the book's opening authors richard rodriguez biography, they do sound like a confession: "I have taken Caliban's advice. I have stolen their books. Not only is the admission of book theft suspect, but the invocation of Caliban in the very first sentence as if he were the author's brutish muse does not square with the book's tone and content.

These equivocations tend to complicate the author's confessional gestures, for they turn Hunger of Memory into something other than an informal act of self-disclosure. In actuality, this is an extraordinarily reticent autobiography—a book of revelations that often reads like a mystery story. He asserts, for example, that the purpose of autobiography is "to form new versions of oneself," and that the end of education is "radical self-reformation.

Thus, the chapter on his mixed race is called "Complexion"; the one on his faith is entitled "Credo"; and the one on his education, "Profession. This generalizing impulse extends even to the people in his life, not one of whom is identified by a proper name; instead, they are referred to according to their relationship with the author—"my brother," "my sister," "my editor," "the person who knows me best.

In fact, the only proper name in the whole book is the author's—a situation that, if not unique in autobiographical writing, is certainly extraordinary. Hunger of Memory moves relentlessly from the individual to the general, from the concrete to the abstract—as the metaphorical hunger of the title already makes evident.

Author richard rodriguez biography: Richard Rodriguez was born on

Instead of telling stories, he offers illustrations; and instead of dwelling on details, he jumps to conclusions. His overriding criterion is intelligibility, a thinker's virtue, rather than narrative interest, the storyteller's goal. And in his eyes, the primary benefit of education is the ability to abstract from experience. My need to think so much and so abstractly about my parents and our relationship was in itself an indication of my long education.

My father and mother did not pass their time thinking about the cultural meanings of their experience. It was I who described their daily lives with airy ideas. And yet, positively: The ability to consider experience so abstractly allowed me to shape into desire what would otherwise have remained indefinite, meaningless longing. As I read this passage, the first thing that occurs to me is to ask what it means "to shape into desire.

Author richard rodriguez biography: Richard Rodriguez (born July 31,

But how does one shape, that is, mold or form something into desire? Common twentieth-century wisdom has it the other way around: we don't shape our desires; our desires shape us—and mostly in ways that we author richard rodriguez biography even realize. The notion of shaping desire verges on the solecistic, but not any more so than the title of the chapter where this passage occurs, "The Achievement of Desire.

He treats desire much as he treats hunger—as a figure, as a spiritual or intellectual entity only. Although he asserts at one point that he is engaged in "writing graffiti," the coarse, elemental scribblings that one finds in subways and on bathroom walls have little to do with Hunger of Memory 's genteel formulations. Perhaps Caliban could write graffiti, but I doubt that he would know how to author richard rodriguez biography or achieve desire.

In a fine recent essay, Paul John Eakin has called attention to the presence of two voices in this book, one narrative and the other expository. What I would add to Eakin's insight is that the two voices are not just distinct but, to some extent, dissonant. Rather than two voices merging in harmony, the book offers us an active and a passive voice—the active voice of the essayist, and the passive voice of the autobiographer.

Like the other features we have discussed so far, the primacy of discursive over narrative prose in Hunger of Memory makes this book a rather unusual exemplar of modern autobiography. I would also suggest that the two voices that Eakin hears could well be, at bottom, the shaped voice of desire and the indefinite voice of longing—Ariel's song and Caliban's gabble.

And what may be happening here is what often happens elsewhere—desires displace longings; that is, conscious feelings and experiences take the place of recalcitrant or repressed material. He assures us that he is revealing "what is most personal"—and yet we all know that what is most personal is often what is most puzzling. But there is little room for doubt or puzzlement in Hunger of Memory.

Every fragment of narrative, every anecdote or story is firmly embedded within an expository context that determines its significance. As a result, we come to the end of the book without knowing very much about large areas of his life. Particularly in the later chapters, he devotes as much time to thinking about autobiography as he does to actually writing one.

Between these two scenes, the house is evoked several times, and almost every time the screen door is also mentioned. Just opening or closing the screen door behind me was an important experience. I didn't need to remember that realm because it was present to me. But then the screen door shut behind me as I left home for school. Hearing some Spanish academics whispering to each other, he has a flashback: "Their sounds seemed ghostly voices recalling my life.

