Olga Ravn, My Work

Of Ravn’s translated novels, My Work is perhaps the most challenging. It’s probably the most personal, or at least the most obviously personal, of the three. It tells, circuitously, of the time just before and the time just after the birth of her child. Unlike The Employees and The Wax Child, it doesn’t make its mind up about form, and is presented as a sort of collage of prose narratives, personal memoirs, journal entries, essays, poems, official reports, pamphlets, and plays. Trying to interpret the appearance of the several devices adds a layer of interpretive interest to reading My Work.

Reading My Work between The Employees and The Wax Child offers helpful perspective: Where The Employees and The Wax Child are both clearly about the mystery of objects, and about the ambivalence of the line separating the living from the non-living, My Work is about motherhood. Superficially, the temptation might be to read My Work as a blip of memoir in an otherwise consistent project, but Ravn makes clear in My Work the continuity of the motif. To begin with the most obvious source of continuity: Motherhood is, among other things, bringing an object into being—but a strange sort of object; an object that can feel compassion and antipathy; an object whose distinctive mode of objectivity is dependence. A less obvious continuity: Anna fantasizes frequently about being a knife, that is to say, having the power to distinguish things, to make objects. In My Work, objecthood is complex, appearing both as a problem and as an ideal. My Work is also the most explicit in being about writing and its complex relation to objecthood.

At the beginning of the book, the narrator presents herself as the person whose “papers” she (i.e., the narrator) is “arranging”—that is, she presents herself as an object—and the line separating this as-if-external “Anna” from the narrator is crossed and recrossed continually.

Writing becomes a way of negotiating the porous boundaries of being a mother, the ambivalence of objecthood. The purpose of writing, we read in an unattributed poem, is “to keep me alive” but also to give its author the “nonhuman patience” necessary to be for the child what she must be. Writing “will turn me into iron,” “will turn me into soil” (48). One way to think of this would be to say that writing encourages a sort of reflective posture that slows the pangs of the emotional and physical immediacy of motherhood. Another way would to say that writing, like motherhood, consists in making something an object: producing a text, a book, giving shape and physicality to the shapeless, to what is not an object. As I’m writing this, my copy of My Work keeps falling, obstinately, from my chair to the ground.

Reflecting on the place of writing over the course of her life, Anna wonders also whether her “deep union with the objects of the house was the result of her upbringing,” whether the way she was brought up, as a woman, taught her “to be one with the house itself, to be an object among objects” (66). At the same time she senses that writing brings her “closer to all the objects in the world”; that in her writing “she became less human, that in her writing she could seek to become an object”; that in her writing, finally, she was “happily objectified” (67). Writing—though as a third-best, after shopping and watching TV—is a way of connecting her to the world (189).

One of the more formally daring devices employed in My Work is the script for a play: sections depicting Anna’s group therapy sessions as dialogues, complete with setting, dramatis personae, and so forth. These come just before the decisive ten-day stay in “the big man’s house” in Spain (285ff.), where Anna finally has the opportunity to devote more sustained periods to My Work. The dialogues (245ff.) place not only Anna but Anna’s apprehensions and fears in the context of a community of others who experience versions of them. Tellingly, these dialogues come just after a dialogue between “me” and “Anna,” in which “Anna” kills “me” (237ff.). The group therapy sessions accomplish for Anna what the internal work of autofiction cannot: identification as one object among others. They mark, in a sense, the beginning of the end of the book, the overcoming of the problem of the book itself.

The book later spills its own conditions of possibility, when the narrator, in the form of a journal entry, divulges that “I want to write myself as if I were a stranger” (229). There’s a fascinating moment when we see behind the curtain, so to speak. Anna is throughout struggling with the feeling that, as she describes it, she is “losing her mind.” At one point, the narrator describes Anna as seeing a black shape “lifing and falling like a breath,” and notes that “she was most likely going mad.” Note the switch in the voice of the narrator here:

She [Anna] looked over at the boy, he didn’t seem to have noticed anything.
The first thing I did when I got home was to write down the scene. It had a surreal quality to it which I almost immediately recognized as literary. Was this impulse to turn it into writing a means of protecting myself against this opening into madness, or rather a way of digesting the event and giving it space?
Often when Anna saw things that did not exist, she told herself: You can write about it, and in that way she tied it to the real world. (238–9)

Third-person, first-person, third-person. The first person shows up, not to explain, but to explore possible explanations of what she’s doing in the third-personal sections. The idea seems to be that ‘to write about it’ is to ‘tie it to the real world’, so that Anna writes third-personally about Anna in order to tie this Anna, who she feels she is losing, to the real world, that is, to make her real. Naturally, the fully unspooled version is irresistible: Ravn creates a narrator named ‘Anna’ who creates herself as a character in order to tie the character to the real world. In this, Ravn ties the act of writing itself—the narrator’s creation of Anna etc.—to the real world. And they tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on, and so on….

The ‘Anna’ conceit is later revealed as a sort of provisional therapy:

I can no longer write in the third person.
Writing in the third person was born of a powerlessness in the face of experience.
To write in the third person was to create someone else to endure the pain.
One invents her. Her name is Anna. (289)

Writing itself thus appears as a mode of misdirection, as it were, a distraction from the work of absorbing the trials of human experience. The fiction absorbs the pain until the work can be done. My Work is an exorcism.

Text

My Work was translated by S.H. Smith and J. Russell for New Directions in 2023.