Staying Alive

Severance is so fun — and funny — that it's easy to overlook how much it's also about sustained, ongoing, and eminently ordinary loss. This fact is surprising given the novel's apocalyptic subject matter. Yet the restraint and humor of the narrative voice obscure just how many losses its protagonist suffers. Even as one loved object after another vanishes — country, father, mother, lover, job, city, friends — Candace Chen remains neutral, restrained, and matter of fact, not to say detached, numb, or even dissociated.1 Ling Ma retains and rearticulates her concern with survival amid mounting crises across the book's generic mashups: dystopian fiction (surviving the apocalypse), immigrant Bildungsroman (surviving the loss of homeland and family), and office novel (surviving the precarity of neoliberal work as well as its soul-crushing effects). But what does it take to stay alive, both before and after the end of the world?

By Ma's account, Severance was conceived of as "a work novel, with the global supply chain as the setting," driven by the question "why does Candance Chen keep working at her job" even as the world collapses around her?2 Clear-eyed about the effects of global capitalism on people (increased migration, increased inequality, poor working conditions) and the environment (toxic pollutants, airborne diseases, viral transmission, global pandemics), the novel offers a portrait of our inextricability from exploitative systems in spite of our awareness of them. During a visit to the Shenzhen factory that manufactures the Bibles she is in charge of producing, Candace reflects on the system of offshore manufacturing that has created a glut of inexpensive goods subsidized by cheap foreign labor. "I was a part of this," she thinks, and also, "I was just doing my job."3 The latter statement forms something of a refrain throughout the novel, both apology and shrug. To the extent that its portrayal of contemporary capitalism does not itself ultimately end in a shrug, Severance carries out its critique notably not in tones of righteous outrage, or in gleeful satire (although there are moments of perfectly understated irony), but mostly through dispassionate description.4

Dispassionate could also be a good description of Candace's narrative voice and affective life. Not only is there little mourning or lament for the catastrophic losses she suffers, there is also little joy or revelry. What Candace seeks, or takes comfort in, is a kind of affective anesthesia, as she explains of the feeling she gets on "stalks" (when the survivors go into houses belonging to fevered people in order to take supplies):

It is hard to describe because it is close to nothing . . . I would forget where I was or why I was there. I would get lost in the taking of inventory, with the categorizing and gathering, the packing of everything into space-efficient arrangements in the same boxes . . . It was a trance. It was like burrowing underground, and the deeper I burrowed the warmer it became, and the more the nothing feeling subsumed me, snuffing out any worries and anxieties. It is the feeling I like best about working.5

For most of the novel it is striking how unambitious Candace's affective imagination is. She seems to harbor no aspiration toward anything more vital than a muted sense of comfort (that sometimes shades into oblivion); joy is simply not within the horizon of possibility. Trauma hums as constant ambient noise, felt more in its conditioning than as a punctual event in itself. In this way, the "severance" of the title applies not only to job layoffs and the displacements of global migration, but also to the remove from one's affective life — and the narrowing of its scope — that comes from prolonged and multi-pronged alienation.

The mutedness of Severance's affective tone as well as its social critique derive from the modes of managing loss that it explores, particularly in its preoccupation with a cluster of related terms: habit, habituation, inhabitability, a lexical constellation that spreads throughout the book. The question of why Candace keeps going to her job as the world collapses around her could be reframed accordingly: how much can we habituate ourselves before a situation becomes unlivable? What kind of toll does this habituation take? And what, conversely, are its rewards, indeed, its pleasures? The novel broaches these question at the most intimate psychic levels, where, for Candace, the accretions of loss from earliest life make meaningful connection all but impossible, and where the dependence on routine is so total that "the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame."6 Severance also broaches these questions at the largest global levels, depicting the stretching of supply chains to their limit and their eventual destruction (with the lives and health of human laborers as so much collateral), while the creaking infrastructure of New York City slowly grinds to a halt under the weight of accumulated strains.

Habituation is a matter of repetition, and the novel's interest in repetition and routine is obvious — its fictional disease, Shen Fever, reduces its victims to mindlessly repeating familiar, rote tasks until they fatally lose consciousness. Given the similarity of the fevered to the ordinary pencil-pushers of global capitalism, the indictment of the way we work — and live — now seems clear. But in Severance repetition and routine are sources of comfort as much as they are bludgeons to consciousness. Habit is an ambivalent term: it lends coherence to a life and holds together subjectivities that might otherwise shatter; at the same time, it leads to making accommodations to structures or relations that are by all rights intolerable.

