Art and sustenance in the work of Sara Baume

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Sara Baume
• crisis
• climate change
• neoliberalism
• Derek Attridge
• instrumentalism

Introduction

What role can literature, and art in general, play at a time of severe difficulty and hardship? This question is likely as old as the earliest artistic creations but has been keenly felt in the present era, featuring as it does an intersectional crisis that is affecting the entire planet. Writing in 2015, Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin asked: “If art is now a practice condemned to a homolithic earth – that is, to a world ‘going to pieces’ as the literal sediment of human activity – how can aesthetic practices address the social and political spheres that are being set in stone?”¹ They argued that

art, as the vehicle of aesthesis, is central to thinking with and feeling through the Anthropocene. […] To approach the panoply of complex issues that are aggregated within and adjacent to the Anthropocene, as well as their interconnections and intra-actions, it is necessary to engage with and encounter art.²

However, much scholarly engagement with art and literature has suffered from what Derek Attridge has termed “instrumentalism.” Attridge defines this type of approach as

the treating of a text (or other cultural artifact) as a means to a predetermined end: coming to the object with the hope or the assumption that it can be instrumental in furthering an existing project, and responding to it in such a way as to test, or even produce, that usefulness.³

Although the project may be beneficial in itself – such as combating climate change or exploitative attitudes and practices – the instrumentalist approach ignores what Attridge terms “the singularity” of literature and art which defies their use for set goals.⁴

This article explores the writings of a remarkable author and visual artist, Sara Baume, complicating the current critical readings of Baume’s texts as a condemnation of humans for their destruction of the environment and/or an indictment of neoliberal capitalism. Triggered by the liberating affective power of Baume’s multimedia performance essay “The Alphabet of Birds” (2021), particularly its detailed depiction of artists engaged in seemingly purposeless acts of creativity, it attempts to draw out the extended meditation about the position and significance of art in the present global crisis that underlies Baume’s work.

Interpreting reflections of the environment and neoliberalism in Baume’s novels

Sara Baume is the author of three novels to date, Spill Simmer Falter Wither (2015), A Line Made by Walking (2017) and Seven Steeples (2022), and of Handiwork (2020), a brief book that is perhaps best described by the words used on its cover: a “contemplative short narrative.” Her short stories, essays and reviews have appeared in a range of magazines and dailies including The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review, Granta, Elementum, Holy Show, the Visual Artists’ Newsletter and the Irish Times, and on the websites and in exhibition catalogues of various galleries, including Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. A graduate in Fine Art from Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology (as well as the Creative Writing programme at Trinity College Dublin), her first solo exhibition occurred in the Morley Gallery in London in 2018. Her art works have been exhibited since at the Glucksman Gallery and National Sculpture Factory in Cork (both 2020).

Several recent articles may be used to demonstrate the ease with which Baume’s work lends itself to posthumanist, ecocritical and/or new materialist readings. Her first novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither, tells the story of Ray, a reclusive, deeply traumatised man in his late fifties, and his life with One Eye, a mutilated, aggressive dog that he has rescued. Apart from its Prologue and the very ending, the novel is narrated by Ray in the first person and mostly addressed to the dog, with some passages seemingly focalised through One Eye. Carmen-Veronica Borbely has argued that Baume’s novel “participates in the posthumanist Derridean critique of the ‘abyssal rupture’ deemed to separate human and nonhuman animals, grounded in the idea of man being superior to the other species, which are consigned to a domain of abject, disposable otherness.”⁵ Parallel to her posthumanist interpretation of Spill, Borbely has also perceptively drawn out the novel’s affinities with the tradition of the Irish Gothic. However, apt as her perception about the novel’s critique of the separation of human and nonhuman animals may be, like most posthumanist readings it must suppress the fact that the consciousness of the dog in the novel is necessarily constructed by a human, in this case not just Baume as the author but also Ray who is the one explicitly imagining One Eye’s perceptions.⁶ Moreover, the ethical impulse behind Borbely’s approach results in a curious interpretation of the novel’s ambivalent ending: the final moments in which Ray finds himself at an ultimate impasse and likely dies by suicide are viewed as “the narrator’s reconciliation with personal trauma and his ethically responsible repositioning in the world at large” under the influence of his kinship with the dog.⁷

