• 1 From Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Format (...)
• 2 Sara Baume, Seven Steeples, Dublin, Tramp Press, 2022.

1Sara Baume’s latest published book, Seven Steeples,2 raises questions about what genre of writing the book belongs to and if it can be defined as narrative fiction at all. However, despite the beautiful language it deploys, the systematic use of repetition, the typographical layout which at times introduces cuts and run-on lines, and the creation of rhythm, it cannot be considered as a long prose poem either. The book still retains some of the basic tenets of narrative fiction, such as the succession of actions, albeit insignificant, and the staging of fictional characters, even though underdeveloped. Neither can it be called an essay, as it contains no moral, political or philosophical digression. It is not a pamphlet either, as it does not make any call for action on the part of public or private powers. The point of this paper is to show in what ways Seven Steeples is an attempt to place the non-human at the heart of the narrative, instead of using the traditional human perspective to tell a story about humans. Baume has challenged herself to eschew such basic ingredients of narrative fiction as characterisation, plot, dialogue, or interior monologue, because they all tend to produce an anthropocentric rendition of the world, whereby only the human characters are endowed with agency, and the world around them merely serves as an inert and passive background.

• 3 Rick Dolphijn, Iris van der Tuin, “The Transversality of New Materialism”, in New Mater (...)

2Instead, Seven Steeples invites the reader to acknowledge how humans and non-humans are not separate from one another but are utterly co-dependent and intermingled. It is especially through the emphasis on matter – in the most down-to-earth, material sense of the word – that the author casts light on the entanglement of our lives with the things, objects, minerals, plants, animals, dirt, mud, etc., which surround us and sometimes even blend with our bodies themselves, as is the case for bugs, germs, parasites, etc. By reminding us of the way humans and human culture are not separate from nature but are part and parcel of it, Baume’s novel may read as an illustration of the ideas advocated in the last two decades by philosophers of “new materialisms”, who wish to rework, and even break through, the dualism between body and mind, the living and the inert, nature and culture, to paraphrase Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin in a chapter entitled “The Transversality of New Materialism”.3

• 6 Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introduction”, in The Ecocriticism Reader. Landmarks in Literary Ec (...)
• 7 Simon C. Estok, “Afterword: New Horizons in Materiality and Literature”, Neohelicon: Ac (...)
• 8 Erin James, Eric Morel, “Ecocriticism and Narrative Theory: An Introduction”, English S (...)

5Ecocriticism, defined by Cheryll Glotfelty as “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment […] [which] takes an earth-centered approach to literary studies”,6 has questioned not just the relationship between humans and their environment but also what means and devices art and literature can use to raise the reader’s awareness of the necessity to change their vision of their place in the world. According to Simon C. Estok in an article called “New Horizons in Materiality and Literature”, “One of the consequences of [the] new conceptualizations of materials and their dynamics is a new understanding of narrative itself”.7 Ecocriticism has thus recently moved towards greater attention to narrative form, and has considered “how narratives can challenge readers’ conceptions of what it means to be human and how nonhuman characters and actants express their agency”, to quote Erin James and Eric Morel in their introduction to the special issue of English Studies entitled Ecocriticism and Narrative Theory.8

• 9 Sara Baume studied fine art at Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology (I (...)
• 10 Sara Baume, Spill Simmer Falter Wither, London, W. Heinemann, 2015.
• 11 Sara Baume, A Line Made by Walking, London, W. Heinemann, 2017.
• 12 The title of the novel is that of a work by Richard Long, exhibited at the Tate Modern (...)
• 13 Sara Baume, Handiwork, Dublin, Tramp Press, 2020.

7Sara Baume is one of the most innovative Irish novelists to have emerged in the recent years. Having graduated both in fine art and creative writing,9 she has confessed having hesitated for a while between becoming either a writer or a visual artist, a hesitation which to a certain extent is reflected by the evolution of her written work. Whereas her first published novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither,10 was based on a fully-developed character and contained a plot with a beginning and an end, therefore more or less abiding by the rules of traditional story-telling, her second book, A Line Made by Walking,11 already departed from that pattern and included photographs of dead animals, as well as descriptions of existing contemporary works of art,12 like as many ekphrases spread out through the narrative. She then published Handiwork,13 a partially autobiographical narrative which alternates memories of her early life and of her family, especially of her dead father, and a reflection on her artistic work, with a focus on a collection of miniature wooden birds she made, represented in photographs included in the volume. The book also contains observations about actual birds and their migratory habits or songs.

• 14 Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination…, p. 168.

