Summary Of The Achievement Of Desire By Richard Rodriguez

Richard Rodriguez in his nonfictional work, “The Achievement of Desire” (1982), posits that his life typifies a problematic cultural discontinuity concerning the education and family life of certain students, which generates issues such as a disconnection concerning true knowledge and superficial academic achievement in the minds of these students termed ‘scholarship boys.’ The 1993 movie Six Degrees of Separation tells the story of Paul, a Harvard graduate student who achieves the good-graces of art dealing couple Ouisa and Flan Kittredge, revealed New York underbelly-residing impersonator glib. Rodriguez develops his thesis by examining his own experience, first examining his scholarly ambition, then the changing relationship between him

and his parents (as representative of his lost culture generally) and finally the existential change in self he is, from his now higher perspective, able to observe. A provocative notion implicit within Rodriguez’s writing is that to shed one’s authentic culture and assimilate into another class is not a simple loss but rather a nuanced trade-off achieved via self-deception at the consequence of the loss of one’s authentic self, a thesis that is explored with an inverse measure of explicitness in the outwardly-deceptive activities of Paul concerning his identity and the manifest benefits he reaps from the Kittredge couple.
Rodriguez’s work, a chapter exert from his book, explores a narrative concerning his personal educational experience. While his description of a ‘Scholarship boy’ is simple enough, what Rodriguez presents in this chapter is a challenging work, one lacking a clear normative prescription, but rather containing an explicit classification of a certain type of student alongside quite subtle implications. He sets up a classic tragic tale of a neglected student, a “boy who first entered a classroom barely able to speak English.” He nonetheless goes to describe a student neglected in another way, in his classification.

The student originally described as a ‘Scholarship Boy’ by Richard Hoggart only briefly in his 1957 work The Uses of Literacy “tends to over-stress the importance of examinations, of the piling-up of knowledge and of received opinions. He discovers a technique of apparent learning, of the acquiring of facts rather than of the handling and use of facts.” Rodriguez develops further this definition, in his prolific summation he writes that “he is the great mimic; a collector of thoughts, not a thinker.” Rodriguez emphasizes that this troubled mimicry-dependent student is despite the popular pedagogical perception is a small minority, noting that, “Radical educationalists meanwhile complain that ghetto schools “oppress” students by trying to mold them, stifling native characteristics. The truer critique would be just the reverse: not that schools change ghetto students too much, but that while they might promote the occasional scholarship student, they change most students barely at all.” This point is of particular note as it points to an unexpected rhetorical value system, deeming what we had previously regarded as his tribulation ‘promotion,’ and complaining

it does not happen to most students. This point is also of particular note to those people who as a hobby keep a well-maintained scrap-book chronicling all cases of things that contradict Paulo Freire’s educational theses (This chapter may be entered alphabetically under ‘Rodriguez’ following the previous entries of ‘Reason’ and ‘Reality.’) Subtle implications such as these are complicated by the loss of culture he describes both explicitly and implicitly through the allegory of Spanish (A contrast to Hoggart who spoke nothing to ethnicity in his work.) On the subject of bilingualism, many scholars note a relationship between ones original language and their connection to their original culture. The connection is obvious as this native language constitutes communication, in a literal sense, between the cultural nomad and the members of his or her own original culture. Along with their original culture, it is thought that the societal position of their original culture is inherited language. “Rodriguez shows how Spanish occupies the place of a "low" language-a publicly illegitimate language-in the same way that a working-class dialect carries a stigma outside of its immediate environment,” posits Jeehyun Lim in “The Performance of Bilingualism” on Rodriguez’s writing (525). A literal schooling mirrors inversely an impromptu schooling in Six Degrees of Separation.
If Rodriguez’s ‘Scholarship boy’ is the ‘great mimic’ who deceives, Paul from Six Degrees of Separation is a great deceiver who mimics. Paul is revealed to the audience, as to the Kittredge’s, under false pretenses. Walking into the Kittredge apartment, he spins a tale about going to school with their Harvard-student children, “your children said you were kind. All the kids were sitting around the dorm one night dishing the shit out of their parents. But your kids were silent and said No, not our parents.” explaining that this is why he has chosen to walk into their apartment following an unfortunate thesis-mugging. It is only after they become infatuated with his way with words and pasta, that he is discovered by them as well as several other affluent couples to be an impostor. He was simply acting the part of a falsified Harvard student (for motivation that is revealed difficult to discern, as is seen in the talk between these couples and a detective following this discovery.) Could it perhaps stand to reason in that case that Paul undergoes some sort of mimicry (of all things!) in his assimilation (heaven forbid!) to the, if one dares even to make such an audacious claim, higher classes occupied by the Kittredge couple? Could it be that this, and please do brace for the coming whiplash that will surely be spurred by this very suggestion, is reminiscent of the actions of the young Rodriguez in his narrative? Vertiginous as such a realization may be to arrive at it may even be the very basis for this comparison. And lo, behold the teachings of Trent Conway. While his infatuation with Paul inverses Rodriguez’s admiration towards his teachers, he nonetheless dictates the mannerisms of high society as Rodriguez’s instruction did for the western catholic erudite zeitgeist. As Rodriguez is deluded as to the true nature of the loss of his Mexican heritage, Paul knowingly and purposely embellishes his story with a tale of a Swiss Boarding School, informing the Kittredge couple he does not “even feel black.” Hark! For as Rodriguez describes a student lacking true knowledge and opinions, short of those inherited, does not Paul inherit his opinion on Cather in the Rye and the rest of the ideas presented in his supposed dissertation? Those especially pushed for content in a particularly barren essay might even compare Rodriguez’s “hundred most important books of Western Civilization” list and the superficial facts he draws from them to Trent Conway’s address book. Engrossing as though it may be to establish in so many pages the precise line-by-line correlation between Paul’s education in the way of pronouncing ‘bottle’ and the linguistic trails of Rodriguez, whilst interspersing exciting words like ‘ethnic’ and ‘socioeconomic,’ such monumental tasks are to be left to the true titans of college essay arrangement. Perhaps there are some scraps of leftover insight that can be examined however.
What is revealed late, both to us the reader as well as to Rodriguez in his life, is the self-deception aspect of the cultural assimilation process.