Baume’s second novel, A Line Made by Walking, concerns Frankie, an ambitious arts graduate in her mid-twenties who struggles to find a place for herself in the world. In an attempt to deal with her protracted state of depression, she moves to live in her recently deceased grandmother’s house in rural Ireland. Paralysed by her inability to make art, or indeed get involved in any activity, she eventually embarks on a project of photographing dead animals that she finds, every now and then, in the vicinity of the house. The novel is narrated in the first person and is interspersed with references to dozens of conceptual artworks that Frankie finds relevant to her situation and/or a particular moment. In a sophisticated essay about precarity in contemporary Irish fiction, Malcolm Sen has used a detailed reading of Frankie’s engagement with one of these art works, Anya Gallaccio’s preserve “beauty” (1991–2003), to make a claim about the “novel’s ecology, or its ‘way of seeing’,”⁸ arguing that A Line displays “an aesthetics of ecological crisis that upends received notions of homeliness and territorial sure-footedness.”⁹ Wondering together with the novel’s protagonist about what a “forcible metaphor for living” in the present might be, Sen concludes that it seems to be art, since “Art provides the bulwark and the compass that allows the present to be navigated in Baume’s novel.”¹⁰ To an extent, this is true, and one can see how such a conclusion may be attractive to a humanities scholar, both as a vindication of art and literature and our own academic work – but the problem is that in this instance, the assertion is based on a reductive interpretation of the passage in question. Frankie’s meditation in this part of the novel concerns Stanley Brouwn’s conceptual art project This way brouwn (1960–64) which she sees as “an apt and forcible metaphor for living” actually because it tells her that “throughout all of this time, these decades, we have no choice but to obtusely, optimistically, follow.” Consequently, this makes her admire the way Brouwn decided to withdraw from public view in 1972 and forbade the reproduction of his work.¹¹ Moreover, Frankie’s preoccupation with artworks often results in posing fundamental questions concerning the border between art and nature, and between art and non-art, with one of her final observations being that “art is every inexplicable thing,”¹² which complicates Sen’s conclusion in yet another way. This is also true of the ending of the novel where Frankie, who has run away from her grandmother’s house because she had descended into a state in which she saw the grandmother’s ghost, concludes that “Art, and sadness, […] last forever.”¹³ Art might be there to navigate the present, but it evidently does not help Frankie regain her mental wellbeing – or at least not as yet.

While Sen’s interpretation of A Line Made by Walking may need to be reductive due to forming a part of a broader argument about contemporary Irish fiction offered within the constraints of a single article, Camille Pinettes has attempted a comprehensive reading of the novel through a new materialist ecocritical lens. However, in her effort to demonstrate the importance of the recent “non-human turn” in the humanities that has been building on the observation “that the nature/culture, mind/body, and human/non-human divides are, in fact, constructs,”¹⁴ Pinettes actually ends up focusing solely on what she terms “ordinary processes of exchange between human and non-human bodies”¹⁵ as depicted in the novel. Frankie’s principal problem which, it may be argued, is fitting into human society, is largely ignored, as is the extensive, multifaceted engagement with questions surrounding the role of art in a damaged world that Baume features in the novel. Valuable as Pinettes’ contribution is, the instrumentalist tendency to use Baume’s novel as an illustration of the “material connections that underpin the world we live in”¹⁶ makes her sideline these aspects of A Line Made by Walking that are as central to it as its focus on materiality.

Baume’s latest novel, Seven Steeples tells the story of a young couple, Bell and Sigh (these being diminutives for Isabel and Simon),¹⁷ who decide to move with their two dogs to a semi-decrepit house in a rural coastal area, trying “to see what would happen when two solitary misanthropes tried to live together.”¹⁸ They are driven by an “amorphous idea” that “the only appropriate trajectory of a life [i]s to leave as little trace as possible and incrementally disappear.”¹⁹ In Seven Steeples, Baume has changed her narrative technique again: the novel is narrated in the third person and focalised mostly through Bell and sometimes through Sigh; moreover, each chapter features a passage that is focalised through the mountain (or more precisely, “the outcrop […] which was definitely/greater than a hill/but smaller/than a mountain”) overlooking their cottage.²⁰ Given that at heart, Seven Steeples is a story of love and deep personal attachment, in which the couple gradually merge poetically into a single being, it curiously features no dialogue, and although Bell and Sigh talk extensively, their speech is almost never reproduced in the novel. There are also no depictions of physical intimacy.