10According to Lawrence Buell, “the aesthetic of relinquishment”, as he calls it, “fits environmental non-fiction better than lyric poetry and prose fiction”, he argues, because these modes rely on “the most basic aesthetic pleasures of homocentrism: plot, characterization, lyric pathos, dialogue, intersocial events, and so on”.14 It seems to me that Seven Steeples embraces this “aesthetic of relinquishment” by abandoning and re-working one of the first “basic aesthetic pleasures of homocentrism”, which is character.

• 15 Sara Baume, Seven Steeples, p. 17.
• 16 Anthony Wall, “Characters in Bakhtin’s Theory”, Studies in 20^th Century Literature, v (...)
• 17 Sara Baume, Seven Steeples, p. 83.

11Characters in the book are reduced to only two, and they are endowed with a minimum of character-traits, as is evidenced right away by their very names, shortened to a single syllable each: Bell and Sigh, deriving, as we are told incidentally, from the names Isabel and Simon, but which now sound like animals’ names. The facts about their personal, individual lives before moving in together in the house by the mountain boil down to one or two. We thus learn that they were both born in large families but that “they neither had experienced any unusual unhappiness in early life, any notable trauma”.15 The remark reads like an ironic, dismissive allusion to a very traditional aspect of characterisation, that is to say the summary of the protagonist’s childhood, such as can be found for instance in Robinson Crusoe (1719), one of the earliest novels in the English language, which begins with “I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull”. The comparison with Robinson Crusoe is not entirely irrelevant here as Baume’s characters experience a kind of voluntary exile from society, and manage to re-build a world of their own in an isolated place. The reference to “trauma” also sounds ironic in an Irish context, if we consider the great number of Irish novels which tell the story of an unhappy childhood (references that come to mind are for instance Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996), John McGahern’s The Dark (1965), or Anne Enright’s The Gathering (2007)). Here not only are the characters deprived of a background, whether it be family, education or friends, but they are also denied any psychological depth, as the narrator does not describe their feelings and the author makes no use of interior monologue to disclose the characters’ inner lives and feelings. Neither are the characters defined by their speech, as there is hardly a line of dialogue throughout the text, contrary to what was deemed so essential to the genre of the novel by Bakhtin, for whom “[t]he good novelist manages to create a literary facsimile of that social dialogue which constitutes human language”.16 Here the human characters are not granted any individual voice, and dialogue, if any, is mostly summarised by the narrator, as in: “They talked. Their talk was mostly composed of the obvious, but sometimes it contained declarations and commands, or involved problem-solving, speculation, philosophy”.17

• 18 Paul Ricœur, “Narrative Time”, Critical Inquiry, vol. 7, no. 1, autumn 1980, On (...)

13On the other hand, one of the main narrative components that Seven Steeples has recourse to, and that Buell does not mention, is time and temporality, considered by Paul Ricœur as the very essence of narrativity. Ricœur takes “[…] temporality to be that structure of existence that reaches language in narrativity and narrativity to be the language structure that has temporality as its ultimate referent. Their relationship is therefore reciprocal”.18

• 19 Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit, t. III, Le temps raconté, Paris, Seuil, 1985, (...)
• 20 Sara Baume, Seven Steeples, p. 13.
• 21 Merriam-Webster dictionary online: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/almanac.
• 22 Sara Baume, Seven Steeples, p. 68.
• 23 Peter Childs, Modernism, Oxford – New York, Routledge, 2000, p. 49.
• 24 Sara Baume, Seven Steeples, p. 124.

14But Ricœur also insists on the importance of plot and emplotment as a means of imitating the human experience of time: by re-arranging the chronology of events, emplotment, he argues, creates the intelligibility and credibility of the narrative, and, by linking them together, plot renders events, agents and objects meaningful as part of a larger whole. But in Seven Steeples the notion of a plot, based on a chain of events that would be linked by causality, is superseded by the mere succession of days, seasons and years, dutifully recorded by the narrator. As a result, no meaning is assigned to individual events, those which traditionally make up the fabric of narrative fiction, or even of history as narrative. Here, what is recorded are the day-by-day tiny changes happening according to the natural succession of day and night, winter and spring, in other words of what Ricœur calls “cosmological time”,19 or the flow of time. Bell and Sigh are thus said to move in together on “the winter that followed the summer they met”,20 and the narrative is punctuated by numerous such references to the time of year, either through the name of the month, or of the season, which are accompanied by descriptions of the state of the vegetation or information about the presence or absence of insects, so that the book can be read as a kind of almanac, defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “a publication containing astronomical and meteorological data for a given year and often including a miscellany of other information”.21 Calendar-time, in the sense of the mere succession of days, months and years, is therefore the only aspect of temporality taken into account in the narrative, excluding other types of temporality usually recreated in prose fiction, such as historical time, psychological time or social time. No allusion indeed is made in the course of the narrative to any historical period or event, except a random allusion to the presence in the vicinity of the house of a “Norman castle, a Victorian estate, a Famine graveyard, a prehistoric stone circle”.22 Likewise, the absence of any form of interiority granted to the characters precludes the creation of psychological time, a notion developed by Henri Bergson, which, he argued, is measured by duration, defined as the varying speed at which the mind apprehends the length of experiences according to their different intensities, contents and meaning for each individual.23 The notion was central to modernist literature, as illustrated by the novels of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce or Marcel Proust. To the reader’s knowledge, Bell and Sigh do not reminisce about their past lives; neither do they project themselves into the future, or make plans. Due to the couple’s isolation, the return of social events, such as workdays, holidays, celebrations, anniversaries, and the like, remain for them meaningless ciphers on the wall calendar offered by the fuel company: “The oil man came at the start of every year with a fresh calendar”.24

