Actually Pretty Good: The Employees

Olga Ravn mixes impressionist post-human sci-fi with workplace comedy

Not to wade too far into the discourse here, but there is a certain strain of argument hanging around Twitter these days: genre fiction has become more experimental than literary fiction. Or, to put it another way, the wall between ‘genre fiction’ and ‘literary fiction’ has completely fallen apart, with Serious, Critically Lauded Literary Writers like Colson Whitehead writing noir detective stories while only old dinosaurs like Jonathan Franzen and middlebrow sticklers keep up the tradition of Literary Fiction about Families or Generations of Women. It’s not exactly a fair characterization – for one, “literary realism,” the traditional province of Literary Fiction, is itself a genre with its own conventions and hallmarks, and, for another, the great books of yesteryear are often genre exercises that were only elevated into the halls of Literature due to their greatness or the greatness of their author. What is Beloved if not a ghost story, Blood Meridian a Western, 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale pieces of speculative fiction, Love in the Time of Cholera a romance, etc. But given that two of our previous Actually Pretty Good honorees have been a sci-fi novel and a Western, there’s something to be said for the idea that writers working outside the bounds of ‘respectable’ literary fiction are having more fun these days, taking more risks, and generally making the literary world a more interesting place. You might call it a reaction to the current dominance of autofiction – there’s only so much you can do in a book about a writer in Brooklyn trying to write a book, whereas the story of humans and humanoids on a spaceship in the 22nd century might expand our purview a little bit. In any case, the taboo is completely gone: you can be a Serious Writer and also talk about spaceships.

And thus steps in Olga Ravn’s The Employees, subtitled A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century. Ravn is a Danish poet, and this is definitely a poet’s novel, fragmentary and full of arresting images, reveling in ambiguity but sticking in the mind as a whole. The novel is not only a reflection on what it means to be human but also a riff on the phenomenological relation between subjects and objects, and, on top of all that, an airing out of the absurdities of contemporary work culture. In that respect, it joins Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory and Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate as exemplars of a recent reaction to the forced obsequiousness of the current job market, a reaction against the expectation that you will get a job and work but also that you will love that work.

The Employees is structured as a series of statements and reports by the crew of the spaceship Six Thousand, which has landed on the planet ‘New Discovery’ and brought on board a number of mysterious objects from the planet. These objects, once onboard, begin to affect the feelings and dreams of the crew. The objects are alien, in the traditional sense, but not aliens, or at least not aliens in the way we think of them - E.T. style creatures with a recognizable, if parallel, form of consciousness. The objects are just things, and they exude a sort of aura, but whatever form of consciousness they have is more affectual than outwardly apparent; they change the crew’s relation to objects themselves. Without lecturing you all on the dense metaphysics of a Nazi philosopher, the crew’s sense of dasein (being in the world) is altered by these objects, the thingness of the objects becomes one with the crew.¹ As one crew member describes:

“I keep thinking about the one on the purple hide. Something about it makes me react differently than the others do. Is this what my coworkers have told me about? A feeling, a sense of attachment? Do you know? Has it got a name? What do you call it? Is it normal? Should I be worried?.. I got the distinct impression it was looking at me. That we came together. That it was reading me like a catalog… I feel I carry it with me, the way a taste sometimes lingers in the mouth.”

Affect theory scholars everywhere are screaming! The crew undergoes these changes in being in a way that is beyond words (“What do you call it?”) and perhaps human comprehension itself (“Is it normal?”). One of the first manifestations of this change is the strange dreams of the crew after encountering the objects; all of them dream of repeated small holes, eczema scars, open pores, or pomegranate seeds, a strange form of trypophilia, before some of them actually break out in warts. The objects also break down the crew’s sense of individuality as a concept: “at any time, one of them can always be the others. As if they don’t actually exist on their own, but only in the idea of each other… 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.”

Canadian cover showing off those weird little dots!

That feeling of a dissolving and disintegrating form of humanity seeps into the crew, dovetailing nicely with the division within the crew between humans and “humanoids,” which, as far as it is explained, are something like androids; human appearing, with some sort of updatable software controlling their work and personality. The consciousness of these humanoids is constantly up for grabs, with Ravn’s numbered and anonymized statements never revealing who is exactly who, or if someone even qualifies as a who. Even if you’re certain that a statement is by a humanoid, they are constantly ‘upgraded,’ their memories wiped and their personalities altered. As any good poet knows, juxtaposition is a powerful tool, and often Ravn will put two statements on opposite pages to heighten the ambiguities of human-ness: one person asking “Am I human? Does it say in your files what I am?” and, on the next page, someone (else?) saying “I live, the way numbers live, and the stars; the way tanned hide ripped from the belly of an animal lives, and nylon lives; the way any object lives, in communion with another … You made me, you gave me language, and now I see your failings and deficiencies. I see your inadequate plans.” While the second one sounds more like a humanoid, it also sounds suspiciously like humans dealing with the theodic problem of an indifferent God. As the Six Thousand ship sinks further into a sort of object-induced mania, the humanoids and humans’ fractures deepen. As one statement ominously reads, “Violence is by no means inconceivable. We’re only just beginning to understand what we’re capable of.”

While all that sounds like some pretty heady stuff, the book is mostly focused on quotidian work habits and the sort of comedy that arises when regular workers are put in contact with the incomprehensible, or alongside the not-quite-human. One of the humanoids speaks with a sort of fervor for work indistinguishable from todays #grindset workers posting pablum on LinkedIn:

“I was made for work… My human coworker sometimes talks about not wanting to work, and then he’ll say something quite odd and rather silly. What is it he says, now? There’s more to a person than the work they do, or A person is more than just their work? Something like that. But what else could a person be? Where would your food come from? Who would keep you company? How would you get by without work and without your coworkers?… [S]ometimes he’ll get an idea that means we can do our job in less than the designated time. He’s got an incredible knack for streamlining, from which I gladly learn.”

But more important to Ravn than a skewering of the efficiency mindset that rules modern work culture is a revealing of the essential helplessness of the worker, here presented under some form of capitalism so late that it’s 4 AM and all the bars are closing. The worker must not only submit to work but also to the power of their employer, must not harbor any negative feelings toward them, must live for their work, just like you pretend to do when you write a cover letter. “I’m starting to feel disloyal toward the organization and it pains me because there’s no other place for me other than inside the organization” reads the beginning of one statement, something that’s distressingly literal on a spaceship but also is the eternal plight of the jobseeker. “How can I say no to you, the people who gave me my job?” reads another, again something said by someone trapped in the boundless void of space but also describing the precarity of nearly every employee today. Even as the crew drifts towards their doom, they are still in thrall to their nameless, faceless employers, still hoping that work will hold up its end of the bargain.

The elasticity of genre fiction – how it reflects the real world back to us in strange ways, as in those work examples – is likely why so many ‘serious’ writers are using it now, as opposed to staying strictly in the shallow sandbox of literary realism. Ravn’s book, like the objects on the ship, imparts a feeling rather than delivering a clear plot, an impressionist, abstract, kind of sideways book, and that alone is worth celebrating amongst a sea of staid, traditional books. But the book is also worth it for how many ideas it grapples with in such a compact package, how it grapples with the one question that all literary fiction strives to answer - what does it mean to be a human? - in a way that takes in the past, present, and the far-flung future that we draw ineluctably closer to every day.

You can buy The Employees at your local bookstore, check it out at your local library, or order it online from Bookshop.org, where every purchase supports independent bookstores across the country, as well as me and the newsletter through their affiliate program.

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1. It’s impossible to talk about phenomenology without sounding like a knob.