As in Baume’s previous two novels, the protagonists of Seven Steeples do not engage in any work that would generate income: while Frankie in A Line Made by Walking survives on a modest sum left over by her grandmother, Bell and Sigh live off social welfare combined with their gradually dwindling savings, like Ray does in Spill Simmer Falter Wither. This notable feature has become the subject of a perceptive article by Aran Ward Sell, which discusses the decision to opt out of remunerative labour in a total of four novels by Irish women published between 2018 and 2022. Ward Sell points out that Bell and Sigh’s “desire to decouple basic survival from the need to perform remunerative labour” constitutes “more of an elision of capitalism’s core logic than an explicit revolt to it.”²¹ He concludes that while paid labour “is, in fact, far less economically necessary than our socio-economic hierarchies are prepared to admit,”²² the issue ultimately turns out to be of marginal importance in Baume’s novel: accepting capitalism as “unchangeable,” her protagonists merely “find a loophole” and focus on their lives on capitalism’s margins.²³

Beyond instrumentalist readings

Perhaps with the exception of Ward Sell’s essay, which examines reflections of a specific motif within a complex relationship to global capitalism without predetermining the end, the approach in the articles referred to above is instrumentalist to a varying degree, meaning that it is led by “the hope or the assumption that [the literary text] can be instrumental in furthering an existing project, and respond[s] to it in such a way as to test, or even produce, that usefulness,” to return to Attridge’s definition. There is no doubt that exposing the effects of neoliberal capitalism and raising awareness of an impending ecological catastrophe and its causes are vital projects of course; however, if we are to do literature justice, we must attend to what Attridge describes as its singularity. Literature – and by extension all art – is singular in that as a cultural product it is “never simply contained by a culture,” that is, it always reaches beyond the limits of existing paradigms, being something “more than” and “other than” it is claimed to be.²⁴ What follows is that “there is no way [literature] can serve as an instrument without at the same time challenging the basis of instrumentality itself.”²⁵ With this in mind, the blind spots caused by a tendency towards instrumentalism in the current readings of Sara Baume need to be addressed.

First, let us consider Baume’s depictions of nature. Virtually every commentary, be it a critical essay, a review or an introduction in an interview, has noted the central position of nature in Baume’s work, as well as how detailed her observations of animals, plants and landscapes are, conveyed in a lyrical but at the same time unsentimental, terse language. These descriptions organically incorporate the impact of humans: the world of Baume’s characters involves not only multiple animal species and thriving vegetation, but also various waste dumped by people: plastic bags, wrappers, drink cans in ditches or man-made detritus washed up on the beach. The impact of human activity on the landscape is often documented as well: the mountain slope in Seven Steeples, for instance, is periodically scarred by the neighbouring farmer setting fire to the gorse bushes and the meadow permanently bears imprints of his tractor and farming machinery.²⁶ Frequently, there is an underlying sense that the world is dying: this is certainly one way of interpreting Frankie’s obsession in A Line Made by Walking with the dead animals that she photographs,²⁷ as well as her periodical meditations about art projects that concern death and finitude, and the uncanny act towards the end of the novel in which she positions her body on the carpet in the exact place where her grandmother’s death bed was.²⁸ When Bell and Sigh in Seven Steeples finally climb the mountain following eight years of life in its proximity, they adopt its gaze as the narrator’s voice observes: “From the top they could see/everything;/all that was left.”²⁹ In accord with the sense of an impending end, Baume’s protagonists are reluctant to attend to their places of habitation, letting everything gradually dismantle itself and dust and cobwebs gather; while in Spill and A Line this might be seen largely as a result of Ray and Frankie’s respective state of distress, Bell and Sigh in Seven Steeples are quite composed. They seem to programmatically fix (or have fixed by their landlord) only those things that absolutely need fixing, such as the drains every now and then or dislocated slates on the roof, and merely note with curiosity the deterioration of the rest.³⁰ Their attitude clearly goes beyond the sense of being temporary inhabitants of the house only, or the dire state of their finances.