Rodriguez remarks on his realization about his lost culture “hidden beneath layers of embarrassment.” Caroline Calvillo in “Memoir and autobiography” writes that he “addresses the personal cost of loneliness and alienation from family brought about, he says, by his educational ambition and loftiness, and […] his taste for "upper-class" intellectual interactions and academic cultural situations,” quite cynically (53). His realization that “schooling was changing me and separating me from the life I enjoyed before becoming a student.” The cultural assimilation present in both works is commonly thought to be change in class. What ‘class’ is exactly is an especially difficult topic which demands the implementation of several especially large words, which in-turn require the aid of several especially wordy academic journal articles to understand. It is thus on the basis of expediency that the lower class status of both Rodriguez and Paul, and the upper class status of a certain selection their compatriots, will be accepted on a basis of fiat. It is an especially important task of academics to remind those of the lower class that they are indeed of this lower class, as otherwise these classifications might become eroded thus invalidating the numerous painstakingly written academic works on the subject, which would be a great shame.

Further investigation into the subject must be terminated as sarcasm, it is commonly noted by critics, is ill-suited to these sorts of writings. A stark contrast between Rodriguez’s ‘Scholarship Boy’ and Paul from Six Degrees of Separation one might come across is thus: Paul, unlike Rodriguez, is under no misconception about his own deception. He seems also to be cognizant of what he stands to gain materially and otherwise. Rodriguez on the other hand writes of a child with an obsessive focus on his end with a confused attempt to quantify what exactly it is he will gain. This is illustrated by his relation with books. A drive to read and finish books characterizes his drive towards superficial academic achievement. “Any book they told me to read, I read—then waited for them to tell me which books I enjoyed” he recalls. He then attempts to summarize his benefit from these books. He “decided to record in a notebook the themes of the books that I read” Adding that, “rereading these brief moralistic appraisals usually left me disheartened. I couldn’t believe that they were really the source of reading’s value. But for many more years, they constituted the only means I had of describing to myself the educational value of books.” It at the surface may be gathered his true desire lies beyond the book’s end, that it is a sort of interpersonal accreditation he seeks. Acceptance and praise in the eyes of the higher class, the recognition of his undergoing assimilation. That it is not but an exercise in superficiality the writing seems to say.
The mirroring of events goes beyond just the theme of deception found in “The Achievement of Desire” and displayed plainly by the deceptive actions of Paul in Six Degrees of Separation, there is a chronologically consistent parallel between the self-discovery that dawns on Rodriguez and the second and third acts of Six Degrees of Separation. Much like Rodriguez sacrifices part of what constitutes his being existentially to appeal to his idolized teachers, Paul stabs himself; he bleeds in to the hands of his newfound caretakers, who he once was seeps out alongside it. The stage direction reads “Paul lifts his shirt and stabs himself.” These works demonstrate inverse pain, one inner and the outer. Conspicuous by its absence, is the unhappy ending to these two notably unhappy stories. Both of these men bleed, but their wounds demand examination. Is it a satisfactory examination of these works to terminate analysis at their respective endpoints? It is an act of mediocrity of this short that does not often go unrewarded; nonetheless the wondering mind inevitably looks past the final curtains. What would seem to follow naturally from a Scholarship Boy upbringing is a man of crippled critical faculties. Yet this work is self-evidently deeply self-reflective, and Rodriguez has become notoriously polemic towards academic consensus. Ilan Stavans in” The journey of Richard Rodriguez” noted his “attack against bilingual education” as well as “affirmative-action programs” in the book this writing is taken from (20). One might be lead to wonder if he truly learned nothing from the books read, and so too if Paul truly thinks nothing of the concepts he parrots.