“Relinquishing the myth of human apartness” in Sara Baume’s Seven Steeples (2022)

Abstract

It is difficult to categorise Sara Baume’s Seven Steeples from a generic point of view. It is neither a long prose poem, nor an essay, nor a pamphlet. Despite its featuring some of the basic ingredients of the novel genre, such as characters and narration, these elements are reduced to a minimum. The aim of this article is to show that this aesthetic choice is meant to “relinquish the myth of human apartness” to quote from Lawrence Buell, by decentering the narrative and diverting the reader’s attention from the human to the non-human – animals, plants, rocks, but also dust, garbage, rot – which surround the characters and make up the very fabric of their lives, undermined as they are by the same erosion as the other elements on earth, as a consequence of the passing of time. As a result, Baume’s novel seems to echo the ideas of “new materialist” philosophers who have emphasised the intermingling of the human and the non-human.