Dream and the Dialogue: Adrienne Rich's Feminist Poetics, The

Alice Templeton. The Dream and the Dialogue: Adrienne Rich's Feminist Poetics. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1994. $24 hc. 193 pp.

TERENCE DIGGORY SKIDMORE COLLEGE

One of the basic principles assumed by Alice Templeton in her reading of Adrienne Rich's career is that each of the poet's volumes acquires particular meaning from the issues dominating critical debate at the time of its publication. By the same principle, Templeton's analysis of Rich's "feminist poetics," published at a time when feminism has suffered damaging attacks both from within and outside its ranks, acquires meaning beyond what it might otherwise have as yet another study of Rich. While the mass media are preoccupied with the debate over feminism as a political agenda, Templeton offers an opportunity to consider how that debate might affect feminism as a way of reading literature. In fact, Templeton proposes that the act of reading is itself a political act.

For Templeton, "the central question that feminism raises" is "What is the relationship between the individual and the collective?" (128). This question arises in the context of Templeton's discussion of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, whose Feminism Without Illusions (Chapel Hill: U North Carolina P, 1991) constitutes one of the more sober and sympathetic of the recent critiques of feminism. Two principal concerns of Fox-Genovese's critique correspond roughly to two stages in Rich's feminist poetry, as Templeton traces its development starting with Diving into the Wreck (1973). First, Fox-Genovese attacks what might be called mainline feminism, at least in the American context, for its uncritical appeal to the ideology of individualism that has driven the subordination of women in the past. In Templeton's reading of Diving into the Wreck, and even more decisively in The Dream of a Common Language (1978), she infers a critique of individualism from Rich's "collectivizing" (Margaret Homans's term) of the transcendent ego that has governed lyric poetry since romanticism (25).

The second concern of Fox-Genovese's critique is what she calls "postmodernist" feminism, which comes closest to the critique of individualism that she prefers, but does so at the expense of a wholesale repudiation of the past (230). Both FoxGenovese (225) and Templeton (10-11) remind us that feminism itself belongs to a tradition of liberation inspired by romantic ideals. What is needed, then, is not simplistic repudiation but complex negotiation between the possibilities and the constraints inherited from tradition, as well as between the individual and the collective. For Templeton, such negotiation especially characterizes Rich's later work, starting with A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far. The publication of this volume in 1981 coincides with the heyday of poststructuralist literary criticism, whose "historical nihilism," as Templeton calls it (8), enjoyed even more influence than Fox-Genovese grants postmodern feminism. Templeton proposes reading Rich's poetry of this period as a means of negotiating the "crisis of interpretation" created by poststructuralist theory (89). However, the extent to which Templeton's argument depends on that theory poses an obstacle to successful negotiation.

Although Templeton identifies "negotiation" as one of her key terms (4-5), she does not set that term within a theoretical context such as might have been provided, for instance, by reference to new historicism. Instead, she provides multiple, and contradictory, references for the related term that appears in her title, "dialogue." Her principal reference is Hans-Georg Gadamer (64-69), for whom dialogue is a model for achieving relatively stable agreement between participating voices. However, her analysis of Rich's practice owes more to the poststructuralist concept of dialogue. Its source, discussed briefly by Templeton (69-70), is M. Ml. Bakhtin, for whom voices joined in dialogue interrupt each other and unsettle rigid ideology. At one point (92-93), through indirect reference to Paul Ricoeur, Templeton suggests that these conflicting models might themselves be reconciled in a dialogical relation in Gadamer's sense, but this is a possibility that Gadamer himself has denied. That Templeton persists in the suggestion is symptomatic of her indulgence in a kind of wishful thinking. It is the kind of thinking that permits her to posit "dream," a term derived from Rich, as the necessary condition for transforming the reader's dialogue with the poem into a political act (81).

Of course, there is a long and honorable history to the notion that literature, as a mode of dreaming, makes a contribution to politics by imagining alternatives to unjust social relations. This is the "what if?" function that Rich celebrates at the end of her latest prose volume, P7hat Is Found There (New York: Norton, 1993), which must have appeared too late to be included in Templeton's study. Templeton attempts to take dream beyond the "what it?" function by emphasizing its active reciprocation in the mind of the reader. Since the content of the dream is ethical social relation, the reader's reciprocation makes the dream a reality; a social relation has now actually been created between the writer and the reader, and from that germ an entire society might eventually grow. The problem, on which Gadamer's version of dialogue inevitably founders, is: how can we be sure that the reader's act has in fact reciprocated the act of the writer? As deconstructionists never tire of pointing out, the act of writing itself compounds the problem, because it puts in the place of the writer-who might at least have responded, however unreliably, to the reader's questions-a text that will not respond at all. From this perspective, the very existence of dialogue can be no more than a dream, a rather bloodless "what if?"

Reading William Carlos Williams has given me hope that there is a way out of this predicament, so I find it peculiarly appropriate that Williams's famous love poem, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," supplies the title of Rich's What Is Found There. Against the advice of deconstruction, Williams's phrase directs us to look to the text of the poem for what is present rather than what is absent. If the author is absent as a guarantor of meaning, "what is found there" in the very structure of the poem is the author's love for the materials that compose that structure. For Rich, this is how the poem not only imagines but materially embodies an alternative to existing social relations: "What is represented as intolerable-as crushing-becomes the figure of its own transformation, through the beauty of the medium and through the artist's uncompromised love for that medium, a love as deep as the love of freedom. These loves are not in opposition" (What Is Found There 249). The poetic medium in its material aspect receives progressively greater acknowledgment as Templeton reads through the three volumes of poems Rich has published since A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far. The latest volume, An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991), is treated in a chapter that Templeton entitles "The Material and the Dream," the dream in this case being the goal of women's liberation that Rich identifies with "the love of freedom." However, in keeping with the poststructuralist concept of dialogue, Templeton suspects the material of resisting rather than embodying the dream. Were she less attuned to discord among the theorists, Templeton might have listened more intently to the poet who says constantly through a diverse body of work: "These loves are not in opposition."

Copyright West Chester University Jun 1996
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