All this is easily interpreted as implying a forceful critique of humanity’s detrimental impact on the environment. A similar conclusion may be drawn as regards Bell and Sigh’s life being conducted in a sustainable, responsible manner: they recycle their waste, prefer to wear second-hand clothes, insist on using up products such as washing-up liquid, shampoo, olive oil or honey to the last drop, and unlike their friends in the city, on finishing their meals to the last morsel.³¹ However, Bell and Sigh’s environmental-friendly living goes only so far: for instance, they make no effort to dispose of the rubbish left behind by strangers, they use oil and solid fuel for heating,³² and drive around in an old van with a combustion engine. This in fact happens to be an autobiographical reflection – one of many, as we will see later. In an interview that she gave in 2021, Baume stated that although she is “very much mindful” of issues such as climate change and global warming, she is “as concerned about inequality as about climate action,” using her own example to point out that she simply cannot afford ecological heating and continues to drive a diesel van because electric cars “are so damn expensive.”³³

In the same interview, Baume confessed that while she has great respect for climate activists, she considers herself “much more of a bystander and onlooker, much more of a thinker and a maker than an actual doer.” Notwithstanding that, Handiwork, Baume’s non-fictional meditation about her life and art practice, has her ponder, most responsibly, even about the waste created by art making. She comments, “I search for a new principle by which to justify my daily waste,” “flail[ing] for small absolutions” such as that she merely transforms already existing materials into art, giving them care and a story. Yet, she ultimately likens herself to John James Audobon, a famous nineteenth-century illustrator who had no qualms about shooting “tens of thousands” of birds in order to depict them: “I am Audobon,” Baume says, “caring chiefly and obsessively not about nature but the accuracy and beauty of its depiction – not the living world, but its lifeless replication.”³⁴

Even though Baume may seem needlessly harsh on herself in this observation, the word “beauty” deserves special attention in the context of discussing her depictions of the environment. They indeed are strangely beautiful, exuding a lyrical stoicism about the intertwining of the organic with manmade detritus, and often involve both a sense of wonder and a quiet celebration of life in this world. Here are a couple of representative examples from Seven Steeples:

The stubbly yellow grass started to bush and green again. Pink-streaked daisies were the first to nose through the dirt lawn, between the gnawed sticks and dismembered pegs, the skinned orbs of split tennis balls. Narcissi with their sherbet scent soon followed, dandelions shaking out their manes.³⁵

The walls flanking their road would be rickety were it not for the flora that plugged each hollow – bindweed, pennywort, creeping ivy – and the moss and turf clasping each stone in place.

 In spring and summer, briars and gorse engineered a scaffold. In autumn and winter, the walls were robbed of their reinforcements; the wind hissed through their holes again, toppling the odd stone.

 Blackberries blotted the scaffolds. Ragwort speared up. In the night their tall stems appeared to uproot from the ditches surrounding the cattle fields; to toss themselves across the road and lie there, trampled;        petals limp, roots drooped.

 Hubcaps appeared between the ferns and murdered ragwort – with six thick, rigid plastic spokes, an archaic symbol embossed at the heart. Bell and Sigh pointed the hubcaps out to each other, and all the familiar things, again,

                        and every unfamiliar thing,

                                   anew.³⁶

The matter-of-fact attitude to the state of the environment, together with the arresting beauty of its depiction, complicate any ecocritical readings of Baume’s work as involving a straightforward condemnation of the damage that has been inflicted on the planet by humans, or as implying a call for action. It would seem more appropriate perhaps to relate Baume’s novels to Jean-Luc Nancy’s suggestion that the existence of the world is “always unexpected” and that it is ordinary life in it that deserves to become our principal focal point; as Nancy argues, art in this world, “is above all the name of that which remains clear of ends and goals.”³⁷