• 25 Ibid., p. 17.
• 26 Ibid., p. 69.
• 27 Ibid., p. 74.

16Accordingly, the narrator keeps a detailed record of the signs of change, decline, obsolescence and disintegration observed in the objects, things, as well as animals, plants and even rocks surrounding the couple: “Outdoor, the lid of their biscuit-tin letterbox had rusted. The letters of their names had faded”.25 “By then, a green pelt had grown on the black plastic backs of the van’s wing mirrors”,26 “the timber fenceposts […] leaned and disintegrated, rotting from the inside out, caving in”.27

• 30 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Ma (...)
• 31 See for instance Mario Ortiz-Robles, Literature and Animal Studies, London, Routledge (...)
• 32 Sara Baume, Seven Steeples, p. 100.

19By reminding us readers that humans are not only spirits and souls but primarily bodies made of cells and particles which assemble, then dissolve and disintegrate, depending upon what kind of food we eat, the air we breathe, the germs, viruses and parasites which feed off our bodies, the dust which accumulates in the rooms we live in, Baume’s narrative illustrates Karen Barad’s idea that “[t]he very nature of materiality is an entanglement. Matter itself is always already open to, or rather entangled with, the ‘Other’”.30 The weather conditions thus obviously shape the characters’ lives and determine their occupations, as they huddle inside the house in winter and stay outdoors to observe the starry nights when the weather is fine. The entanglement of the human characters with other-than-humans is also humorously emphasised by the co-presence of their two dogs, one male, one female, one brought along by Sigh and the other by Bell, whose one-syllable names Voss and Pip, echo their human companions’. The phonetic correspondence hints at the parallel Baume clearly means to establish between the human couple and the animal one, thus placing them on the same level, describing the dogs’ habits, behaviours, tastes and attitudes in as much detail as those of their human counterparts. However, it is not so uncommon to find dogs being promoted as full characters in prose fiction, as evidenced by numerous studies devoted to the relationships between pets and humans in literature.31 Baume herself used a dog as her main character’s alter ego in her first novel Spill Simmer Falter Wither. But Seven Steeples differs from this kind of literature which tends to humanise pets and stages much more unusual animal companions, which however are very much part of our lives, such as insects, spiders, moth, mice, birds, larvae, worms, slugs, bugs – the recent Covid crisis having demonstrated if need be the inevitable entanglement of our lives with the existence of microscopic living agents. No element of the world surrounding the characters is thus too tiny or too insignificant to be duly recorded and described in the narrative, as in: “Both sides of the ragworms’ bodies were lined with legs through which they breathed. The lugworms were shorter and lighter, with hispid gills and mucus-coloured tails”.32

• 33 Ibid., p. 62.
• 34 Ibid., p. 156.
• 35 Ibid., p. 173.

20What is more, the inclusion of non-human, or other-than-human elements in the novel is not limited to animals. Much attention is granted to matter itself, however unaesthetic or repulsive it may be: thus puddles, mud, compost, dirt, discarded hairs, cobwebs, are all taken into account and make up the fabric of the narrative, as in: “Rain, cowshit and ash collected in its shallow cavities, forming a thin gruel that Sigh spilled onto the lawn one bright evening”;33 or again when the couple buy a hoover and find it too weak to absorb “five full years’ worth of the electric grit that had collected in the carpet on the stairs – the microscopic fibres of pine needles and pollen, sand and shale, splinters and mud”;34 or again, when the narrator describes the filth gathered in one of the dogs’ fur: “Dewdrops, aphids, larvae, grains of rice and coarse flour, flakes of garlic skin, tissue, bran. Voss, like the carpet on the stairs, held a microscopic material archive within his ragged coat”.35

• 37 Sara Baume, Seven Steeples, p. 9.

