OLGA RAVN
On the first page of Olga Ravn’s novel The Employees, the reader is informed that the statements that follow were collected from the crew of the spacecraft Six-Thousand Ship over a period of 18 months in order to evaluate the effect on the personnel of several objects recently collected from the planet New Discovery. Though delivered with the detachment of fluent corporate jargon, these employee reports soon reveal a mounting crisis aboard the spacecraft: mesmerised by the highly sensuous objects, the humanoid crew members are suddenly experiencing feelings that make them practically indistinguishable from their human superiors. One of the latter, seeing a humanoid’s eyes welling up with emotion, concludes that, “we have failed, and that our time is over”.
Interview by Claudia SteinbergPortrait by Lærke Posselt
Claudia Steinberg The objects from the planet New Discovery are a dangerous import, inspiring too much attachment for Earth among the crew members. They emit human sounds and at least one of them realises that they, too, are all prisoners on board the Six-Thousand Ship. How do these objects have the power to evoke so many sensations and emotions?
Olga Ravn With the spaceship I created a world with a strong hierarchical order made of hard materials, and I wanted to introduce something into that world uninterested in fitting in. So I tried to invent objects that defy origins and are quite difficult to understand – something that would change shape or might be alive – and cannot be commodified. Their existence is a challenge to the characters in my book because they have only been taught a very structured way of life. If I had really wanted to come up with a radically different life form, I wouldn’t have been able to fully describe it, because I wouldn’t know it myself.
CS In spite of your intentional vagueness, I formed an idea of these sensual, amorphous, blobby things in my mind, however, the images are slippery and their gestalt keeps disappearing; they refuse to be grasped. When you speak of the “hard hierarchy” on the ship, do you think of it also in architectural terms?
OR Yes, but foremost in terms of the ship’s social order, which is so strong that it has been internalised by the people who are speaking. They’re confused when one of the characters expresses feelings of ambiguity and anger caused by the sensual notions these objects evoke: “I don’t really know what to do with them – are they unproductive?”
CS Humans and humanoids have a capacity for love, including the love of objects or even holograms that are meant to comfort them, and love for the world that they – and we – are losing. But neither their nor our actions are governed by love. Is love weak in comparison to greed, a lust for power and convenience?
OR I don’t think love is a weak force at all. On the contrary, love – or perhaps intimacy or connection – is something that in this novel, at least, is a radical force that turns everything upside down. With The Employees I wanted to awaken something – something that has always been there. We all have this deep connection with our ecology, with our planet, with each other. We’re all deeply sensual, loving beings. We are also destructive and greedy, but I have a strong belief in and hope and love for humans.
CS One certainly gets the sense of an achy, melancholic longing for Earth. I once heard that astronauts on the space station spend all their free time looking at Earth.
OR I read a lot of interviews with astronauts and cosmonauts while writing The Employees; I looked at their pictures and went on their social media. One of the guys who had stayed in space the longest was asked what he had missed the most about Earth. Everybody expected him to say, my wife or my children, but what he had actually pined for was to be engulfed by water. I thought that was an incredible answer since the atmosphere is created by little drops of water. He almost said that he missed the atmosphere like being in the water.
CS Your spaceship could perhaps be seen as an archive – there is a steadily increasing sense of impending doom. Once the ship is abandoned, it turns into a floating container of information and objects – a record.
OR When you write a book, there is inevitably some linear time no matter what you do, simply because there’ll be a first page and a last page, and you have to work with that. But there’s always some part of me that wants to mess it up. So I’m really interested in ways to create another kind of temporality. My Work – my book about motherhood – has 13 beginnings and 20 middle parts and 12 endings. I’m trying to show how a book can also be like a space or a vessel. In her essay, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”, American science-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin talks about the novel being like a carrier bag or purse, filled with dead ends and beads and seeds and stuff. When I read that, a light turned on in my mind. I have tried to write other kinds of novels many times and it just never worked, because I just don’t experience work and time in such a linear way, and the pandemic has emphasised that. I think we have all had this really, really strange experience over the last two years, when time became very elastic. It could seem like it was only yesterday that there was no pandemic and it could feel like it’s been here for ten years. That same fluid sense of time was really an inspiration for My Work. When I gave birth to my first child, my sense of time completely exploded.
CS In what way?
