Book Notes: The Employees by Olga Ravn, trans. Martin Aitken
Is this a human problem? If so, I’d like to keep it.
In the 22nd century, the Six-Thousand Ship transports a team of humans and humanoids through space. Earth’s just a distant memory, if it’s a memory at all. Yet the modern machinery of the workplace lives on: workers are defined — and so come to define themselves — by the roles they perform on the Ship; the day is Stanley-knifed into little slices of time to aid productivity; and the general mood is one of thoughtless endeavour. If Tennyson’s ‘noble six hundred’ believed that ‘Ours was not to reason why / Ours was but to do and die’,1 then this spirit is echoed by the employees of the Ship. The core difference is that the men of the Light Brigade had conviction in the wider belief in English supremacy to fuel their derring-do. There’s no such belief for the titular Employees, and no such derring-do — there is just do. Why? Because we do? Perhaps a better soldierly analogy are the British troops in WWI singing ‘We’re Here Because We’re Here.’
The Employees are decidedly not soldiers, but there is the same sense of them acting and thinking not as individuals, but as one. At least, this is where one of the novel’s core tensions lie: the bucking and writhing of a self wanting to be known as a self, against a complex and faceless bureaucracy that does all it can to ensure this doesn’t happen.
This tension is catalysed by the ship landing on the planet New Discovery, discovering some strange life forms, and taking these life forms onto the ship. The crew — both human and humanoid — become attached to these beings, compelled to care for them, without knowing why. One thing is for certain: these beings awaken a sense that there can be an individual, even if what that is is murky and possibly terrifying:
They make me touch them, even if I don’t want to. They’ve got a language that breaks me down when I go in. The language is that they’re many, that they’re not one, that one of them is the reiteration of all of them.
What we find is that the essence of being human — whatever it is — is inextricably bound up with language. Contact with the life forms reminds the Employees of an idea of Walter Benjamin’s2: that ‘Every expression of human life can be understood as a kind of language.’ There is nothing that is not language. The language ‘breaks [the employee] down’ because it is not just words: it is a mode of being, a whole other reality. Language, Benjamin writes, ’communicates the mental being corresponding to it. It is fundamental,’ he continues, ’that this mental being communicates itself in language and not through language.’ Once language’s potency, its true nature is re-established, things can never be the same again.
For the novella is written — structured — as a series of witness statements to a commission. Why witness statements are needed is revealed in the novel, so I shall not spoil it. But what the statements do is language; or, rather, they are language, the language of an individual self. Such a self needs must be a performance via language, a la Goffman’s dramaturgical theory of human interaction3, and Ravn’s prose chronicles that self-fashioning in raw, bone-bright prose4:
I don’t know if I’m human anymore. Am I human? Does it say in your files what I am?
and:
I know you call them my attacks and that according to the programme I’ve developed disproportionate strategies in dealing with emotional and relational challenges, but I know that I’m living. I live, the way numbers live, and the stars; the way tanned hide ripped from the belly of an animal lives, and nylon rope; the way any object lives, in communion with another. I’m like one of those objects. You made me, you gave me language, and now I see your failings and deficiencies. I see your inadequate plans.
The penultimate sentence here I read as an allusion to Caliban in The Tempest: ‘You gave me language, and my profit on’t is I know how to curse.’ The same tragic power dynamic is at play: pseudo-benevolent overlord cursed by its creation. There are, naturally, echoes of the monster from Frankenstein, too — to be human, perhaps, is to wish to be beyond such, a Nietzschean übermensch fantasy in which one self-fashions not as man, but as god. It’s an old idea, this apotheosis — think of Roman emperor’s ascending to godly status on death — but it speaks to something that seems to have plagued at least some of humanity: a desire to be more than what one is, to the point at which one becomes — or sees oneself as — metahuman, transhuman? Such ideas of transhumanity are alive and well — see Mark O’Connell’s excellent To Be A Machine — but, perhaps, this desire to transcend one’s humanness fear of death by another name. Memento mori cuts two ways: one can take it as an exhortation to live life to the fullest, to carpe diem, or it can be a crippling fear, a weakness, a curse. What better way to convince oneself of one’s superiority, one’s transcendence, and therefore by extension one’s putative immortality, by ‘creating’ a ‘human’? Creation is the realm of gods alone.
Venkatesh Rao considers such an idea: we’re in an ‘age of early divinity’. First we make our gods, then our gods make us; after this, we become gods ourselves. Gods, he writes, ‘are finite-game idealizations of imagined dialectical counter-parties in our own human striving.’ We create the gods we need; sometimes, the gods we need are ourselves.
Of course, this we, as Susan Sontag5 reminds us, is not a ‘we’ at all: ‘we’ is a falsehood, a way of feigning universality of human experience where they cannot be one. Those who see themselves as gods are not a ‘we’ with those whom they believe they have fashioned. Masters are not a ‘we’ with slaves; to extend this to race, this is why Toni Morrison insisted that ‘a criticism that needs to insist that literature is not only “universal” but “race free” risks lobotomising that literature and diminishes both the art and the artist.’6 Coming back to Ravn’s novella, what’s so beautiful about it is that it makes this impossibility of a ‘we’ the core reason for the failures of the novel, but, more broadly, the failures of the post-industrial capitalist ethic to create a united world, a just world, or a happy world. Far from reaching constantly beyond oneself, yearning to be more-than-human, one should explore the quick of the here and now. We should come back to earth, stop turning our eyes skywards. This is hard to do: just to live. But, as one of the statements asks: Is this a human problem? If so, I’d like to keep it.
From ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ (1854) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
On Language as Such and the Language of Man (1916)
See The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (1957)
This prose works beautifully in translation, so credit must go to Aitken, too.
Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)
Playing in the Dark (1992), which will be the subject of a future book notes post.