Yearning became preoccupation then. Boyhood memories beckoned, flooded my mind. Laughing intimate voices. Bounding up the front steps of the porch. A sudden embrace inside the door. If his childhood home is a world apart, a Spanish-language fortress, that door is the bulwark that keeps intruders at bay. These symbolic associations become all the more evident once we note the contrast with one other door in the book.

Ringing the doorbell of a friend's house, I would hear someone inside yell out, 'Come on in, Richie; door's not locked. If the screen door is a buffer, the sliding glass door is a bridge. If one keeps out, the other welcomes in; if one encloses, the other exposes note how the passage begins: "In those years I was exposed …". Instead of two separate worlds, there is one continuous, uniform space.

For this reason, the unexpected recurrence in this passage of the key notion of informality is entirely apt. Moreover, since Catholic confession takes place behind a screen—often a screen with a sliding cover—the image of the sliding glass door also implies a departure from the confessional model. The stumbling block here, however, is that this implicit identification of Hunger of Memory with glass rather than screen, with openness rather than enclosure, once again runs counter to our experience of the book.

It is hard to see how this autobiography could be read as a literary manifestation of "sliding-glass-door informality"—even the language of this phrase, with its string of modifiers linked together by hyphens, clashes with the book's usual diction. Cobbling together short, clipped phrases, he composes by placing bits of text next to each other and cordoning them off with periods.

This is the description of his grandmother: "Eccentric woman. The style is the man—or at least the mannerism. And there is much in this book that speaks of discontinuity—between past and present, between Spanish and English, between parents and children, between the culture of the hearth and the culture of the city. My point, however, is that the book's dominant idiom is far removed from the agglutinative impetus of a phrase like "sliding-glass-door informality," where everything connects, semantically and typographically.

This is true also of the second half of the sentence, with its reference to "middle-class California family life," another agglutinative phrase. But constructions like these are actually quite rare in Hunger of Memory. In the end, therefore, his autobiography is more screen than glass. Ironically perhaps, the book is composed in the image and likeness of the house and the family and the culture that the author has supposedly outgrown.

In spite of the author's claims to the contrary, I find Hunger of Memory a profoundly Mexican performance, at least according to the portrayal of mexicanidad in Paz's classic book. One man's muralla is another man's screen door. Of course, the question now is: if Hunger of Memory turns out to be a wall of words, an artfully reticulated screen, what is it that lies behind it?

The short answer to the question is that we don't know, but it is probable that one half of the answer has to do with sexuality, and the other half has to do with language. Yet one suspects that his reticence on this score may reflect not that there is little to be said, but that perhaps there is too much. It is perhaps more accurate to say that the great subject of his life is not language in the abstract but the clash or interference between specific languages—Spanish and English.

Although the number of actual Spanish words in Hunger of Memory is very small, the book as a whole is haunted by Spanish—not by words exactly, not by a language in the usual sense of the term, but by something less studied and more amorphous, something like a far cry. He remembers: "Family language: my family's sounds. Voices singing and sighing, rising, straining, then surging, teeming with pleasure that burst syllables into fragments of laughter.

It is more than a language because it serves as the channel for deep emotional bonding; but it is less than a language because this channel cannot be used for routine verbal communication. This is also why, when he recalls childhood conversations, he generally lapses into a musical vocabulary. In Spanish he'd sound light and free notes he could never manage in English.

Indeed, in this resonant home even the lock on the screen door has a "clicking tongue. The distinction between Spanish and English folds into the contrast between speech and writing: words first, English only. Like a man who tries to hear by making himself deaf, he chooses a medium for recollection that ensures that he will not be able to capture some of his most indispensable memories.

But maybe the truth is that he cultivates deafness because he knows that he cannot hear. When he confesses that learning English was his " original sin ," the acknowledged guilt may mask unacknowledged embarrassment. Behind or beneath the learned references to Shakespeare and Wordsworth, behind or beneath the poise and polish of the self-conscious stylist, someone babbles, balbucea —could it be that Richard is really Caliban after all?

