Olga Ravn, The Employees

For a reader interested in experiments in form, a book like The Employees will always be readable. The novel is comprised of a series of short “statements” given by the human and humanoid workers aboard the “Six Thousand Ship.” The ship collects and houses what seem to be alien life forms (called simply “objects” throughout), and the statements of the workers are presented without much commentary at all. The alien objects have strange flaps and tendons jutting out from them in various weird ways; they induce olfactory hallucinations and pique strong emotional responses.

Perhaps the main question, as it were, of The Employees is how superficially unlike our world a world might be and still remain fundamentally the same. The corporate speak of the sparing commentary, and the allusion to it by the interview subjects, are of course deeply and depressingly familiar. Moreover, however strange the objects may be, one interview subject says of the objects that

There’s something familiar about them, even if you’ve never seen them before. As if they came from our dreams, or some distant past we carry deep inside us, like a recollection without language. Like a memory of having been an amoeba or some other single-celled organism, or a weightless embryo in warm fluid, nose and mouth still to grow together, as yet only mucous membranes, open and exposed like genitals. (33)

This idea, incidentally, more or less encompasses the entire world of interest of Ravn’s three translated novels: the uncanny aspect of objects, which seem at once strange and yet wholly familiar.

This dynamic shows up in more than the obvious way (that is, in relation to “the objects”). To begin with, the line separating human from humanoid is fairly thin. Although some interview subjects make clear whether they are human or humanoid, others leave (and, most tellingly, can leave) the matter unclear. Ravn moreover depicts their differences in fascinating though compelling ways. One interview subject mentions “nostalgia attacks” among the humans as an ongoing problem (37). Humanoid subjects speak of their humanlike bodies in unhuman ways. “I have big muscles. My body wants to live, and my skin is lustrous,” remarks one (83). It isn’t “reason,” then, distinguishing the human from the non-human, but the distinctive ways in which memory and embodiment shape human experience.

Humanoids differ from humans in another important way: The humanoids revolt. You could put their thought like this: This sucks, we want out, so we resist. It’s perfectly reasonable, the very picture of thought and its ideal relation to action. The humans, however, don’t act or think this way. Their acceptance of a shitty situation, their willingness simply to wallow, is what sets them apart. From a certain perspective, this should seem surprising. Aren’t the humans the creatives, the revolutionaries? For all its ‘sci-fi’ setting and narrative, The Employees would likely be a tough sell for a conventional film producer, because the humans do nothing, leaving the humanoids—our ideal, our rational selves, say—to do the tragically heroic work of resistance.

The Employees is a compelling meditation on human nature; it is also a compelling occasion for reflecting generally on the nature of art, of narrative, of writing. The objects, for example, appear in The Employees in a simple, matter-of-fact sort of way. What lurks, and shows itself only indirectly, is the foreign but unmistakable presence of the interrogators. Subjects refer to them directly: The first interview subject, for example, wonders aloud, to an unnamed second person: “Maybe that’s not what you mean?” (5). Other subjects seem confused about the purpose of the interviews (see, e.g., 29: “But what is it you want me to talk about?”). Additionally, the number of statements betrays an unmentioned editorial hand: Statements appear out of order (the first four statements, for example, come in the order 4, 12, 6, 2); and, assuming the numbering system were to start at 1 and proceed to 2 and so on, many statements simply don’t appear (number 1, for example).

The interrogators do the unseen work, in other words, of the writer herself—only in The Employees this inconspicuous work is done, as it were, in the open. “To employ” (at ansætte) is “to put to use,” and on one vision of artistic creation, that is what the artist does: direct things, more or less autocratically, to some end. In The Employees, the employees serve as dramatizations of the imperfections of this idea of the artist as authority, as creator, as employer. In a pointed moment an interview subject asks:

Why haven’t you put cameras up in there? You want me to be your camera? Let me see. Some of them are friendly, others seem as though they’re being torn up inside by rage. Some are on the brink of tears. Others are completely out of it. They hardly ever speak. (69)

The rhetorical questions have obvious answers, uncomfortable ones perhaps: The interviews—like literature generally—capture something the cameras can’t: anguish, torment, glee, the ‘inside’ stuff. The interviews—like literature generally—function as a kind of psychical surveillance, a way of bringing out the inside, making the frontiers of the mind concrete, mappable, surveyable. And writing, too, attempts—perhaps within limits; perhaps merely attempts—to get right up next to the boundaries of the inner, but only—as the above interview subject puts it—to the “brink,” to infer inner states merely by how things “seem.”

You could see the interview format as a sort of bureaucratic failure because it has to do, in exactly one way, the job of all sorts of written records: personal and social histories, individual grievance, confession, accusation, defense, narrative, and so on. And it is good at some of these and not so good at others. Thus, although there is no Six Thousand Ship, it makes sense to say The Employees is not the entire story of that ship, and one decisive reason why is because of the monolithic dimension of the interview format. (Of course one additional way in which this format is shortsighted is because the subjects have to consent to speak. At one point many of the humanoids simply stop talking to the interviewers.)

In The Employees the fragmentary nature of the presentation is a compelling exemplification of the shortcomings of corporate bureaucracy; it’s a professional embarrassment, so to speak, that all these different personal expressions get funneled into the same reception format. The documents comprising The Employees are presented as if they tell some meaningful story about the working conditions of the Six Thousand Ship. They don’t by a long shot, and that is exactly one way in which Ravn’s telling—not just of the ship, but, indirectly, of its corporate overseers also—is precise.

But writing is not always colonizing the inner. In one particularly powerful passage, a humanoid seems to see the written record of their interview as a sort of weapon against the interviewer.

A slight tremor passing through the ship now. Enter it into the record . . . . I can see your hands are shaking slightly. Enter that into the record too. The light in the room is changing. I’ve never seen such a light before. Enter into the record. . . . I want to take the opportunity to tell you I’m living. No matter what you say, I’m not going to believe otherwise. Enter it into the record. (104–5)

Critique and conformity are both immanent possibilities of writing, and The Employees is rich with occasions for reflecting on this ambivalence.

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The Employees was translated by Martin Aitken in 2001 for New Directions.