‘Severance’ makes a claim that Capitalism is a flawed system which suppresses our desires by forcing participation in a system that prioritises capital value over cultural value. A system which delivers our ‘wants’ rather than our ‘needs’.
“I was like everyone else. We all hoped the storm would knock things over, fuck things up enough but not too much. We hoped the damage was bad enough to cancel work the next morning but not so bad that we couldn’t go to brunch instead.”
Ma, Ling. Severance (p. 198). The Text Publishing Company. Kindle Edition.
Through a post-apocalyptic setting, we can fantasise a hypothetical world where Capitalism has been destroyed. A common trope in such a story involves the characters coming to terms with their own needs and re-contextualising the value of work. Where Ma’s novel differs in this aspect, is by depicting the extreme circumstances as rather mundane and repetitive:
“My reflection in the computer screen stared blankly at me. I opened Outlook, which showed no new emails. I typed up an email to Michael Reitman and Carole, with the subject line elevator malfunction, that detailed my morning’s travails and the steps I took to implement a solution.”
Ma, Ling. Severance (p. 251). The Text Publishing Company. Kindle Edition.
In this passage, Candace is the only one left in her office due to the pandemic and takes it upon herself to inform the managers of an elavator malfunction. The lack of tension makes this novel stand out compared to similar apocalyptic narratives, which rely on life-threatening situations to push the narrative forward.
‘Severance’ on the other hand, sheds the narrative elements that create tension: the ‘fevered’ are of no threat to the main cast, the search for supplies is categorised as mainly inconvenient:
“I had taken to buying all my household supplies off Amazon, but the boxes, carrying anything from batteries to deodorant, took at least two weeks to deliver, whether the service was FedEx or UPS or USPS or DHL.” (247-248)
The fact that Amazon and several delivery services are still up and running undermine the precarity of the situation. Furthermore the items that are being delivered could be considered non-essential in a life or death scenario (deodrant stands out in particular when you imagine the typical, unhygenic characters in a show such as ‘The Walking Dead’).
Another key subversion of the ‘apocalypse’ genre is visible in the blurred lines between the past and present. The genre hinges on the idea of the ‘end’. However, the ‘end’ cannot be constituted without other parts of a narrative, so in a sense the apocalpyse is just as much about the ‘beginning’.
Where Ma goes in a different direction is immediately noticed in the structure of the novel: the narrative is non-linear and jumps between past and present. A common theme in the novel is one of nostalgia seeping into the present:
“The internet is the flattening of time. It is the place where the past and the present exist on one single plane. But proportionally, because the present calcifies into the past, even now, even as we speak, perhaps it is more accurate to say that the internet almost wholly consists of the past. It is the place we go to commune with the past.” (113)
If the past bleeds into the present and vice versa, then how can a post-apocalyptic narrative structure work? I believe that ‘Severance’ can be a challenging read because it lacks this clear structure, but the effect of this is an interesting commentary on the idealistic idea of a ‘post-capitalist’ world.
This is best demonstrated through Bob’s group, which could be accurately described as a cult with Bob as the authorative figure. If this group is categorised as a new beginning post-capitalism, then the outlook is remarkably dreary. An obvious example being the gender roles: “The men hunted, and the women gathered” (63) which suggests that the flaws of a capitalist system would simply repeat themselves.
Theodore Martin claims in ‘Survival: Work and Plague’ that “The sameness at the heart of survival complicates the speculative power usually accorded to the genre of post-apocalyptic fiction”. (162) I believe that in this instance, Ma has leaned more into the repetitive aspects of the survival genre and in this case it serves the speculative ideas present in the text: that whilst Capitalism is accurately portrayed in all of its flaws, there seems to be a reluctance to embrace a new style of living.
Bibliography
Ling, Ma, ‘Severance’ 2018 (Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Theodore Martin, ‘Survival: Work and Plague’ in Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism and The Problem of the Present (Columbia, 2017)
Ma, Ling. Severance (p. 63). The Text Publishing Company. Kindle Edition.