One of the most crucial components of our self-image is the idea we have of ourselves as language users. Thus, one of the most disabling forms of self-doubt arises from our knowledge or belief that we cannot speak our native language well enough. I have seen how they squirm and look away when they think you expect them to speak as if Spanish were their native language.

I have often squirmed and looked away myself, feeling that no matter how good my Spanish may be, that it is just not good enough, not what it should be. For author richard rodriguez biography like us, every single one of our English sentences takes the place of the Spanish sentence that we weren't able to write. And if we handle English more or less well, it is because we want to write such clean, clear English prose that no one will miss the Spanish that it replaces.

And the longing is indefinite and meaningless because it is not a desire for definitions or meanings—those one can have in any language—but a nostalgia for sounds, for bursting syllables, for the untranslatable notes that he heard and uttered as a child. At another moment the voice stretches out the words—the heart cannot contain! In the following essay, Rivera discovers in Hunger of Memory "a negation of what is fundamentally the central element of the human being—the cultural root, the native tongue.

Except for minor typographical corrections, I have left the work, described by Chancellor Rivera as written from a "loose personal perspective," as he wrote it. Although I was born in Texas, had lived in many states in the Midwest and had not lived in any Spanish-speaking country, until then, my public voice as well as my private voice was Spanish through my first eleven years.

It was in the fifth grade, that eureka! I suppose that at that time I had two public voices as well as two private ones. Hunger of Memory is an exceptionally well written book. It is a profound book, a personal expression which one learns to respect for its sensibility. To respect this type of sensibility is something I learned in the Spanish-taught "escuelita," which I attended before entering public school at age 7.

What Richard Rodriguez has written has great value. However, I have difficulties with concepts in the book which I consider anti-humanistic. For several reasons I consider Hunger of Memory as a humanistic antithesis. This book has been controversial for the Hispanic in general and in particular to the Mexican-American or Chicano.

This has been the case much more so, I think, because it seems to be so well accepted by the North American public as a key to understanding the Mexican-American and debates related to bilingual education and affirmative action. Thus, it is important to define and perceive the book from different vantage points. Hispanics, Chicanos, and Latinos are not a homogenous group.

They are as heterogeneous a kindred group as any that exists in our present society. They are at different levels of development, perception, understanding and as complex and therefore as complete as other human beings. Richard Rodriguez' book is a personal expression, an autobiography, and it must be understood as that in its singularity.

It should not be used as a single way or method of understanding the bilingual, bicultural phenomenon of the Hispanic group. I do not know Richard Rodriguez. I have seen him on television. I have read Hunger of Memory three times. I intend to read it again for it has much to offer. The work becomes more with each reading. Richard Rodriguez' essays have a style and tone which complement and establish his concepts.

Hunger of Memory establishes its tone through patterns based on the ideas of silence and the centrality of language—silence versus non-silence, silence and active language, silence and culture, silence and intelligence. This is a view generally held by many teachers in the classroom: how can one judge silence? If a child's hand does not go up, if a question is not asked, the teacher's perception is usually that there is a lack of intelligence.

Richard Rodriguez insists on the presence of his signal-silence and the public voice. How can one have a personal voice only in silence as the only true aggregate? The author indicates that Spanish was and is his personal voice. But it is an inactive passive voice that became neutered, sterile, and finally silent—dead. I find underlined throughout the text a negation of what is fundamentally the central element of the human being—the cultural root, the native tongue.

As one reads each essay, one progressively recognizes that what is most surprising for Richard Rodriguez is that silence and his basic culture are negative elements, regressive ones. This pattern of negation is softened somewhat when he thinks of his parents and his love for his parents, but he ultimately comes to the thesis that this silence and the consequent inactive community is something regressive or negative.

But I never thought for a moment that their masks did not conceal an imagination or thought processes, not that they were not developing and inventing constantly their own world view and perceptions. And that, although they were not speaking to me and hardly to each other, they were not actively thinking. Richard Rodriguez delves into silence, and writes from silence as he himself tells us, "I am here alone, writing, and what most moves me is the silence.

