(4) ling ma's severance

reading a plague novel after living through plague years, inverted hauntology, and the question: what even is the real plague?

📸 by Souloner Younger

Content warning: sexual content quoted directly from the book

We’re back after a long while! As usual, with our book reviews: spoilers abound everywhere, so proceed with caution. This week, we’ll be discussing Ling Ma’s 2018 novel, Severance (not to be confused with the thematically similar and titularly indistinguishable Severance (2022), an Apple TV show about, you guessed it, yet another corporate dystopia).

Our Present Realities— Ghosts of Past Fiction?

Severance is a plague novel, and the fictional plague is “Shen Fever”. The FAQ handout our protagonist receives in one of the earliest chapters reads:

In its initial stages, Shen Fever is difficult to detect. Early symptoms include memory lapse, headaches, disorientation, shortness of breath, and fatigue.

Because these symptoms are often mistaken for the common cold, patients are often unaware they have contracted Shen Fever. They may appear functional and are still able to execute rote, everyday tasks. However, these initial symptoms will worsen.

Later-stage symptoms include signs of malnourishment, lapse of hygiene, bruising on the skin, and impaired motor coordination. Patients’ physical movements may appear more effortful and clumsy. Eventually, Shen Fever results in a fatal loss of consciousness. From the moment of contraction, symptoms may develop over the course of one to four weeks, based on the strength of the patient’s immune system.

In essence, the onset of Shen Fever is a pandemic of nostalgia zombies. Peaceful zombies of monotony and routines.

I have— all of us have— lived through 2 years (and more) of the Covid-19 pandemic, and in no place is normalcy back in its entirety. I doubt it will ever happen, and I have made peace with it; have convinced myself that some of these changes, drastic as they may be, are for the better in the long run. But still, it was odd to read of the exact same things I did in 2020— doom-scrolling, checking the “Death Knell” on the New York Times’ home page, the complete and total disarray of the outside world not registering in the haze and loneliness of my isolation— being written and described to a tee in a 2018 novel.

The odd similarities between “Shen Fever” and coronavirus range from originating in China (“the popular theory is that it somehow traveled here through the shipment of goods from China to the States”) to the corporations suddenly touting “people first, production second” philosophies and distributing N-95 masks to their employees while ignoring the endangered lives of the Chinese factory-workers (“The gemstone supplier that Spectra had initially contracted for the job had unexpectedly closed… workers had developed various forms of lung diseases… class-action lawsuit had been filed on behalf of the workers… closure of the supplier”). It’s eerie, it’s unnerving. This fictional, apocalyptic 2011 of Ling Ma’s Severance claws out from the hardback my school library bought in 2018, pulls us in, haunts us with the knowledge: that our realities have already been played out, satirized down to the bone, and chronicled in fiction.

As someone who spends a lot of time in online literary circles, I can establish a clear parallel between the recent renaissance in horror fiction to the curious, almost predictive nature of this novel (which, in its own sense, is an horror— all apocalyptic and/or dystopian novels are horror). Excuse the pessimism, but the reality that we live in, too, is horror. Our presents are horrific.

Maybe humanity is trying to seek solace from horror reality in horror fiction. Maybe humanity is trying to comprehend horror reality using horror fiction. Maybe we’ve learned to realize and spot the horror reality in fictional horrors by authors who should have had no way of knowing that their imaginative visions would come to life. Maybe this parallel-finding has become so commonplace, maybe we’ve started to see so much of ourselves and our neighborhoods in every horror novel that it’s started to give us a rush. Or much-needed serotonin. All of the aforementioned scenarios are possible, and one conference paper by Alexei Warshawski calls the phenomenon “inverted hauntology”.

“Hauntology” is a convoluted concept in and of itself, and there is no clear definition that all writers agree on. Initially a neologism coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Specters of Marx, and a pun on ontology, hauntology is “a range of ideas referring to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as in the manner of a ghost”— for example, musicians taking advantage of the recent nostalgia for the 2000s. Warshawski argues that Severance— and other similar “allegedly predictive” works of fiction and art— exist to invert the concept (for us readers) so that instead of returning to a sweet past that may have never existed, art now haunts us with “the realization of the dystopian imagery, rather than by the failed promises of utopia”.

We are no longer haunted by futures that never arrived; rather, we have witnessed events unfold which we are already eerily familiar with from literature, film and television.

(Ling Ma’s ‘Severance’, Speculation and Inverted Hauntology)

I don’t know, this is a neat little angle to see from. Horrifying.

The Actual Review: Capitalism, Nostalgia, Escaping the Ghosts of Past (Escaping Disease?)

Because I can never keep one coherent string of thought running for more than one minute, the review will be organized below in bullet points.

