One of the beauties of Olga Ravn’s The Employees is the many times the reader is asked to imagine a complicated smell. Sometimes these smells are poetic and sometimes they are malevolent. Most often they emanate from or are involved with the mysterious objects guarded and hunted by nameless employees whose numbered statements document the unraveling of life on the Six Thousand Ship. In the presence of the objects, the speakers are seduced by fragrances of “citrus fruit, or the stone of a peach” (Statement 014) or fragrances that have “four hearts. None of the hearts are human” (Statement 011). The speaker in Statement 072, of a scientific cast of mind, chews bay leaves by way of establishing contact with the objects, and notices that in return the objects produce a “dare I say, personal smell.” These are smells “with will and intention” (Statement 026) that act on the human, non-human and human-ish narrators in many different ways, inspiring both longing and disgust in the smellers. They operate as the channel of communication between the objects (possibly alive or possibly supernatural) and employees (possibly or possibly alive or possibly robotic).
The human and humanoid speakers of the short statements that make up this book– statements that seem to be made in the context of some conglomerated corporate/ military ritual of interrogation/confession– return over and over to the way smell is associated with loss. They speak of losing smells (the first thing to go, says the narrator of Statement 044, was “the smell of gravity”), dreaming of the lost smell of Earth’s soil, or secretly cherishing the “smell of burnt matter” that comes from the ship’s incinerator. Is smell the most human of human faculties? Or simply the most sentimental? Or perhaps it is just one that most reminds us of our porousness.
Another preoccupation of this hive of speakers is skin. “Are you off to see the Skin Doctor?” is an inside joke among humanoids, reports the speaker of Statement 057. Skins and hides (of what? The animal is rarely mentioned) abound in the accounts of the objects in the rooms– the objects may be held in place by strapping made of hide, or may rest most peacefully on a particular purple hide. The hides, like the smells, are communicative, almost sentient: the speaker of statement 083 boasts “I’m the only one the hides will allow to clean them.”
The thought of skin being compromised stokes the speakers’ anxiety. The speaker of Statement 085 does damage control about an epidemic of warts that has erupted on various hands, the speaker of Statement 084 is plagued with dreams of seeds bursting out of skins of their skin. This speaker believes this has something to do with the objects, “something about their smoothness in relation to my skin[…] I got the impression that one of the objects wanted to take my skin away from me.” The objects present a threat to the skin, causing a the sealed container of a person to rupture, become permeable. An existential threat, for the speaker continues: “When can it be said that I no longer exist? For example, does my smell precede me and do I touch the objects with my smell?”
Many of the speakers whose statements are taken down in The Employees want to be alive, but they aren’t always sure if they are, or how they are. How do the humans live? How do the objects? In Statement 019 the speaker protests that they are, in fact, existing, alive. They know they are living “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 others.”
Normandy Sherwood has been teaching in NYU’s Expository Writing Program since 2012.