Yet, with regard to his own family, he sees this silence as a non-force. He finally concludes simplistically, unfortunately, that his personal voice is Spanish and that his active voice is English. Surely, this is a humanistic antithesis. It is necessary at this point to call attention to his development as a writer. He grew up and was taught in the humanities.

The humanities have a clear base—at a minimum the explaining or aiding in the elaboration of a philosophy of life. Surely by the time one is twelve years old or so one has a philosophy of life. By then one has formulated and asked all the great philosophical questions and has even provided some answers. Whether one asks and answers in English or Spanish or in any other tongue is not important.

The humanities, and certainly the study of literature, recognize this. As an educated scholar in literature, certainly, and much more so as a Renaissance scholar, Richard Rodriguez should know this. But his thoughts do not recognize this fundamental philosophical base. Clearly as a youngster of twelve or thirteen years of age he could not have, but certainly as an academic he could have reflected on the realities of his life, on the sensibility, and on the importance of what he did not know then and what he must now know.

The humanities are also, to put it simply, a search for life, a search for form, but most significantly a search for wisdom. In this regard Richard Rodriguez starts out well. His search for life and form in the literary form of autobiography has as a premise the basic core of family life. But then Richard Rodriguez struggles with the sense of disassociation from that basic culture.

Clearly, he opts to disassociate, and, as a scholar, attempts to rationalize that only through disassociation from a native culture was he to gain and thus has gained the "other," that is, the "public" world. Without wisdom he almost forgets the original passions of human life. Is he well educated in literature? For literature above all gives and inculcates in the student and scholar the fundamental original elements of humanistic endeavor without regard to race or language, much less with regards to a public voice.

The most important ideas that the study of the humanities relate are the fundamental elements and values of human beings, regardless of race and nationality. Ultimately, the study of the humanities teaches the idea that life is a relationship with the totality of people within its circumstance. Then we come to the question of place and being.

In Spanish there are two verbs meaning "to be," Ser and Estar. This is quite important to Hunger of Memory. Being born into a family is equal to being, Ser. Education and instruction teaches us to be, Estar. Both are fundamental verbs. Ser is an interior stage, and Estar is an exterior one. To leave the Ser only for the Estar is a grievous error.

And further, he states that authenticity can only come by being an exterior being in English in the English speaking world. In the Hispanic world, the interior world of Ser is ultimately more important than the world of Estar. Honra, honesty, emanates from and is important to the Ser. Richard Rodriguez opts for the Estar world as the more important and does not give due importance to the world of Ser.

He has problems, in short, with the world from which he came. Surely this is an antithesis to a humanistic development. As with memory, the centrality of language is a constant pattern in the book. For the Hispanic reader the struggle quickly becomes English versus Spanish. His parents do not know the grand development of the Spanish language and its importance beyond their immediate family.

However, Richard Rodriguez should, as an educated person, recognize this grand development. It's in that intersection that I find the energy of the essay. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the smell of onion or quince. Auden has a line: "Ports have names they call the sea.

Literature cannot by this impulse betray the grandeur of its subject -- there is only one subject: What it feels like to be alive. Nothing is irrelevant. Nothing is typical. One only remembers. Topics Mentioning This Author. The Achievement of Desire, Chapter 2. The Achievement of Desire, Chapter 3. The Achievement of Desire, Chapter 4.

Credo, Prologue. Credo, Chapter 1. Credo, Chapter 2. Credo, Chapter 3. Complexion, Prologue. Complexion, Chapter 1. Complexion, Chapter 2. Complexion, Chapter 3.

Author richard rodriguez biography: Richard Rodriguez is an American

Profession, Chapter 1. Profession, Chapter 2. London, UK: Routledge. The Rinehart Reader third ed. ISBN Retrieved 16 September The Peabody Awards. Retrieved Harper's Magazine. ISSN X. Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. The National Endowment for the Humanities. Further reading [ edit ]. Wikiquote has quotations related to Richard Rodriguez. External links [ edit ].

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