Despite their contrasting orientations towards the archive, on the one hand, and the speculative, on the other, there nonetheless exists a certain formal affinity between the genres of historical and science fiction. If the historical novel returns to prior moments of rupture and transition in order to depict how the future emerges – or could have bifurcated differently – science fiction seeks to transform the present into an archeology of a future age, to lean on Fredric Jameson’s evocative phrase. Polarized around the reconstruction of prehistories and the extrapolation of future histories, both genres strive to historicize the present, to stress its status as contingent and open to the possibility of change. It is perhaps this underground compact which partially explains why the Danish poet and novelist Olga Ravn should be drawn to two genres of literature with otherwise quite distinct vibes. Ravn’s debut novel, The Employees (2020) pushes the present to its limits and projects its logics into the too late modernity of the 22nd century, recording the workplace interactions between humans and non-human technologies of memory. Meanwhile, her most recent novel, the lyrically hypnotic The Wax Child (2025) travels in the opposite direction, back to the seventeenth-century and to a series of witch trials which coincided with the advent of early modernity.
At first blush, a thematic connection between The Employees and The Wax Child could be made around labour and the reproduction of labour-power. If The Employees registers the entropic drift of work at the end of history, then The Wax Child might be felt to return to one of the origins of that particular historical arc. The prevalence of witch trials across Early Modern Europe is central to Silvia Federici’s feminist reconceptualization of primitive accumulation and the emergence of capitalist social relations. For Federici, the persecution of so-called witches formed a strategy in which women were both expropriated from the land but also from social roles and traditional practices and forms of knowledge. As a consequence, their bodies were transformed into breeding machines for the reproduction of labour-power. This perception of loss and patriarchal control resonates across popular culture. Christy Moore’s ‘Burning Times’, for example, contrasts the ‘wisdom of the earth’ possessed by women to the war waged against them by the Catholic church, re-imagining the Earth as the body of a witch, exploited by extractivist industries into the present but also a source of hope.
In The Wax Child the break from one form of life to another is recorded at the level of the sensible, around feelings, affects, and intensities: ‘there’s something not right, something awry … they don’t know it yet, but they sense it. The Earth turns slowly into modernity. And in the space of an imperceptible moment, the old world succumbed conclusively to the new’. Unlike Rivka Galchen’s Everyone Knows Your Mother Is A Witch, The Wax Child does not primarily refract this period of turmoil through the intellectual struggle between scientific knowledge and the common sense of superstition – although the question of epistemology remains significant for the novel’s beeswax narrator. Instead, The Wax Child concentrates on language and actions as individuals react to situations which rapidly escalate beyond their imagining. The novel shares Federici’s belief that far from an eruption of the archaic, the witch trials are conditioned by the new and inscribe barbarism within the very foundations of reason, which demonizes as other all who do not conform to its protocols. At the same time as Christenze Kruckow and her friends are subject to accusations of witchcraft, the narrator senses ‘ships filled with living bodies in the darkness of their holds’, the conjunction of witch trials and the Atlantic slave trade which holds together Federici’s Caliban and the Witch.
Some of the most compelling historical novels of the twenty-first century have turned to these unwritten histories that are nevertheless constitutive of modernity and the social relations that continue to shape and exert an influence on the present. Amitav Ghosh’s stunning ‘Ibis Trilogy’, revives and rewrites the conventions of nineteenth-century historical fiction, which had previously focused on nations, opening the form up to the dynamics between caste and class, the production and circulation of commodities, and the struggle between empire and the multitude. A narco-epic, Ghosh traces the passage of indentured Indian labourers on their way to the plantations of Mauritius, a journey in which they lose their ancestral identities as they cross the ‘black water’ in what is also a metaphor for the ‘becoming-black’, as Achille Mbembe might say, of the historical novel itself.
The Wax Child, in contrast, does not owe its form, style, or sensibility to the inheritance of Victorian realism. Neither is the novel particularly concerned with the coming into existence of classes or the mutations of forms of value, even if the ‘spirit of the age’ is glimpsed hurrying ‘across’ the northern Danish town of Aalborg. Whereas conventional historical novels tend to encounter such a spirit embodied in a world historical figure who can resolve political crises – or, in the case of Ghosh, in the upwardly mobile colonial merchants – The Wax Child observes this figure in a more nebulous form, less an individual than an inhuman duration of time: ‘the passage of the spirit of the age is long and laborious, some four hundred years I have seen, and not turns on its opposite side, the great serpent in its corridor-shaped nest, the times are changing. The wheel revolves, old ideas are swept away and trampled underfoot, soon you shall all be crushed’.