An assessment of the – related – theme of capitalism and its impact in Baume’s writing may usefully expand on Aran Ward Sell’s keen observations. Baume’s protagonists occasionally display a negative attitude to consumerism or voice a protest. Ray in Spill detests, and is afraid of, the affluent inhabitants of the newly built costal housing estate, describing them as “the people who buy the tool belts and steam mops and magic knickers we see advertised between television programmes.”³⁸ Similarly, Bell and Sigh in Seven Steeples have an aversion to the owners of holiday homes that have sprung up during the Celtic Tiger era on what they see as “their” coast: “How Bell and Sigh […] hated the man with two homes, who owned a hundred things he did not use; who had a duplicate holiday set of his hundred unused things.”³⁹ In A Line, Frankie lashes out drunkenly at an episode of the reality TV business programme Dragon’s Den: “THERE’S NO INNOVATION, NO CREATIVITY […] IN MONEY BEGETTING MONEY!”⁴⁰ But as Ward Sell has observed, these moments are marginal to the protagonists’ concerns, who are preoccupied with their lives that are deliberately lived on the fringes of consumerist society and its rules.

Having said that, there are some significant differences between the three novels in this respect. Ray’s self-isolation has little to do with neoliberal capitalism, being the result of the neglect and psychological abuse that he had suffered from his father.⁴¹ Frankie’s mental state, on the other hand, and her subsequent seclusion from society, may be perceived as a direct consequence of the expectations that she has grown up with as a comfortably well-off young person in modern Western society. In the novel which examines the “psychological condition of alienation brought on by living in the twenty-first century with an acutely alert consciousness,” to quote Malcom Sen,⁴² Frankie’s central problem is feeling stultifyingly unhappy, despite there being no obvious cause, and finding herself unable to interact with others. As Sara Ahmed has detailed in The Promise of Happiness, the central importance of being happy is a product of modernity that has become essential to capitalist society in the recent couple of decades in particular: Ahmed observes how our lives have become “directed by the promise of happiness, the promise that happiness is what follows if we do this or that.”⁴³ The frustration of someone like Frankie, a middle-class college graduate in a subject that she likes, at happiness failing to materialise is understandable. The only help that the world at large seems to offer her is medication for depression, handed over with a shrug. This indictment of contemporary society for the way it tends to treat young people who find it hard to fit in has become all the more acute following the COVID-19 pandemic, needless to say.

For Bell and Sigh, who are somewhat older, and who have each other, withdrawal from society is a programmatic decision, “A refuge, a cult, a church of two; […] their experiment.”⁴⁴ They live “in a kind of retirement,”⁴⁵ in which the pressures of the contemporary world are ignored to the greatest possible extent, and which is characterised by a gradual obliteration of the time that rules the lives of others: the couple eventually stop bothering about adjusting the time on their kitchen clock, are oblivious of the time on the clock in their van being wrong, and one October they ultimately decide to ignore the change from daylight saving time back.⁴⁶ Their lives are governed only by the seasons, with occasional differences brought about by irregularities of the weather. This is also elaborately reflected in the structure of the novel: while Baume organised the story in her first book according to the seasons already, as its title – Spill Simmer Falter Wither – indicates, Seven Steeples follows two interconnected timelines: one that more or less chronologically outlines the story of Bell and Sigh’s eight years in the cottage under the mountain, and another which is structured according to the time of the year, with the first chapter beginning in early January, each subsequent chapter focusing mostly on the next month or two, and the last chapter ending in January again. Moreover, each chapter opens with a reference to the mountain and/or its gaze, and ends with an image of an eye, or eyes. In this way, Baume foregrounds the importance of the cycles of nature for life, as well as the centrality of perception.

Autobiographical dimension, processing grief and the importance of routine

A feature of Baume’s writing that deserves as much attention as its reflections of the environment and neoliberal consumerist society is its increasingly autobiographical nature, something that Baume has highlighted in virtually every interview. The autobiographical dimension of her work gives particular salience to Handiwork in relation to Baume’s oeuvre of fiction, and makes a good case for all her output to be viewed as an artist’s extended contemplation of her life and work, regardless of the elements in Baume’s texts that have obviously been fictionalised.