• Apocalyptic satire is a wonderful, wonderful combination of two unlikely genres. It pokes fun at millennial sadness and millennial work lives and millennial love lives, and does an astoundingly self-aware job at that— it’s not a light read by any means nor in any sense of the word, but you laugh in spite of yourself, in spite of the solemnity you see on the pages. Would anyone believe me if I told you the quote below is taken from one of the more devastating series of scenes in the book, during New York’s last days?

  He pulled his shirt off. He had a thin body, hairy and slimy and squishy. I can honestly say that it was my favorite body. His dick an ugly sea cucumber, veiny and brown and wretched. He handled me as if separating egg whites from yolk.

• The story is narrated by an (ex-)Bible product coordinator about the onset & aftermath of Shen Fever, an epidemic that, as discussed above, traps its victims in rote repetition of their former routines: e.g. a fashion student changing in and out of the same dress, a girl of 12 sipping moldy orange juice & mindlessly flipping through the pages of her favorite book in her family library, a retail employee folding the same T-shirt over & over again—  all until they ultimately die from exhaustion. The irony of its parallel to the monotony of working life under capitalism is not lost — fevered or un-fevered, the people of the city are imprisoned in tedium & lack of change. Jonathan, the protagonist's (ex-)boyfriend & our resident "market economy critic” and supposed "free spirit", calls it 'uninspired lifestyle choices', says the city itself is the embodiment of the aforementioned urban banality: 

  "Jonathan had become increasingly disillusioned with living in New York. Something along the lines of: the city, New York fucking City, tedious and boring, its charms as illusory as its façade of authenticity. Its lines were too long. Everything was a status symbol and everything cost too much. There were so many on-trend consumers, standing in lines for blocks to experience a fad dessert, gimmicky art exhibits, a new retail concept store. We were all making such uninspired lifestyle choices."

• Through Jonathan, Ling Ma establishes an ideological opposition to what Candace, our protagonist, stands for: an extreme distrust of the system (or rather, a desire to opt out of the system). Candace, on the other hand as the self-appointed “realist” of the relationship, is critical of the system but still feels the need to participate in it, perpetuate its inequalities— one brilliant example is her last correspondence with the printing press in Shenzhen, urging them to finish the printing job they had been contracted for despite knowing the severity of Shen Fever in its place of origin. Her justification: “… I clicked Send, knowing it was fruitless… I sent the email anyways… owed it to the client… owed it to Spectra… owed it to my contract… was just doing my job”. Below are some of the last words she spoke to Jonathan:

  “What I didn’t say was: I know you too well. You live your life too idealistically. You think it’s possible to opt out of the system. No regular income, no health insurance. You quit jobs on a dime. You think this is freedom but I still see the bare, painstakingly cheap way you live, the scrimping and saving, and that is not freedom either. You move in circumscribed circles. You move peripherally, on the margins of everything, pirating movies and eating dollar slices. I used to admire this about you, how fervently you clung to your beliefs— I called it integrity— but five years of watching you live this way changed me. In this world, money is freedom. Opting out is not a real choice.” 

  And she did stay desperately true to it, by remaining in New York until its last functioning days for a contract she made with supervisors whom she isn't even sure are still alive, in hopes of a large payout or a promotion if she's lucky. (This is where the satire part comes in.)

• I like to think of this book as a book of contrasts. Candace doing the opposite of what she believes in, because she has to. The cities known for change & their unchanging routines. 

• In particular, I loved how it tackled nostalgia (i.e. our own perceptions of the past). Candace survived the flu because she was trying to run away from the past, evading nostalgia. People tried to spend humanity's last days with their family, in their childhood homes, surrounded by love— but the flu fed on nostalgia & turned people into mindless enactors of routines from the good old days, of licking chinaware as if in family dinners, of finally having time to do their childhood hobbies, until death. As an orphan, Candace did not; as a directionless second-gen immigrant with parents who wanted the very best and most American for her, Candace did not. She survived/ escaped— for a while, anyways.

• Elaborating back on the 'for a while, anyways': my interpretation of the ending was that Candace did, or at least will in the near future, fall victim to the Shen Fever. She started repeating about her desire to "create a home with what she knew", revisited her past through conversations with Bob (no matter the motive), hallucinated her mother several times, and reflected on her parents’ adoption of capitalist beliefs that come from the All-American New Identity Package Deal. She finally, after years of routines and bibles and more routines, had the time to think about her past— and we know what happens in the world of Ling Ma when the past comes back as a specter. Who knows, she might end up being an "NY Ghost" in Chicago. Luna, the daughter inside of her, might not live. The future feels bleak, but feels right.

All this to say: the real plague is a lot of things! Capitalism, globalism, fear of change, the past, fear of the past. As the resident Mitski fan, here’s a song to go with the book: My Body Is Made of Crushed Little Stars, my on-loop song for when I force myself to spend late nights working, this time about corporations and suicidality. Fun times.

Written by S.