The template (Los empleados, in Spanish; both published in Anagrama) should not be read with Star Wars in mind. Is it science fiction? Yes, but everything that happens there happens very slowly, in small doses, which build the story as if they were pieces of a puzzle. “Yes, it’s true. What I wanted was to keep the suspense building very slowly, but I didn’t want the suspense to be directly related to the plot. In other words, the mystery of the novel is not like that of a noir novel, where you have to discover who the murderer is, but you, as the reader, are building the puzzle while you read”, he explains the author, Olga Ravn (Copenhagen, 1986), in an interview for La Vanguardia.
Humans appear – who doubt whether they are or who might want to be humanoid -, humanoids – who doubt whether they are human or who might want to be -, there is no shortage of the ship, of course, and the escape from Earth, for some reason we don’t know. And there is the arrival in New Discovery, a new world where they find objects that we do not know what they are or what they are for, but which are the cause of a whole series of small changes…
In La template you don’t have to be in a hurry to understand what happens there, but what happens catches the reader and raises ethical questions about what it is to be human, what life is, what death is, where is the truth, who has, who controls the information, what is blind loyalty to a cause – in this case the company -, to what degree can absolute obedience harm you if you do not use your own judgment…
Everything is explained in a dreamlike atmosphere and from the conversations that some interviewers – could they pass for psychoanalysts? – record with the crew to find out why what happened… facts that we will not discover here. Olga Ravn adds: “If you read this novel with a rational mental perspective, that is, looking for a plot, you will really get very little information, even though it is a novel that is packed with information. But you have to know how to listen, feel, savor…”.
And to do that, you have to pay attention to the smells – “for the history of smell to emerge you have to read the book differently” – to the touch of the skin – and its roughness and breaths – and taste, especially what comes from the mouth, a part of the body to which Ravn attaches great importance and sensuality: “I’m obsessed with writing about the mouth… hahaha”. Because? “Because it seems to me that the reader’s body can be activated by writing about sensations and circumstances that occur in the mouth. When my children were very small, they put everything in their mouths: nails, snow, pencils… everything! It is the way to discover, to understand what the world is made of. We all know what metal tastes like and it seems to me a wonderful way to experience the world and this is present in all my books. There is something, also very erotic, in the fact of using the mouth as if it were a hand or of understanding the world through the mouth… and language and language are also in the mouthâ€.
The relationships between humans and humanoids are not tense, but rather collaborative, and many times the reader does not know whether the person speaking to the pollsters is one or the other, or what gender he is: “It is written that way because I knew that the reader I would immediately put it next to human, because we are human. In this way I wanted to alter this perception. If someone speaking could be human or humanoid, but you don’t know, then you start to be alert to the signals and then you have to confront the issue of what do you think of these signals that come to you, what are the characteristics that we consider human”.
You have to be very attentive to the details: “I don’t like people holding my hand when I read. Rather than building a narrative plot, I wanted to build a world where you don’t know what’s going on. In my head I have the image of a house and it is night and when I write I am wandering around the house. If there is a door ajar, I poke my nose in, I see a bit of what’s there, and so, looking back, that’s what becomes a statement. And then I catch a glimpse of other things. Maybe what I’m going to say may seem a bit philosophical: the house is like a language and I’m walking there and I don’t know too well what will happen there, hahaha… From time to time images start to appear and this is precisely the mirror of the character, because the characters in the book don’t really know what’s going on either; they have explained things to them, but almost they also question themselves: am I human?, am I not?”.
This house is the spaceship and the non-plot grows all at the same time: “When I write a book, I like to think of it as a space, rather than a linear story that goes forward. When I write I like to write the whole book at once, not to have the idea that I start the book on page u and finish it on page x, but I write everything at once. When you build a house, you do it from bottom to top, but you’re not building one room first and then another, but you’re doing it, building the house up at the same time.”
This means that the characters have only a part of the information, what they know about each part of the house-ship, but they do not have an overview. They are therefore vulnerable to manipulation. And this also happens today with information and with politics? “Exactly. And it is an important tool of power. We tell you that what you do is very important and we have the whole picture. You limit yourself to doing what we tell you because we have the overall vision”.
In the end it seems that humans want to give up their identity and live more like a humanoid and that the exact opposite happens to humanoids: “It’s totally true. I think one of the most important points of this novel is this kind of blind loyalty to the company. The two categories cross the system and the stories that have sold them, of being who they are. And there is a hierarchy. Humans have more value, in history, than humanoids and it is more difficult for them to leave this system, because they will lose more in the beginning. And it becomes clear that the system is broken, that it doesn’t work, but it’s harder for humans to let go of this idea that they’ve been sold. It’s easier for the humanoid, because they have nothing to lose. They simply realize that there is something more to life than being a humanoid who only works”. Science fiction? Let humans learn from it.