The work of habituation or accommodation (which also refers to living quarters) is carried out both before and after the apocalypse, underscoring the proximity of these worlds. This point is most explicitly allegorized by the thin line between the fevered and the ostensibly healthy, but there are other parallels. In her pre-pandemic life, Candace has to adjust to her office job and all the compromises it entails, both in terms of her personal ambitions (her main interest is photography) and her participation in inequitable global systems (finding suppliers willing to disregard health risks to workers in order to deliver products at any costs). After the apocalypse, in many ways, little changes. Joining a ragtag group of survivors led by Bob, a former mid-level IT manager, Candace's survival becomes her new full-time job. The group's hierarchical, non-democratic organization recapitulates existing organizational structures, while their work proceeds along the same temporal rhythms that structure more mundane weeks.

Their main task involves carving out a literally habitable place. For half the novel the group focuses on reaching the Facility, the place where Bob promises they will be able to take shelter and start anew.7 Once they reach the Facility, which turns out to be a mall in suburban Illinois, they turn to converting the cold commercial space into ersatz domestic environments, as each survivor claims a boutique for a bedroom (Candace picks L'Occitane for its coziness). The comic impossibility of this task derives not so much from its distance but its proximity to the pre-pandemic world, where the threat of being priced out is constant and where home is little more than a place to sleep in between days at the office. Both before and after, the struggle for those in Candace's world — and ours ­— is to find a way to inhabit the often-unlivable conditions of capitalism. In this way, Severance offers a critique of how we habituate to the very structures and routines that lead to our undoing

But if the novel offers a stark portrayal of how we make accommodations to inequitable structures, it also treats the desire to make a livable life at all costs with some gentleness. Even as Severance shows how attachments to the prospect of constancy and belonging can maintain an unjust status quo or underwrite disaster, it is sympathetic to — without endorsing — these attachments, which lead us to continue going to work even as a world-historical crisis unfolds around us, and even if that work directly contributes to the slow destruction of everything we know. To borrow a phrase Sianne Ngai uses in a different context, the novel "refus[es] to be contemptuous of people's desire for the normal, even or especially as that desire complicatedly persists at a 'postnormative' moment 'in which fantasmatic clarities about the conditions for enduring collectivity, historical continuity, and infrastructural stability have melted away'."8 Put differently, Severance takes a non-endorsing yet non-contemptuous attitude toward how we accommodate ourselves to an unjust world in order to live in it.

The refusal to be contemptuous of accommodation may be linked to the fact that Candace is an immigrant, possessed of the immigrant's imperative to make a new place into something resembling a habitation, if not a home. When her mother, Ruifang, first moves to Utah, the practice of prayer that she learns at the local Chinese church "would become an important ritual, the one routine that granted her a sense of control. She practically invented her own life in America by praying, she liked to say."9 For Ruifang's daughter, it is not religion (however pragmatically understood) but art that bestows her sustaining fantasies. Candace's desire to move to New York is stoked by seeing Nan Goldin's photographs of people who "inhabited themselves fully. They made me want to move to New York. Then I'd really be somewhere, I had thought, inhabiting myself."10 That cliché of New York, that fantasy, is disabused but not disavowed. It's also not wrong. For all the ways in which it is unlivable (rising rents leading to continual displacement, and later, the breakdown of public services and infrastructure), New York provides for Candace a good enough habitation.11 The narrative's gentleness toward Candace's attachment to it, hovering between non-contempt and non-endorsement, is a reparative version of her own dispassionate mode of managing loss.

The ambivalent nature of the work of habituation is made clear in a late conversation between Candace and Bob, when she recounts her last days in New York to win his trust and convince him to release her from imprisonment.

So, in the end, you lived in your office, Bob summarizes.

And I worked there too.

Right. NY Ghost. That makes sense. But, he continues, putting his teacup down, I don't understand why you stayed for that long when it was no longer habitable.

It was still habitable to me.12

The assertion "it was still habitable to me" highlights how what is unlivable to one person is livable to another. Candace is able to stay in New York long after others have abandoned it because she is skilled at accommodating herself to the conditions in which she finds herself, not bothered by things that are, to others, intolerable. Her desire for the normal is strong, her requirements for livability minimal, and, as she repeatedly says, she has nowhere else to go. The imperative to forge a good enough habitation, even out of the most broken materials, makes her cling to the city — as well as to her other home, the office. Thus, Candace continues to go to work because she is a good capitalist subject, and because she is the child of Chinese immigrants (her parents' deathbed wish is for her to be "useful," a term whose valences are sensitively explored by Amy Wong and Eugenia Zuroski).13 But she is also compelled to make work, that is, to find meaningful forms of action to hold her life together. As Jane Hu writes, "at the end of the world, Candace continues to work not because it is socially productive or financially necessary, but because it is personally, indeed psychically grounding." Like the need for routine, the novel does not regard the compulsion to work as purely a pathology of neoliberalism. "The office has the potential for salvation, however temporary."14