It is true that the inspiration by the author’s life in writing her first novel may be considered of no special importance: although Baume has stated that the book was written out of feeling lonely and ostracised as an artist in her late twenties trying to live in a rural Irish community,⁴⁷ the obvious differences between the male protagonist in his sixties and the much younger female author (amongst others) make the nature of Spill’s relation to the author’s experience similar to most novels. However, the fact that A Line is closely based on a period of disorientation that Baume went through as an arts graduate in her mid-twenties⁴⁸ brings the novel close to autofiction, with Frankie as Baume’s alter ego, which is also true of Seven Steeples, a novel that is modelled on the life of the author with her partner, Mark Beatty, in rural south Cork. Handiwork, a non-fictional account of a period in the artist’s life, is on the other hand not only conveyed in lyrical language that resembles Baume’s fiction and structured into short passages with page breaks occurring often after a single paragraph, or even a single sentence, but it also involves subtle manipulations of reality. Remarkably, for instance, the photographs of model birds created by Baume that introduce each section of the book combine with the way the narrative voice frequently refers to the artworks that she is creating while writing the book in bird terminology,⁴⁹ giving the impression that the model birds are indeed the art objects that Baume is making for her upcoming exhibition. It is only upon careful inspection of the featured “Note on the Images” and “Acknowledgments” section that the reader discovers this to be misleading. These paratexts note, on the one hand, that the book responds “to the process of building three sculptural installations that were exhibited together in a solo show in the Morley Gallery” in 2018, and on the other, that Baume did not start working on the bird series until the spring of 2019.⁵⁰ Further confirmation is available outside the book: in a video about her work which is part of “The Alphabet of Birds” performance, Baume acknowledges that the birds were made in retrospect, with the sole intent of providing the cover image for Handiwork;⁵¹ likewise, the online coverage of the Morley Gallery exhibition bears no traces of the bird series being part of it.⁵² The blurring of genre boundaries between a conventional novel and autofiction is thus paralleled in Handiwork by vaguening the limits of non-fiction.

A central theme in much of Baume’s work that is closely intertwined with the autobiographical is the processing of grief. In an interview that she gave in January 2018, Baume revealed that while she was writing her first novel, her grandmother died, and that her father died as she was working on A Line Made by Walking. Frankie’s coming to terms with the passing of her grandmother became an important theme in A Line, where the young artist engages with the grandmother’s archive of family photographs in an effort to think about her origins, and grows progressively more obsessed with the actual spot where her ancestor died, as noted earlier. Baume’s mourning of her father, to whom she was very close despite him not really comprehending her involvement in art and literature (as she details in Handiwork),⁵³ has added an even stronger personal dimension to her work both as a writer and as a visual artist. As well as being a meditation on art and nature, Handiwork is a powerful book of mourning in which the author processes her father’s death, imagining conversations with him and his private thoughts. She also pays tribute to his manual labour in a quarry and his construction of machinery and various mechanical contraptions. Baume juxtaposes her father’s incessant activity to that of amateur artists, represented by her grandfather’s building of model carriages and the work of model railway hobbyists, as well as to her own visual arts practice, concluding that in many ways they are no different. Her observation that her father “just needed to be doing things” and that “labour was his pleasure, or perhaps his sanctuary”⁵⁴ holds true for her too, as it does for her grandfather and other hobbyists. As an artist, she describes herself as a disciple of the central figure of the British Arts and Crafts Movement, William Morris, whom she paraphrases as saying: “Art must arise from daily life […] and the person who labours must be inseparable from the product of their labour – it must synchronously be a product of their will, their pains, their talents, their tenderness.”⁵⁵ Baume’s discussion of her father’s labour, and that of the hobbyists, again indicates that in this sense, they are really similar too.

Much of Handiwork sees Baume engaged in seemingly endless work routines, which are determined by the nature of her artwork: Baume has specialised mainly in producing art installations consisting of identical or near-identical objects, such as a model Irish cottage or a model ship, replicated in profusion – the installations consist of multiple dozens of these objects. Like the writing of Handiwork, Baume’s immersion in such repetitive practice of art making at this moment in her life may be seen to stem from the bereavement that she has suffered: as she stated herself, art became “a means of staving off her father’s death.”⁵⁶ In “The Alphabet of Birds,” creative activity is even linked to the religion that Baume lost in her teens: “Daily I type and carve and sew and read, as if they are a form of prayer.”⁵⁷ Other repetitive actions described in “The Alphabet of Birds” are clearly linked to processing loss as well, such as the habit Baume developed of swimming daily in the sea in any kind of weather, “a form of self-flagellation” which eventually resulted in an “unserious neck injury” due to desperately trying to hold her head above water when the sea was rough.⁵⁸ Indeed, even Baume’s incantation of bird names during sleepless nights with which she opens and closes the performance is easily viewed in connection to her grief, also because of their juxtaposition in the narrative both with Baume’s abandoned childhood habit of praying at night and the difficult time the family had setting up a funeral ritual for her father.⁵⁹

