Olga Ravn, The Wax Child

The move from The Employees through My Work to The Wax Child is an interesting but not entirely unexpected one. The Employees tells of humans watching strange objects, My Work tells of a human producing and watching a strange object, and The Wax Child tells of a strange, human-produced object that watches humans who then use this object to do strange things.

The Wax Child is told from the perspective of a (you guessed it) wax child, a sort of doll impressed with the body parts—hair and teeth, for example—of its intended marks or targets. There is a plot that works in the background: The doll’s owner and a number of her cohorts, who do practice witchcraft, are convicted of practicing witchcraft and burned alive or decapitated. We are invited to contemplate the immorality and brutality of all this, of course, and indeed they are there in spades.

Contemplating the experience of a wax doll is mind-melting, and Ravn is effective at providing occasion for it. Ravn’s wax doll experiences time and space in radically different ways; it insinuates itself into the king’s (Christian IV’s) body frequently. The doll is at once profoundly physical (at one point the wax doll compares its knowledge to a “gash” in their body [141]) and yet capable of the most profoundly transcendent experiences, traveling, it seems, through time and space freely. The wax doll once says that it dreams frequently but never sleeps (144). It is very like and very unlike us.

There’s a moment toward the beginning of The Wax Child that captures, satirically, some of the big idea in all this:

There was a night when I was still lying in the bed of my mistress. Yes, I remember it. She wakes with a start, sits up, looks out. Others, in the surrounding houses of the town, wake in the same manner. They don’t know why. They are possessed by such a strange feeling. I observe them. I hear their thoughts. There’s something not right, something awry. The salty air—as if the sea has flooded into their rooms. They don’t know it yet, but still they sense it. The Earth turns slowly into modernity. And in the space of an imperceptible moment, the old world has succumbed conclusively to the new. (8; my emphasis)

Of course nothing like that ever happens, or ever happened—that’s the joke. “Modernity" doesn’t just leap into existence, and perhaps it never “conclusively” overcomes its predecessor, and indeed perhaps what’s wrong is the very idea of ‘predecessor’ and ‘successor’ in human history: Maybe “modernity” is the fiction that humans “overcame” some pre-modern state, and maybe “modernity” turns out just to be more of the same.

What’s “modernity”? In this context I think we could call it a few things. First, it’s the idea that the individual stands in some way apart from nature. And second, it’s the idea that nature should be made to conform to human ends. Nature then ceases to be the place humans come from or even the place in which humans must find a place to live. Nature becomes a ‘stuff’ to be manipulated into or even replaced by ‘technology’, to be rearranged, reconfigured, remade so as to satisfy human interests. And, third, as a sort of condition of the second, modernity coincides with the view that nature is nothing but inert, inanimate matter.

A wax doll lives at an interesting intersection of the broader human-historical trajectory. For, on the one hand, a wax doll is precisely a tool; is precisely a rearrangement of matter to satisfy human ends. But, on the other hand, it is premised on the rejection of the third idea, which is, to put it differently, that there is no “magic.” Of course, in fact there is no magic, that’s just how it is, folks, but perhaps something human is lost in knowing that.

The Wax Child is an attempt to explore the thought that objects—like wax dolls—have stories. It’s the sort of marginal thought that modernity excludes but that must, even in some literal sense, be true. Indirectly, it’s a reflection on the strangeness of being human.

One particularly interesting trope is the doll’s repeated refrain announcing itself: “I was a child shaped in beeswax,” the novel begins, and at least four other chapters begin with virtually identical refrains (see 48, 67, 77, 135; this last one beginning: “I was the wax child” [my emphasis]). It’s odd, of course, but consider: What is it? and: Why is it odd?

It’s self-consciousness, of course, the very mark of the ‘modern’ mind. The doll has to keep practicing its awareness of itself in order to keep it alive. Its integrity, as a bona fide lump of wax, is always under threat, always just about to fail, so it rehearses this line as a sort of spell on itself.

