Lost in Nostalgia: The Autobiographies of Eva Hoffman and Richard Rodriguez

Abstract

In Plural Self: The Politicization of Memory and Form in Three American Ethnic Autobiographies, in which she compares N. Scott Momaday's The Names, Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera, and Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez concludes, Ethnic autobiography gives meanings and new possibilities to term autobiography. Using retrospection to gain a vision for future, ... autobiographers create a hybridized, double-voiced form of autobiography in which collective memory and individual memory are linked in a dialogue. (57) Although Browdy de Hernandez's argument is convincing with respect to three writers she discusses, I will demonstrate that some American autobiographies resist hybridization and double-voicedness. Hybridization, as Mikhail Bakhtin defines it, is the mixing, within a single concrete utterance, of two or more different linguistic consciousnesses, often widely separated in time and social space (429). Furthermore, Bakhtin's definition of double-voiced discourse is speech in another's language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a (324) so that double-voiced discourse is always internally dialogized (324). The examples of double-voiced discourse that Bakhtin cites are comic, ironic or parodic discourse, refracting discourse of a narrator, refracting discourse in language of a character and finally discourse of a whole incorporated genre (324). I would like to suggest that discourse could consequently be read as discourse of an writer who dialogizes dominant language by self-consciously resorting to form and language to express his or her intentions in a refracted way through dominant language. Since autobiography is traditionally both a western and an androcentric genre, double-voicedness in autobiography would be apparent in refraction of conventional discourse, that is, in its rewriting, or, at least, in its self-reflexive questioning of autobiographical conventions. A comparison of texts by writers of different ethnic/racial background also raises certain methodological questions. After a brief overview of current debates over methodological concerns regarding critical writing about literature, I will compare and contrast autobiographies of Eva Hoffman, a Jewish Polish immigrant to United States, and of Richard Rodriguez, a Mexican-American, to demonstrate that neither is hybridized and double-voiced. In doing so, I will not neglect differences between respective diasporic locations of two writers. Other autobiographies by so-called visible minority writers born in United Stated lend themselves to comparison with Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, such as Maxine Hong Kinston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts and Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road, not least because, like Rodriguez's autobiography, their texts have been criticized for misrepresentation by members of their own ethnic groups. However, I choose to compare a text by a non-Anglo-Celtic immigrant and that of an American-born writer whose group has experienced colonization in a way not shared by any other group in United States. The similarities and differences between these autobiographies are instructive, and a comparison of two can provide significant insight into intricacies involved in comparing two texts that are both consent oriented (1) and that share a number of narrative strategies, even though their authors and autobiographical selves represented in texts belong to different groups. The main question one needs to consider when comparing texts of writers with different backgrounds is how one can read these texts as sharing ways of conceptualizing pull of two or more cultural loyalties without losing sight of fact that their communities have experienced different degrees of dislocation, colonization, and racism. …