In this respect, The Wax Child breaks with the Lukácsian theory of the historical novel, with its dialectical subject-labour paradigm, and instead aligns itself with the philosophy of the event. A ‘lump of beeswax shaped in the image of a newborn child’, the novel’s non-human narrator explains that it is ‘an internal event. By nature unfinished, or condemned to anticipation’. An event, Maurizio Lazzarato suggests, ‘is not the solution to a problem, but rather an opening of possibles’, a new relation in which things, ideas, and feelings continue to differ differently. Whilst even polyphonic historical fictions like the ‘Ibis Trilogy’ set out to resolve the problem of history with reference to class, capital, gender, and race, a novel like The Wax Child proceeds through discontinuities, invention, and uncertainty: ‘no one listens to a thing I say. Although I speak all the time … though I don’t know how the words get out – I have no larynx, no vocal band, no tongue’. An anthropocentric interpretation of the historical novel as part of a project to create a world fit for humanity is displaced here by an impossible voice and its eccentric regime of signs, a becoming-weird of history.
The core of the novel takes place between 1615, with the creation of the wax child by Christenze Kruckow, and June 26, 1621, the date of Christenze’s execution for witchcraft. Defiantly unmarried, Christenze, a member of the nobility, is dogged by rumours of an ungodly interest in herbal remedies and charms, which sees her flee Kakkebolle and find refuge, as well as communal friendship, in Aalborg. Composed in a fragmentary style, the narrator of The Wax Child identifies themselves as an ‘instrument’, one which records and preserves the memory of Christenze and her extended family of women which ‘no longer exists’. Throughout the novel, the woman work, play, and share advice in the presence of the wax child, their bodies and dreams are synchronized to the ritual passing of the seasons, harvesting crops and becoming ‘gill-women’ as they gut herrings. These impressionistic moments of intimacy are cross-cut and interrupted by other voices, by incantations and forced confessions, by the disquiet thoughts of the paranoid sovereign, Christian IV, King of Denmark and Norway, who is ever vigilant against the threat of sorcery and the supernatural.
With its ‘steady stream of words that slip … without cessation’, the wax child operates like a modernist ‘machine of expression’, a machine which invents and circulates words, images, and gossip. This expressive machine reprocesses exchanges and moments directly witnessed but it also relays and amplifies incidents through a non-human network of communication. There are points in the narrative where the wax child anticipates potential challenges to the veracity of its testimony: on what basis can it recount episodes that did not occur in its presence. ‘How do I know all this’, it answers, ‘because the fish told me. The blossom told me. The threads of the tapestries wailed and turned to whisper it’. There emerges an almost enchanted counter-regime of signs which operates apart from the plane of human experience and its fears of an animated world. This imbrication of the animal, the planetary, and the human is transfused through the prose style: ‘The walls of the tax office at Aalborghus Castle are clad with tapestries, and three windows give on to the fjord that drifts by, glittering as water does in its own deep time, a long arm that reaches into the land, and in the blood veins of the arm run the shoals of fish and shimmer each and every one in the sunshine of May month like rings meshed together in chain mail’.
Standing in opposition to this resonance machine and counter-discourse of seemingly mute things is the enunciation of the sovereign, the law which puts the incorporeal spirit of the women on trial and condemns them to waste, physically and psychologically, in its ‘machinic assemblage’ – prison – before burning them at the stake. An oscillation between expression and enunciation is signaled by the novel’s internal division between ‘A Rumour of Witchcraft’ and ‘A Witch Trial’, which pushes the narrative away from the conversation that pass through a public into the legislative apparatuses of the state. To the horror of the families of the accused, rumours and hearsay are transformed by the discourse of law into penalties that are enacted on and destroy the bodies of their loved ones.
The narrator of The Wax Child dramatizes the ways in which the novel is a technology of memory and attention. Buried within clods of earth, the narrator occupies a capsule of time which greatly exceeds the biological lifespans of the characters within the story. The condition of the narrator’s witnessing, however, is the incapacity to act within the diegetic world. This diminished capacity to act is also incorporated structurally, through the use of prolepsis. Although Christenze believes that her noble status will protect her and disavows the possibility of execution, the reader encounters the ‘Beheaded Virgin’ – what she calls herself after death – early in the narrative. What this accentuates is the rift and a misrecognition between what Christenze imagines her predicament to be and the actual unfolding of an event previously unimaginable. Helpless to avert the catastrophe which engulfed its family, the gaze of the wax child swivels outwards and potential acts on the minds of its readers. The deep temporality of the novel shatters the frames of human existence, but it also seems that the proleptic defeat suffered by Christenze, despite her fantasies of escape, is generalized and extended to those who consume the novel. ‘Hundreds of years I have lain here and heard you chatter’, the wax child notes, ‘you humans like so much to talk from the moment you are born until you die you are engaged in babble. All that is around us will someday fall. Some of it sooner than you think’. Not quite a full proleptic manifestation of the end of humanity’s collective narrative; however, the novel gestures to an associate connection between figures like Christenze, whose environment collapsed in on them, and the arrival of climate collapse, whether the species is ready to adapt or not.
Yet even the discourse of the wax child retains moments of unrealized difference. When the death sentences are announced the gathered families are struck by a ‘horror’ that ‘was thrashing still, that it retained as yet a generative force that could be harnessed and put to use. But this opening is only brief, before the horror becomes a tool in the hands of those who are able to wield it’. This opportunity for rupture is missed in The Wax Child, but perhaps it challenges its readers to channel the potentiality within horror before it immobilizes our capacities to intervene and make the world weird again.
Thomas Travers 