Why’s it odd? It’s odd because putatively ‘self-conscious’ beings like us don’t do this. We don’t repeatedly state who or what we are. In fact, not only do we not state who or what we are, we perhaps never even so much as have the thought. If the thought ever emerges for us—in some adolescent moment of fear, say—it arises, is grasped, and then goes back living underground, as it were, where it belongs.

The doll’s incantation is, of course, what self-consciousness actually looks like, and the oddness of it should serve as a clue to the thought that perhaps self-consciousness is not exactly what makes human life what it is. Indeed, if humans in The Wax Child have one distinguishing trait, it’s probably their cruelty, but that is maybe neither here nor there. The Wax Child is more effective at challenging boundaries than drawing them.

A scene involving torture, for example, conjures a remarkable comparison. Torture, to begin with, imposes the idea of nature on a human body: making another’s body an instrument of one’s own end. A few decades ago it was fashionable to ask whether a ticking time bomb did not serve up an occasion to explore the limits of this imposition. The implicitly obvious answer (“Of course! Hell, I would do it twice!”) perhaps ought to have served as an occasion to reflect on the meaning and good of society, and the meaning and good of our shared ideas about autonomy and so forth. A relative minority of discussants asked a version of this rhetorical question with an obvious and empirically verifiable answer: Does beating the hell out of someone squeeze the truth out of them? (No, by the way, it doesn’t.)

In The Wax Child the absurdity of the “torture mechanism” (the idea that violence on a body will produce truth out of its mouth, as if the body were a tube of toothpaste, or bagpipes that wail forth truth at the right sort of squeeze) reflects in a way the absurdity of the wax doll. One of the women is tortured with a leg screw, for example (91). Here’s the idea of that absolutely insane practice: Introduce extreme pressure to the lower extremities, squeeze truth up out of the laryngeal ventricle. It’s ridiculous, and I’ll tell you exactly what kind of ridiculous it is: It’s the kind of ridiculous we call magic.

Now, either torture works, and then the mind simply is an extension of the body, an extension of nature, and then perhaps it isn’t magic at all, it’s simply pulling one string to make another move. Or torture doesn’t work, but then the practice of it evidences a magical faith. Either way, the institution of torture speaks loudly against the idea that modernity shows up all of a sudden and completely on p. 8 of The Wax Child any more than it shows up at any point between the 17th century and the present. For the whole idea of modernity, as it were, is the idea that humans stand apart from nature, and that their rational capacities to reorder it exist entirely independently of nature. Torture is giving the lie to something here—to the truth of that family of ideas, or to the level of conviction we have about them.

A fascinating moment elicits a quieter vein of discomfort: Christenze, the doll’s creator, realizes in a panic that she, along with the other women in her ‘coven’, is going to be killed. As if from nowhere, she suddenly asserts her different social standing, claiming innocence or privilege or both. She says of the others that they “are only . . . peasants” (quivering ellipses in the original); she says to the others, wildly, “I am better than you,” and denies that they are all “equal before God” (97). (Social hierarchy doubling as religious hierarchy—another subtraction from the conceits of modernity.) When she asks whether anyone can actually prove she has practiced witchcraft, Apelone, one of the other women, says: “You made a wax child, did you not?”

The wax child—this physical thing—is a memento, not only a means of keeping the truth alive but a semi-permanent mark of it. Its testimony against Christenze survives Christenze’s use of it as an instrument, revealing other dimensions of physicality, of objecthood, that escape the human attempt to instrumentalize nature. The wax child ultimately is a sort of surplus of Christenze’s guilt. It works beyond the ends to which Christenze intends it, becomes an instrument of demonstrating her guilt. Perhaps humans can direct nature to their ends—but perhaps, too, they cannot direct it away from others, even those that would destroy them.

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The Wax Child was translated by Martin Aitken for New Directions in 2025.