https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2747-5634
![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The question of what role literature and art may play has become all the more urgent amidst the present intersectional crisis. This article discusses the oeuvre of author and visual artist Sara Baume which invites engagement with central aspects of this crisis: humanity’s impact on nature and the resulting climate change, and the effects of neoliberal capitalism. Discussing Baume’s three novels (Spill Simmer Falter Wither, A Line Made by Walking, and Seven Steeples) together with her non-fictional narrative Handiwork and the performance piece “The Alphabet of Birds,” the essay argues that while it might be justified to approach Baume’s work as poignant critique of the Anthropocene and its attendant ecological and spiritual devastation, it distinctly transcends such instrumentalist critical paradigms. Stoically lyrical about nature interlaced with variegated detritus, and using protagonists positioned on the margins of society, Baume offers an extended meditation on the role of art at the time of crisis and the possibilities of drawing sustenance from artistic creation. As such, Baume’s work engagingly illustrates what Derek Attridge has termed the “singularity” of literature and art, resisting predetermined agendas (including those vitally beneficial) and providing a repeatable opportunity for a potentially risky encounter with alterity.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Davis and Turpin, “Art & Death,” 3.
2. Ibid., 4–5.
3. Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, 9.
4. As Attridge points out, the instrumentalist approach is at least partially the result of the technocracy that has become prevalent at universities. While he traces this tendency to the last two decades of the twentieth century, with the emergence of “buzzwords” such as “outcomes assessment, performance indicators” and the like (8), numerous humanities scholars have recently warned that by the 2020s, an instrumentalist approach has increasingly become a prerequisite for securing funding or finding or maintaining a job in the academic sphere. See, for instance, Collini, Speaking of Universities, Guillory, Professing Criticism (particularly Chap. 10, “Evaluating Scholarship in the Humanities”), or Jirsa, “On Universities and Contemporary Society.”
5. Borbely, “On ‘Making Oddkin’,” 115.
6. Baume has highlighted this herself in an interview, pointing out that One Eye’s perceptions are made up by Ray and stating that Spill “is really about the man, not the dog.” See “Sara Baume on A Line.”
7. Borbely, “On ‘Making Oddkin’,” 118.
8. Sen, “Risk and Refuge,” 17.
9. Ibid., 20.
10. Ibid., 28.
11. Baume, A Line Made by Walking, 133.
12. Ibid., 292.
13. Ibid., 302.
14. Pinettes, “Inextricably Entangled,” 39.
15. Ibid., 23.
16. Ibid.
17. Baume, Seven Steeples, 29.
18. Ibid., 18.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., 13–14.
21. Ward Sell, “Hardly Working,” 18.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., 29.
24. Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, 6–7.
25. Ibid., 17–18.
26. Baume, Seven Steeples, 66–67, 190, 191.
27. See also the interview at the Shakespeare and Company Bookshop in Paris (“Sara Baume on A Line”) where Baume states herself that encountering the dead animals is “a symbol that the world is ending” for Frankie.
28. Baume, A Line Made by Walking, 282, 285.
29. Baume, Seven Steeples, 253.
30. For instance, ibid., 91–92.
31. Ibid., 45, 111, 236, 149, 184.
32. Ibid., 15, 38–39, 93, 193.
33. “Sara Baume in Conversation.”
34. Baume, Handiwork, 167, 93, 171.
35. Baume, Seven Steeples, 57.
36. Ibid., 169.
37. “The Existence of the World,” 89–90.
38. Baume, Spill Simmer Falter Wither, “Simmer.”
39. Baume, Seven Steeples, 148.
40. Baume, A Line Made by Walking, 172. See also Ward Sell, “Hardly Working,” 21.
41. See Borbely, “On ‘Making Oddkin’,” 114–115.
42. See note 8 above.
43. Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 14.
44. Baume, Seven Steeples, 18.
45. Ibid., 163.
46. Ibid., 207, 211.
47. Estévez-Saá, “‘An artist, first and foremost’,” 120.
48. See “Sara Baume on A Line”; and “Sara Baume in Conversation.”
49. E.g., “this flock” (195); “we secure a ring around every bony ankle” (a reference to attaching tags to the objects when getting them ready to be shipped to the gallery; 188).
50. Baume, Handiwork, 232, 229.
51. Although the video may be watched only as part of a live performance, a partial transcript has been published in Baume, “The Alphabet of Birds,” 65. There, the matter is summarised as follows: “I only made as many birds as I needed for the cover of my book, Handiwork.” I am grateful to Brendan Mac Evilly, the artistic director of the show, for granting me access to a recording to quote from.
52. “Sara Baume – Devotions.” Baume has also confessed that while Handiwork covers a period of approximately six months in which she was working towards the exhibition, her effort to build feeders and attract songbirds which is also detailed in the book was in reality stretched over approximately three years. See “Sara Baume in Conversation.”
53. Baume, Handiwork, 73.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid., 127.
56. See note 33 above.
57. Baume, “The Alphabet of Birds,” 68.
58. Ibid., 63, 69, 71.
59. Moreover, the title of the essay may have been inspired by an eponymous collection of short stories by South African author S J Naudé, the central theme of which is loss. See S J Naudé, The Alphabet of Birds. An extract appeared in Granta 129 (2014): 191–202, a magazine that Baume was to publish her work in later.
60. Beckett, “Endgame,” 107.
61. Baume, Seven Steeples, 221.
62. “Sara Baume and Sinéad Gleeson.”
63. See note 57 above.
64. See note 33 above.
65. Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, 5.
66. Ibid., 37.
67. Ibid., 38, 41–45.
68. Ibid., 109.
69. See note 44 above.