Cuando vives in la frontera
people walk through you, the wind steals your voice,
you’re a burra, buey, scapegoat,
forerunner of a new race,
half and half—both woman and man, neither—
a new gender
—Gloria Anzaldúa
In the 2011 short film, “Oh, the Places You’ll Go,” Teddy Saunders explores the resonances between Dr. Seuss’s eponymous story and Burning Man—the week-long music and art festival held in the Nevada desert, which bills itself as an experience and experiment in art and radical self-expression. 1 The film showcases a host of the festival’s participants in various states of provocative dress and undress. They each recite lines from the Seuss text and many animate their reading by performing either what the text suggests or different circus-like acrobatics and movements. The entire scene hints at the carnivalesque—with the backdrop depicting a makeshift city, neon lights and all—in the middle of the wide, dry, sun-scorched Nevada desert.
By juxtaposing the Seuss narrative (ostensibly a children’s book) with a glimpse of the conspicuously erotic art festival, Saunders interprets Burning Man as having an intimate relationship between space and identity, he makes room for a queer rendering of each, and thus subverts both convention and expectation. What does it mean when someone says they are going to Burning Man? Is it a “place you’ll go,” as in a specified location? Is it a series of events that have already been conditioned by their repetition year after year? Is Burning Man the behaviors expected of the participants when they “go there?” The film suggests that Burning Man is simultaneously a “Place You’ll Go” and a self you will become in that place. Therefore, Burning Man hints at the interrelated nature of space and subjectivity—each continuously constituting the other. The invocation of the Seuss narrative helps to emphasize the point that it is indeed the place that makes the self and vice versa. In addition, Saunders’s treatment of Burning Man points to the persistent and potent symbol of the desert as a space of radical transformation.
What follows is an exploration of how Christian authors in late antiquity made use of the idea of the desert—above all, the Egyptian desert—as a literary vehicle for the construction of Christian identity. The same questions undergird this analysis. Is the desert a specific geographic location? Is it a series of conditioned events, responses, and processes of becoming? Or is it, crucially, both at once? Furthermore, the question of identity and its relationship to space is one that I am interested in pursuing more deeply beyond the confines of Christian late antiquity. By looking at analogous moments (even ones separated by over a millennium!), I believe that there is much that can be gleaned to better understand each.
As the late Chicana writer, thinker, and theorist, Gloria Anzaldúa notes in the epigraph above; something new, mixed, fluid, and indeterminate is produced in and through particular spaces (for her, the US–Mexican borderlands). It is indeed her ideas that have inspired me most to think about how Christian hagiographers worked to produce a particular Christian identity through their own makings of the desert . And it is indeed my argument that there are resonances between Anzaldúa’s “new mestiza” and the desert denizens of ancient Christian hagiographies. Because of this, her words and ideas—especially those from her groundbreaking work, Borderlands/La Frontera : The New Mestiza—are pushing through the pages of this book in order to guide my own reading of three foundational Christian texts from antiquity.
Others before me have, of course, emphasized the significance of the Egyptian desert in ascetic literature. In The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity , Peter Brown notes, “Despite their physical closeness to the settled land, the monks of Egypt towered in the imagination of contemporaries because they stood against an ocean of sand that was thought to stretch from Nitria to the furthest edges of the known world. They were a new humanity , settled where no human beings should be found.” 2 Brown hints at the intimate relationship between space and identity for late ancient Christians. While acknowledging the literary or imaginative character of both desert and saint, Brown nonetheless slides easily from representation to reality. Of course, he is not alone in this tendency. Take, for example, Derwas Chitty’s highly regarded study, The Desert, a City . Borrowing its title from a well-known line in Athanasius’s Life of Antony, Chitty describes early Egyptian monasticism in terms of the desert into which Christian monks withdrew. 3 There are, of course, many more excellent studies on the desert in ancient Christian literature. This book, however, sets out to describe the intertwined and rich descriptions of the desert and the saint—the space and the subject—in states of constant production and reproduction via the hagiographer’s imagination. And in so doing, I argue for an understanding of space as both real and imagined for Christian hagiographers in late antiquity.
Taking a cue from the work of James Goehring, this book will demonstrate how holy persons and sacred spaces are intimately linked in the Christian literary imagination: the desert produces the saint while at the same time the saint produces the desert, and both are products of the author’s pen. Goehring’s work has been instrumental in pushing forward the argument that the desert in late ancient literary sources is a literary construct and should therefore be interpreted as such. In Ascetics , Society, and the Desert he places the image of the desert rightly within its literary context. 4 There he strikes a balance of understanding the desert as both a “real and imagined space.” 5 He writes, “Of course the desert, a symbolic metaphor…was a physical reality in the lives of desert monks…it was the linkage of that reality with the symbolic power of the metaphor that generated the literary product.” 6 Importantly, for my purposes, Goehring has suggested that Athanasius’s Life of Antony established the literary motif in its description of the desert, a motif that would be picked up again and again by later authors. He suggests:
Given the dominant influence of the Life of Antony in subsequent presentations of Egyptian monasticism, the later dominance of the desert imagery is perhaps no accident. The success of the Life of Antony is due in part, however, to the reality of the desert’s influence in ascetic literary production in general. The desert’s influence on literary production meant the other major literary sources all fit to a degree the Antonian model. The Life of Antony was such a successful model in part because it was a literary model, and those who wrote about monasticism wrote about or in the desert. As a result, to read monastic literature, both the literature produced by monks, and that produced about monks, was to read about desert monks. And as access to the early monks came to depend on the literature, the only monks that were remembered were those in the desert. 7
Understanding the prominence of the desert imagery in the Life of Antony helps to establish the literary and imagined qualities of this real space. By weaving together the interplay between the real and imagined, Goehring establishes the influence of the Life of Antony as more than a literary model for constructing the desert saint because it equally constructs the Egyptian desert.
Seen in this way, neither the subject nor the space is privileged. I argue that by understanding each (subject and space) as a constitutive element of the other one can better perceive the kind of literary analysis that allows for...