2023-09-10 13:49:00
Describing reality, understanding it, is an impossible task. Perhaps the gesture that brings us closest to that complexity is the sum of voices. The employeesthe latest novel by Danish writer Olga Ravn, is built around that resource.
For a year and a half, a commission carried out a series of interviews with the employees of the six thousand ship. There are first-person voices that also sound like a swarm. Who speak? What are those “rooms” and those “objects” mentioned? In testimony 014, there is a phrase that shakes: “Half-hearted humanity, made from flesh and technique, too alive.”
What are the characteristics of our species? How are we different from others? What are we made of? In one of the testimonies, someone says: “I don’t know if I still belong to the human race.” When everything becomes rarefied, how can one be certain of one’s own condition?
On the ship six thousand, which orbits the planet Recent Discovery, there are “human” employees and others “of human appearance.” They work in rooms where there are “objects” that perhaps deserve another name. “Entities”, perhaps. In our language, the border between the words “something” and “someone” is sharp. What if that border were erased? To what extent does language keep reality within the limits we can bear?
The employees travels through disturbing areas: identity, belonging, multiplicity, replication. Ravn builds a story that begins cryptically and yet it is impossible to stop reading. This opacity collaborates with the creation of an ominous, distressing, sinister atmosphere. Something overflowing with the strange and the familiar, and the terrible echoes that can occur in that coming and going.
How to talk regarding this novel and convey the experience that reading it can produce? That wild estrangement that dreams or nightmares sometimes offer us. To describe this rarefied world, Ravn uses phrases with a strong poetic charge. But in the mouth of the person who bears witness to it, that poetic force seems to be the only way to name what there is. As if it were simply an objective description.
In the novel there is a dilemma around language. How to use old words in new realities. How to name the unknown. Language is omnipresent here, a performative language that does as it says. We read employee testimonials and those voices remind us how much we discover, how much we act and how much we construct reality when our body begins to speak.
The employees It can be considered a work of science fiction, but it is, at the same time, something else. A different point in the use of language shows that its author is also a poet. And something in the novel leads us to think regarding those verses by Olga Orozco: “how to name with that mouth,/how to name in this world with this single mouth in this world with this single mouth?”
- The employees. By Olga Ravn. Anagram. 144 pages
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