Death, art and nature: Performatism and romantic desire in Sara Baume’s “A Line Made by Walking”
Death, art and nature: Performatism and romantic desire in Sara Baume’s “A Line Made by Walking”

Summary/Abstract: Sara Baume’s novel A Line Made by Walking (2017) focuses on a young female artist, Frankie, who escapes from the pressures of a globalized urban society by returning to the rural environment of her late grandmother’s house. Overwhelmed by the looming presence of death—from the “deadness” of her depressed mind to the frequent encounters with dead animals that disturb the pastoral idyll of her retreat—Frankie turns both to art and nature in an effort to achieve a spiritual revival and a return to normality. This paper draws on the theoretical works of Eshelman (2008), Vermeleun and van den Akker (2010), and de Mul (1999) to argue that Frankie represents an example of a performatist subject: opaque, deeply separated from the external world, trapped within a confined space (both in terms of her depressed mind and her mortal existence). She strives for a sense of transcendence that relies on the Romantic aesthetization of reality, such as in her photography project which aims to transform dead animals into artwork. The paper shows that the striving for transcendence is realized in the “escaping from a frame” plot pattern and that the structure of the novel, with its ten “inner scenes” each featuring an “ostensive sign” (a photo of a dead animal), corresponds with the performatist aesthetic device of “double framing” (Eshelman 2008). Finally, the paper posits that the novel participates in a “metamodern (neoromantic) sensibility” (Vermeleun and van den Akker 2010) that replaces postmodern nihilism with enthusiasm, hope, and the desire to turn the finite into the infinite.

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