Metaphors We Write By: Desire’s (Dis)Orientation and the Border in Richard Rodriguez’s <i>Hunger of Memory</i>

Abstract

A of Hunger of Memory (1982) evokes set of questions that have been left largely unexamined by prolific critical literature on Richard Rodriguez's controversial autobiography. To extent are scarce and evasive inscriptions of desire in Rodriguez's narrative readable? What rhetorical logic does emplotment of desire constitute, and by discursive trajectories and models of representation it determined? What rapport between figural logic produced by narration of desire and tropologies that construct and advance text's polemical arguments? I position my engagement these questions in relation to distinction David William Foster makes between a reading of Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory and its queer critical perspective (111). A gay reading would trace glimpses of Rodriguez's prior to public address of his sexual orientation, or explore (con)textualization of same-sex desire in text. A of autobiography queer critical perspective, on other hand, would dwell on inscriptions of social difference and alienation. Such an inscribed difference could be traced, for example, in Rodriguez's description of his unsettled place as minority student within system of elementary education in English. Further, queer difference figured in author's estranged position vis-a-vis conventional social texts, such as undisrupted conversion of private into public stipulated by pedagogical pledge of bilingual education. (1) In place of gay reading, Foster opts for queer exploration of Rodriguez's alienated position within the social text he inhabits (133). It not that gay reading somehow improper or impossible. To contrary: Foster asserts that it could be illuminating, much like valuable exploration of themes, symbols, and images in Garcia Lorca's poetry and drama that partake in an inter-homos(t)ex(t)ual subculture. A gay reading, however, Foster argues, fraught with critical (115). Rather than juxtaposing, for example, formation in text against postulated generic coherence of identity, such would have to ponder instead what understood by identity, how Rodriguez might understand it, and in relation to discourses, which articulate such an identity, text/author situates himself (113). Sexual desire, moreover, is only randomly mentioned in Rodriguez's text and never in any way that would give impression that such desire homoerotic or that there homoerotic dimension to of personal author describes himself as addressing (117). Why, therefore, should one return at all, as I commit to do here, to inscriptions of desire in Rodriguez's autobiographical text, and even more so from position of concurrence Foster's attentive sketching (113-15) of some of difficulties embedded in such an approach? Why should one focus on such inscriptions from position of concordance Foster's suggestion that gay reading of autobiography is, in and of itself, neither particularly interesting nor exceptionally rewarding? In context of these particular questions, Foster's perplexing assertion that there no homoerotic dimension to desire inasmuch as it narrated in Rodriguez's text and no homoerotic dimension to issues of personal identity that text self-addresses diagnostically instructive (117). This argument exemplary of way in which Rodriguez's particular emplotment of desire hardly ever addressed by his critics as an issue relevant to his controversial stance within ideological debate over bilingual education; validity of ethnic and racial identities; viability of multiculturalism versus hegemonic paradigms of homogenous assimilation; or exigency of affirmative action--regardless of whether Rodriguez's positions on these subjects are badly judged or well understood. …