OR Some parts of labour felt like minutes when they actually lasted hours, while a single minute could feel like an eternity. One of the reasons for that distortion was that I experienced intense pain. People who have gone through that all know about this phenomenon. When I write I feel a drive to step into that sort of time. I really like to be there – it’s inspiring, and it’s freeing.
CS In The Employees, humans consider their ability to feel a privilege that differentiates them from the humanoids. Denying the capacity of feeling – be it love or pain – has always been a strategy and an excuse of the powerful to mistreat the powerless. Colonists conveniently denied feelings to Native Americans. You can remove them from their lands, it won’t hurt, because they are just not like us. The same ideology was applied toward Africans; only in the 1960s did British psychologists acknowledge that they had the same emotions as white people. Until only a few decades ago, children were not given adequate pain medicine because they were not considered to be fully endowed yet with all emotions and sensations. In a way, your humanoids address all that.
OR The dehumanisation of peoples happens when you need to use them as a resource. We have done that to the colonies; we do it to animals, as well as to land. It happened also around the time of the witch trials in Europe, and that was one of the reasons I became interested in that subject. Denmark colonised islands in the Caribbean around that time, and later went on to colonise Greenland. To this day you will find the stereotype in Danish society that Inuit people are especially sensitive to alcohol. I heard that all the time as a child. Today, we have a parliament that is criticised by the international society for violating human rights. We have extreme right-wing parties, that are openly racist. It became important to me to examine this mental shift. I wanted to examine the internalisation of the notion that you are lesser, the complete loyalty with the authorities; what does that do to a person’s inner landscape?
CS The humans on the spaceship are left with nostalgia, a backward-looking emotion that was considered a new and dangerous disease when soldiers “died” from it in foreign lands during imperialist campaigns. After the Industrial Revolution, it became romanticised as a longing for the pre-industrial past. Is the spaceship also on a mission of conquest, a space-age form of colonialism, with all its emotional burdens?
OR The planet they have colonised is called New Discovery. It’s kind of unclear what they are doing there, but there is definitely nostalgia for planetary life. It is a very complex emotion. And I wanted the nostalgia to become heavier and heavier towards the end of the book.
CS Was it the anxieties of living in an uncertain world that resulted in the witch hunts, similar maybe to something like QAnon?
OR Perhaps we should see the witch trials in the colonial period as part of the beginning of the modern age, and not as the end of the Middle Ages. At least in Denmark where the much-celebrated king, Christian IV, wanted to cement the Reformation in his country and discipline his people. In celebration of 100 years of Reformation he instituted three laws: no luxury, no lewdness and no witchcraft. These laws were meant to discipline everyone, and I feel like we’re still in that state.
CS You may have violated one of those laws because poetry is very close to a magic spell for you, putting you rather close to the witches. You also likened it to the power of prayer, the recipe and the lullaby.
OR A poem is like a spell: it transforms, and the traditions of poetry and spells are interwoven. Writing poetry is a sort of Transfiguration, and I’m reading a lot of folklore that contains the old spells in the original books from the Scandinavian archives. Some of them are definitely just a weird way of taking a urine sample – something that a doctor would do. Other magic spells are actually impossible to do: go on Long Friday to a small hill and a red bird will meet you… So what was the function of that text? If it cannot actually be done, it must have had another function – one that was perhaps closer to what we call poetry today. Of course, there are a lot of repetitions, rhymes – formal stuff.
CS Speaking of enchanting objects, their irresistibility is legitimised in art, and the art of Lea Guldditte Hestelund with its almost industrial perfection and slightly bewildering sensual appeal played an important role in the creation of The Employees.
OR Art objects – and I’m including books in that category – unfortunately have the reputation of being something that belongs to the elite. This is, of course, untrue because art is everywhere around us, like music and movies. I bought a painting this year, for the first time, and I love it, but I strangely also feel it’s not right that it’s in our house – everybody should be able to see this. As for Lea, she is just amazing. When we met for the first time, we understood each other completely within about ten minutes. The book emerged from a collaboration with her: she had asked me to write something for an exhibition of hers, and my text was part of it; it was organised like an archive. She wanted to do something about something that’s non-human. And I just said, definitely. Lea works a lot in marble, which to her is alive because it contains changes and movements that span many millions of years. And since she works with a lot of different visual codes, her sculptures can appear like shapeshifters – very hard to categorise. It was that kind of deep ambiguity that I also wanted to permeate the book. ◉