‘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.