22Bennett’s call to apply our five senses to the detection of the vitality of matter around us finds an echo in Seven Steeples through the prevailing role attributed to vision in the text, and to the five senses in general. Much of the characters’ daily occupation consists in observing the evolution of the natural world around them. But Baume also manages to revert the balance of power which sets in between the observers – the humans – and the observed – the non-human – and which grants the observer a sense of superiority and domination. Indeed each chapter of Seven Steeples begins with a reference to the mountain facing the characters’ house, described right from the beginning as being capable of vision: “The mountain alone looked up, down and around, seeing everything at once, keeping watch. The mountain was a colossal, cyclopean eye that never shut, even when it was sleeping”.37

• 38 Ibid., p. 34.
• 39 Ibid., p. 90.
• 40 Ibid., p. 152.
• 41 Ibid., p. 213.

23Even though these lines could be read as a classic example of personification, and therefore of anthropocentrism, I suggest we may interpret them precisely the other way round, as Baume here also reverts the traditional hierarchy according to which humans are the ones who have the power of seeing and observing the universe around them, thereby exerting a form of power and domination over nature, dissecting, classifying, exploiting and experimenting with natural resources for the alleged benefit of mankind. Framing each chapter with a reference to the mountain underlines its primacy over the humans, the permanence and immutability of its presence as opposed to the transience of all living beings. The fact that each year Bell and Sigh postpone their planned expedition to the mountain points at the unknowable nature of the mountain, the inscrutable mystery of its existence, which human intelligence and willpower fail to encompass. Each chapter in Seven Steeples also ends with a reference to a non-human eye: “They returned indoors, to the kettle and screens and stove, satisfied, leaving behind them, in the moss-slicked skin of the living tree, the green slit of an opened eye”;38 “The ground webs resembled pale vortexes that whorled down into central points, into pinprick holes. And at the core of every ground web, there was an entrance, an absence, an eye”;39 “the mountain saw the door of the house rupture into a sultry portal. Through the black quagmire of moths, it saw an opening, eye-like”,40 etc. One chapter ends with the phrase “a new eye” repeated on every line over a full one and a half page, in relation to the stars the couple are able to observe in the sky.41 The insistence on that other-than-human, morphing “eye” can be set in relation with the undecidable identity of the omniscient narrative voice, so that we may wonder who tells the story and chronicles the changes in the characters’ environment as their days go by; the fact that the mountain should be described as all-seeing opens up the possibility that the mountain itself could be the narrator.

• 42 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter…, p. ix.
• 43 Sara Baume, Seven Steeples, p. 33.
• 44 Ibid., p. 49.
• 45 Ibid., p. 118.
• 46 Ibid., p. 32.

24In any case, “seeing, hearing, selling, tasting, feeling the fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies”,42 as Bennett puts it, seems to be the main activity the characters engage in all along the narrative, and to be the very motivation behind their existence in the house: “By the end of their first month, Bell and Sigh had started to notice how the undersides of soaring gannets against the sea-grey sky were astonishingly white”,43 “Every evening as they walked, Bell and Sigh described to each other the weather, scenery and character of their route, of the given evening”,44 “They stood at the gate for hours passing the binoculars between them, watching an unusual shape on the surface of the sea: a shoal of whales, a flock of shearwaters, a confluence of conflicting currents”.45 They pay great attention to the noises around them: “Inside their night bedroom, they would hear, and fail to hear, and think they heard: the clicking of hunting bats, the hoarse shriek of a barn owl, the night cows rattling their chains and a slow car on its way home from the pub”.46

• 47 Ibid., p. 127.

25They are also sensitive to the smells proper to the objects, things, animals and plants around them: “The pair of double duvets the dogs slept on had, by their fifth summer, begun to stink – of meat, feet, undergrowth”.47

• 49 Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Come (...)
• 50 Sara Baume, Seven Steeples, p. 125.

26The intense focalisation on what Bennett calls the “detection” of the vibrancy of matter around them also fits Karen Barad’s idea that “‘We’ are not outside observers of the world. Nor are we simply located at particular places in the world; rather, we are part of the world in its ongoing intra-activity”.49 Seven Steeples illustrates this idea as when Bell and Sigh go swimming in the nearby ocean: “They did it as a means of remembering their surroundings; of being reminded that they were each made out of surroundings”.50

• 51 Hashem Hashemnezhad, Seyed Abbas Yazdanfar, Ali Akbar Heidari, Nazgol Behdadfar, “A C (...)
• 52 Sara Baume, Seven Steeples, p. 18.
• 53 Martin Heidegger, “Dwelling Building Thinking” [“Bauen Wohnen Denken”, 1951], in Poet (...)

