Expressing the Universal Analogies: A Four Page Summary of Dieke’s “Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar: Womanist as Monistic Idealist” from his Book, Allegory and Meaning: Reading African, African American, and Caribbean Literature


The metaphysical poet is one who discovers and expresses the universal analogies binding the universe together (Qtd J.A. Mazzeo).
In his essay, “Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar: Womanist as Monistic Idealist,” from his book, Allegory and Meaning: Reading African, African American, and Caribbean Literature, Dieke schematizes Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar as part of the symbolic creativity of the African, African American, and Caribbean literary paradigm. This mindblowing essay is an expression of Walker’s acceptance of the universe as metaphysically connected in a unitary organic whole. Dieke carefully arrays how The Temple of My Familiar revises the mechanistic traditional worldview of Western metaphysics and how this dualistic view, of which the dangers consist in the rules predicated on European culture, is characterized by a view of the universe as a hierarchical universal chain which as a result imposes an ontological difference and superiority between things, namely; cultures, man and woman, human and nature, human and God, God and nature.

Dieke believes that Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar is a symbolic expression of totality or wholeness beyond the intellective culture of binary opposition. This literary creation, which for him, is of a unique egalitarian womanist cosmology, is Walker’s conscious effort calculated not as a demonstration of dichotomy inherent in the mechanistic worldview but as an artistic vision deeply anchored in the holistic paradigm. In other words, Walker has used the womanist instinct in the world dominated by mechanistic conception of the male as the sole inheritor and his assuming supraordinate superintendence in the ecological chain to create a salutary vision of reality pointing towards a monistic idealism in which humans (male and female), animals, and the whole ecological order coexist in a unique dynamics of pancosmic symbiosis. For Dieke furthermore, what Walker does through her work is a reclaiming of her own self-evident ecological insight that ‘we are all part of, and not apart from, each other, the other sex, and the Earth (Gaia) with its richly diverse denizens – humans and non humans alike’ (129).

Accordingly, Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar is what Dieke summarizes as a story about the spirit of mutual dependence. With this spirit of universal bond and sympathetic relatedness clearly envisioned by Walker, Dieke explains that each story out of the six major narrative movements is peculiarly a demonstration of the ‘values of oneness, and unity as opposed to dialectical tension, exclusivity, and separateness’ (129). He sees the characters as taking on serious quest towards discovering the kinship that binds them with one another and with forces beyond themselves.

Dieke reminds us of the creative resourcefulness underlying Walker’s novel. ‘The basic intent,’ he states, ‘is to trace human life in its pancosmic and mythical dimensions through all its protean turns and twists, all its recesses, all its races and peoples’ (129-30). He explains that the watchword throughout the novel is communion, and this communion is forged through three distinct metaphysical frames, namely: time, nature and self.

Time stands for Dieke, in The Temple of My Familiar as Walker’s expression to the process of growth; self-growth and to self’s ineradicable link to the world outside. He sees Walker’s employment of the technique of recollective monologues as an attempt to recapture the past as an essential element in present experience. And it is only in this principle of reconnection also known as the principle of continuum that the characters will understand the true meaning of the self. He illustrates this reconnecting process with The Temple of My Familiar by unveiling a twofold dimension of memory in Lissie’s message to Suwelo. The first, that memory is eucharistic and the second, that it is therapeutic/psychotherapeutic; the former in that ‘it forces us to acknowledge our sacred bond with our past and with those who might be regarded as the prime limbs of that past’ (131), and the latter, because it soothes a violently sundered heart and creates in its void what might be described as “the inner life where the rational soul may cultivate equanimity in defiance of all outward circumstances” (qtd Neibuhr).

Dieke points out nature as another metaphysical element in Walker’s foregrounding of the integration and interconnectedness of all life. With his allusions to the victorian novelist – Thomas Hardy, especially his Far from the Madding Crowd –, the philosopher F.W.J. von Schelling, and the post-Romantic writer – Marcel Proust – Dieke explains to us how Walker uses Lissie’s passionate interest in nature to reiterate the age-long truth ‘that we are all part of the dynamic geology of natural scenery,’ and how she reasserts her Romantics’ interest in the unknown modes of being associated with the world of physical nature. Walker expresses this relatedness in Lissie’s and Hal’s nature art and painting which Dieke tell us are ‘significant ways of experiencing spiritual and imaginative growth, of feeling the immanentistic and vitalistic pulse of God evolving throughout the universe.’ Just like Lissie tells Hal that “Being a genius means you are connected to God,” Dieke also believes that ‘being connected to God means that all of us are connected to nature, for behind nature is supernature.’ And this, for him, is a theosophical and animistic conceptualization of the quintessential chiasma between man and cosmic intelligence.

By self, another metaphysical frame in a universal communion visionary to The Temple of My Familiar, Dieke means ‘the innermost essence of each individual, within which he or she is attuned with the supreme, universal destinal order’ (134). And for him, the symbiosis of memorial psyche and ecological ambience is what Walker creates as a unique sense of self which he rather describes in his own terms as the protean/metempsychean self. The further refers to this self as a reincarnational topos – ‘the belief that the human self is part of the infinite.’ We understand this journey into this unique sense of self through Dieke exposition Lissie’s dream, which, for him, is a ‘metaphor of psychic development in which the dreamer – Lissie – recognizes the pattern of opposition in her life and attempts to synthesize them into some sort of self-healing totality’ (135).

Finally, Dieke sees Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar as partaking in the collective effort of African, African American, and Caribbean literary example in which the universal order is understood as a colossal mystery of wholeness and anagogic valence. In other words, The Temple of My Familiar is a signifying of, and a successful departure from, the dualistic tradition of Western metaphysics which has been accepted as an axiomatic truth or universal postulate. This accepted traditional European worldview presents reality as an irreconcilable dyad. And manifestation of this opposition in some intellectual movements and epochs, as we have seen in Dieke’s essay, is the propelling supposition of cultural, racial, nature and gender superiority and differentiation.