Routine is also connected to the stoicism apparent in Baume’s descriptions of the surrounding environment in all of her writing, however. The “always unexpected world,” to return to Nancy’s phrase, is not only a source of wonder in Baume’s writing but has an almost Beckettian quality: it is a world in which, simply, “something is taking its course,” where routine becomes a fundamental, albeit often near-ridiculous, component of life (“Why this farce, day after day?/Routine. One never knows.”).⁶⁰ Routine serves as a way of survival, of keeping mental balance. It ultimately comes very close to obsession: as the narrator in Seven Steeples observes with a slight touch of irony, “Any small change in routine” might be “catastrophic.”⁶¹

Art as a routine and its singularity

If conceived of as a routine, however, art practice runs all the more strongly the risk of uselessness – and this is a central concern in both Handiwork and “The Alphabet of Birds.” As Baume has confessed, her objective behind writing Handiwork was “justifying what I thought was a waste of time;” in the book, she develops a suitable parallel between the strenuous and futile journey of the migrating northern wheatear and the pointlessness of art and craft.⁶² Moreover, her video section of “The Alphabet of Birds” features the following astringent comment: “I don’t think it’s any more or less useless than any of the things we do in life. It’s one use of time.” (a sentiment that bears relevance to the seemingly pointless and often eccentric creative acts of the other artists filmed for the show as well). However, in the performed essay Baume also emphasises an assertion made by Canadian painter Agnes Martin that “Artwork is a representation of our devotion to life,”⁶³ a perspective that Baume has reiterated in an interview given around the same time, stating that art “need[s] to be made as a form of self-preservation.”⁶⁴

These potentially self-contradictory musings, likely pertinent to many another writer or artist, are of course as relevant for the recipient of the artwork. In order to navigate them, we may again turn to Derek Attridge. Attridge points out that literature, and art in general, “solves no problems and saves no souls,”⁶⁵ an assertion that chimes well with Nancy’s claim that art is only “that which remains clear of ends and goals.” The singularity of literature and art consists in the ability to offer their recipients “a powerful and repeatable event of mental and emotional restructuring.”⁶⁶ This ability is a direct result of a work of art “holding out the possibility of a repeated encounter with alterity,” where alterity – or “the other” – is understood in its broadest sense, from an excluded race to a non-human animal, another human being, and essentially anything that exceeds our established patterns of interpreting the world⁶⁷ – including those that pertain to climate change or neoliberal capitalism, it should be noted in the present context. This radical openness to the other may have the effect of broadening of minds, providing companionship or consolation, generating intense pleasure, but as any encounter with the other, it may also result in the dismantling of entire paradigms – and we as beholders and interpreters should be open to this risk.

Moreover, as Attridge observes, every encounter with art including the literary involves “some sense of strangeness, mystery, or unfathomability.”⁶⁸ This is forcefully apparent in the work of Sara Baume, whose characters are surrounded with an air of mystery that, particularly in A Line Made by Walking and Seven Steeples, culminates in ambivalent endings: will the period spent in her grandmother’s house help Frankie find a place for herself in the world, will she be able to create art again? What exactly does Bell and Sigh’s eventual climbing of the mountain and the adoption of its gaze mean, and does this closure – combined with the money running out – imply that their retreat from society and remunerative labour is over? Or are Bell and Sigh on the cusp of reaching the climax of “incremental disappearance”?⁶⁹ Any reading of Sara Baume needs to stay attuned to the mysteries that it involves. It is only within a framework of willingness to encounter, and re-encounter upon rereading, the alterities that Sara Baume’s writing presents, that the underlying meditation about the significance of art amidst a situation of crisis may be appreciated in its complexity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund project “Beyond Security: Role of Conflict in Resilience-Building” [reg. no.: CZ.02.01.01/00/22_008/0004595].

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.