Richard Rodriguez: Reluctant Romantic

For over five years now, I have been haphazardly corresponding with Richard Rodriguez. Yes, the Richard Rodriguez. While I would never sabotage the privilege of that electronic communication, I can say that, with the aid of his books as confirmation, Rodriguez is a sensitive soul hidden behind a prickly structure of purposeful confusion. Indeed, the wall of conundrum that Rodriguez builds around his ethos is likely more the work of defensive strategizing than of true ideological contradiction. Yet, he loves the paradox that he projects. Rodriguez’ thought process, as expressed by his writing, is labyrinthine, punitive, reconciliatory, and simply pensive. However, his greatest inner conflict is not over his race or cline or ethnicity, but rather over something more arcane: the legacy of English Puritanism, against which he jabs and spars with the agility of my little dog Holly, a Setter mix, when she attempts to provoke my big dog, Buddy, a Chow mix, into play fighting.¹ Consider this passage:

I was studying Puritanism and that, too, interested me; not least for its prohibition of impersonation. At about this time, Malcolm X, an American puritan, discouraged African-American adolescents from hair straighteners and skin lighteners. At about this time, ethnic studies departments were forming on some [college] campuses. Such quorums would produce the great puritans of my age. The puritans would eventually form opinions about me, and I about them.

(49)

Those of us who are used to reading Rodriguezian sentences, with their stylistic range and intellectual rigor, will just nod and provide the gratuitous, “ah, yes.” As if we understand the connections that Rodriguez posits. But upon more careful reading, especially of this particular passage which begins a lengthy section in Brown on Puritanism, itself a bizarre topic for an Hispanic writer² to address, is actually an expression of pain. Clearly, Rodriguez’ feelings were hurt by his treatment at the hands of the academic Puritan elites, an utterly reasonable response, albeit a romantic response. Note the titles and subtitles of his last three books:

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

Days of Obligation: An Argument with my Mexican Father (1992)

Brown: The Last Discovery of America (2002)

These titles are Edwardian in their empire-building ambition, and prosaic enough to look vaguely familiar. Yet, in terms of American literary provenance, Rodriguez is the apotheosis of Gatsby, as he follows the trope of his “novel”—his life—with a glassy self-consciousness. He compares himself to various canonical narrators, such as “Poor Richard” or the autobiographical persona that Ben Franklin develops for himself in the eighteenth century; and the “tricky Dick” political persona of Richard Nixon, whose pedestrian spin on the Faustian quest for ever more power, prestige, and paranoia, intrigues Rodriguez for its irony. Both Franklin and Nixon are work-ethic propagandists, self-improvement gurus, public sphere Puritans.

But Rodriguez is really Jay Gatsby, in that moment when he awaits Daisy for luncheon on East Egg—except that Rodriguez-Gatsby would cancel this fateful meeting, somehow flashing a bloody red light across the noon waters of Long Island Sound: Stop, do not come. You will meet your disaster, and will cause my demise. Too much work, planning, subterfuge, bribery, and stacks of clean, pastel shirts have gone into this moment. I must be alone. Wanting to retain his closet romanticism, Rodriguez-Gatsby would rather bankroll his high-strung unrequited love, than squander it, again, on the Puritan vanguard, regardless of how lovely and unattainable they had become. H. L. Mencken, infamously once stated that Puritanism was “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy,” a sentiment which seems at odds with my impeachment of Rodriguez. Yet, as with Rodriguez, things are more complicated. Indeed, Mencken also wrote:

My whole life, once I get free from my present engagements, will be devoted to combating Puritanism. But in the meantime, I see clearly that the Puritans have nearly all the cards. They drew up the laws now on the statute books, and they cunningly contrived them to serve their own purposes. The only attack that will ever get anywhere will be directed—not [End Page...