Writing as Sanctuary: Place, Movement and the Sacred in the Work of Helene Cixous

E. Anderson
2013 Literature & Theology  
The French philosopher Hélène Cixous has shown consistent interest in material places and imagined spaces from her early theoretical work of the 1970s to her more autobiographical writing of recent decades. This article examines the role of place and movement in Cixous's writing and considers how they inhere within her understanding of writing itself. In this article I analyse the spatial metaphors of garden and flight which map onto the larger concerns of place and movement in Cixous's
more » ... Garden suggests stable locations, while flight indicates the movements in and between places. In tracing the contours of the garden and the trajectories of flight, the article moves from the imagined to the material and back again, while continuing to assert that material places also function within the writer's imagination and that imagined spaces are inflected with traces of materiality. 1 Although gardens are settled, cultivated, grounded, while flight is mobile, unpredictable, airborne, Cixous frequently brings the two metaphors together in unusual conjunctions. The two metaphors of garden and flight form a complex dialectic in Cixous's work. Biblical texts posit the garden as the place of human origin and divine encounter, while its loss has been seen as the original exile. 2 While Cixous draws upon these Biblical tropes in her writing, she deconstructs traditional understandings of origin and exile. A child of immigrants who has lived most of her adult life away from her birthplace (Algeria), she complicates understandings of home. Places of past and present dwelling and the flights towards and away from them form a significant element of her creative projects. The third term of sanctuary enables my exploration of the relationship between garden and flight. The metaphor of sanctuary in Cixous's texts encourages a theological reading of her work. A sanctuary is defined as a holy space and a place of refuge. It forms the connection between garden and flight as it is the endpoint of flight (both a goal and a waystation) and gardens themselves are sanctuaries. However, this identification is ambiguous; for Cixous,
doi:10.1093/litthe/frt004 fatcat:x5ovp4t5rfcy7g7xz3hfxsoiqy