Ma, Ling. Severance (p. 113). The Text Publishing Company. Kindle Edition.
Great post on the twin threats of capitalism and pandemics in Ma’s Severance. The productive/destructive aspect of capitalism has long been a feature of the critical landscape, going back to at least Marx – and Ma picks up on this both in terms of what is gained and lost through consumption and the threats (to workers) posed by production. Perhaps not at Spectra but the Chinese labourers ‘hired’ to mine for gemstones in a job that may end up killing them. I’m intrigued by the lack of tension in the novel, as you describe it, and whether this is a deliberate strategy or not. It’s certainly a risk to drain one’s narrative of tension to make a political point! You’re right on the nose about the gradual collapse between ‘before’ and ‘after’ and here we might think more about who or what the zombies are – what can’t be killed off. Certainly the group or collective who gather in the shopping mall in the ‘after’ sections do not act in a discernibly different manner from those in NYC in the ‘before’ sections. I wonder what the wider implications of this collapse might be and how we tie this into the novel’s claims about the productive/destructive potential of capitalism? Will anything survive the pandemic? Does anything – apart from Candace – survive at the end?
This is a fascinating analysis of Ling Ma’s ‘Severance’, and, for me, it has further demonstrated the relevance of Mark Fisher’s ‘Capitalist Realism’ as an analysis of the piece. Your reference to the continuance of omnipresent companies (such as Amazon) throughout Ma’s apocalyptic world thoroughly sells the idea of our contemporary period’s inability to restrain the force of capitalism, and you have shown such fantastical works as ‘The Walking Dead’ to be heavily fictional, demonstrating the eeriness of Ma’s more realistic world. After reading your discussion on the disjointed nature of Ma’s text, I have realised its effect – it disorients us, almost sending us into a mode of numb, delirious, or unconscious autopilot, showing the dread and panic associated with such a constant world to be detrimental to the mental health of its inhabitants, a mindset which Ma imposes on us. Furthermore, I find Bob to be a fascinating textual character, and your allusion to him has led to my questioning of the true nature of his rather contradictory and hypocritical character. For example, why does he remain religious (religion often being associated with asceticism) whilst continuing to raid houses, furthering his materialistic gain? Overall, this is an excellent blog post, and it has furthered my interest in an already broadly interpretable text.
Fascinating post James. Ma’s novel really explores the concept that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism – in her novel capitalism persists even after the end of the world! The inclusion of companies like Amazon surviving the apocalypse I think really taps into a lot of the anxieties that people in Western countries are feeling in the 21st century about the complete totality of neoliberalism. Especially for people born after the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Communism as a rival global political force to capitalism, it really feels like even after the zombie apocalypse there would be zero-hour contracts and Amazon deliveries. Andrew makes an interesting point about the zombies’ similarity in the After to the people in New York in the Before section, I’m reminded of the ‘Unreal City’ passage from The Waste Land: ‘A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.’ Its interesting that the anxiety about the effects of consumerism and modern capitalism is still highly felt in literature 100 years later – but whereas Eliot and the Modernists were worried about modern capitalism encroaching on cultural and social life it seems like Ma suggests that capitalism is now completely all-encompassing.
I thought that the lack of tension was a very interesting point. I wonder if this is a deliberate decision by Ma to show that the tension has already been underlying. The tension is the strain of the capitalist system which forces participation in a system that caters to our wants and not our needs. Capitalism is unescapable in the novel: “in this world, money is freedom. Opting out is not a real choice”. It is impossible to live outside capitalism. Even Johnathan who is disdainful of capitalism is implicated within it. In Emily Waples article ‘What to Expect When You’re Expecting an Epidemic: Ling Ma’s Severance and Karen Thomson Walker’s The Dreamers’ she highlights how intrinsic capitalism is to our society. Following 9/11 President Bush tells the American public to go shopping. The phrase “retail therapy” is often used today. These comments both highlight how strong the relationship with capitalism is that we use it to console ourselves.