27The sense of place, which humanist geographers define as “a complex concept of emotion and attachment to the human environment which is created from people’s adoption and use of places”,51 plays a major role in the text, even though no reference is made to any real place-name, apart from that of Dublin, where we are told Bell and Sigh used to live before moving to their new house, located near the sea. In fact, a large part of the text is devoted to a description of the house where the couple have retreated, defined as “[a] refuge, a cult, a church of two; this was their experiment”.52 The important role granted to the house, described at repeated intervals, may remind us of Heidegger’s often quoted text “Dwelling Building Thinking”, in which the philosopher argued that the manner in which we dwell is the manner in which we are, we exist, on the face of the earth – an extension of our identity, of who we are. What is more, Heidegger insisted on the role of things in the act of dwelling: “[…] the basic character of dwelling is to spare, to preserve”, “dwelling itself is always a staying with things”.53 In Seven Steeples, the narrative tightly intersects the chronicle of the couple’s existence in the house with the observation of the objects surrounding them, to which great attention is paid. Descriptions of pieces of furniture are traditional elements in a realist novel; but that a full paragraph should be focused upon an old bath mat and its evolution is more unusual:

• 55 Graham Harman, “Technology, Objects and Things in Heidegger”, Cambridge Journal of Ec (...)
• 56 Jane Bennett, “The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter”, Political The (...)
• 57 Ibid., p. 360.
• 58 Ibid., p. 365.

Here the description of the bath mat does not help construct the mimetic illusion, nor is it meant as a metonymy shedding light upon the characters’ personality or social background. Rather, it reminds us of the difference Heidegger makes between things and objects, which led him to the idea that “things thing”. “The fact that the thing things means that it does something besides sit around as a target for human awareness of it”,55 commentator Graham Harman explains. Theoreticians of new materialism have added a new dimension to the idea of the thingness of things, which in Jane Bennett’s words has become “thing-power materialism”. According to the materialist philosopher, “things have the power to move humans”.56 “Thing-power materialism”, she writes, “figures things as being more than mere objects, emphasizing their powers of life, resistance, and even a kind of will; these are powers that, in a tightly knit world, we ignore at our own peril”.57 Her theory also emphasises “the closeness, the intimacy, of humans and nonhumans”.58 The deliberate importance granted by Sara Baume to the old bath mat precisely draws attention to the objects which surround us but that we overlook and forget about, when they in fact constitute our everyday environment and make up the stuff of our daily lives. The detailed listing of the couple’s everyday activities, of the things they see, eat or manipulate, emphasises the imbrication and entanglement of their lives as humans with that of the non-humans around them:

• 61 Ibid., p. 163.

29The narrative of Bell and Sigh’s deliberate withdrawal from society is of course in line with Thoreau’s experience at Walden: “They lived in a kind of retirement. They lived as if they were their own precious stuff-nearing the useful end of life”,61 a phrase which echoes Henry David Thoreau’s famous line in Walden:

• 65 Ibid., p. 251.

      It was a land broken,    wasted,
          Positioned at the very end of time,
      Or perhaps,    at the very beginning,
      And still in the process of being formed65

• 66 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, Oxford, Oxfo (...)
• 67 Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination…, p. 168.

35Likewise, in Seven Steeples Baume deliberately confuses beginning and ending, and thus eschews the tenets of traditional narrative fiction, which is to provide an ending, the sense of which, as Frank Kermode has shown, is a defining aspect of classic narratives and a consolation in the face of our short lifespans.66 Denying the reader this consolation is yet another way for Baume to deviate the focus of the narrative from human existence to that of the non-human and other-than-human. Fluctuating between poetry – thanks to the work on repetition, language and typography – and narrative fiction – through the presence of characters, and despite the absence of events, plot, dialogue or psychology – Sara Baume seeks new ways to affect us through her writing and perhaps to change our way of relating to the world around us, experiencing our lives not as separate and apart from nature, but organically united with it in all its diversity. Seven Steeples eschews what Lawrence Buell called “the most basic aesthetic pleasures of homocentrism”67 while giving us the pleasure of being immersed in a different kind of life, away from the human complications usually illustrated by works of fiction, such as love, family, success and failure, social injustice, social unrest, war and peace, etc., and close to the minutest evolutions of the material, non-human environment.