The question of whom the city is habitable for also places in stark relief the political economies of space, which Severance makes explicit through its precise geographies, recounting a recent history of New York City's gentrification via Candace's itinerary through its neighborhoods. It highlights the question of what happens when the presence of some makes life for others difficult, when making a place habitable for me means making it inhabitable for you. One of the few people she meets after the city has been mostly abandoned is a Latino cabby named Eddy, who remarks, "I've lived in New York my whole life . . . This place is home . . . Besides, now that all the white people have finally left New York, you think I'm leaving?"15

If Ma draws attention to the differences between Bob and Candace's different standards of livability in their exchange, she is also clear about the differences between Candace, as a member of the American middle and professional class, and workers on the other side of the world with whom she shares a racial classification. During a visit to a Shenzhen factory, Candace has an awkward moment of failed connection with a worker ­— she learns that he is from the same province as her family and imagines asking if he knows her aunts or uncles before realizing she doesn't actually know her relatives' full names, or the village where this worker is from. The conditions in which the factory's migrant laborers live presumably would not seem habitable to Candace, or to many Americans who have become used to the invisibility of globalization's costs. Here Ma does not conflate Chinese with Chinese-American, or elide the differences between bosses and workers under the aegis of a shared national identity.

In light of the novel's interest in inhabiting intolerable worlds, it seems fitting that its fictional disease, Shen Fever, is a fungal infection "contracted by breathing in microscopic spores in the air. Because these spores are undetectable, it is difficult to prevent exposure in areas where it is in the environment."16 Although the fungal spores are spread particularly through export goods, it is their diffusion in the atmosphere that makes them so hazardous. Shen Fever is a disease that anyone is susceptible to since it is contracted through one of the most basic actions keeping us alive. The airborne nature of the disease underscores the fact that capitalism is not only metaphorically like air we breathe, a total system governing our lives that we take for granted, but also literally poisoning our air, filling it with all manner of toxic particulates.17 Moreover, the permeability of air and its resistance to segmentation and compartmentalization make it an apt figure for the globalized world that Severance depicts, with its transnational network of supply chains and circuits of capital.

This is not to say that toxic air isn't differentially distributed across the globe, resulting in very different standards of livability, of which "air quality" is a metric.18 It is significant that the disease originates in Shenzhen, a manufacturing hub whose designation as a Special Economic Zone has been crucial to the growth of China's economy and its integration into the global market since the 1980s.19 That integration has in turn been accompanied by severe domestic environmental degradation, including notoriously bad air quality. In a way, the disease effectively functions to globally redistribute the geographically unequal burdens of alienation and sickness under capitalism.20 Created as a byproduct of manufacturing processes, a disease ordinarily suffered invisibly by low-paid Chinese factory workers spreads around the world and comes to eventually cripple the center of American commerce and culture.21

In time, Shen Fever comes to undo the world. Its infection of the total environment and the inability to protect oneself from it suggest that there are no escape routes out of the present. When Candace confronts Bob (representative of the status quo in all its bathos) at a climactic moment at the novel's end, she thinks, "I have always positioned myself in relation to him, thinking I could toe the line, thinking it would be fine if I just cooperated, thinking if only I compressed myself a bit more."22 This sentiment (no doubt eminently relatable for many people of color, and particularly keyed to the model minority) suggests her coming to the end of her accommodationist rope.

What, then, to make of the novel's conclusion, where Candace imagines "another life," which turns out in fact to be more of the same, going to work in the morning and returning home in the evening, only in Chicago instead of New York?23 "To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?"24 Is this resignation or celebration?25 And even if we admit both, which is the answer, does it run the risk of lapsing into a kind of defeatist, if not cynical, pragmatism, given what these "impossible systems" have wrought? When does non-contempt about the compromises we make in our desire for the normal slide into normalization, if not endorsement, of collaborationism?

The burden is not on a novel to offer solutions, but these questions feel especially resonant now. Much has been made of Severance's uncanny timeliness, given its anticipation of many features of our own global pandemic. To me it read differently in the spring of 2020 than it did in the summer — or, now, fall. As the failures of governmental and institutional responses to COVID-19 steadily mount, most of us have seemed to carry on, much like Candace, accommodating to increasingly impossible situations. But at the same time, this protracted crisis has witnessed the emergence of a popular protest movement that has inhabited the streets in a different way and interrupted our entrenched habitual acceptance of racial injustice. The long-term effects of this uprising remain to be seen, but in its insistence that another world is possible, it offers a pandemic-time vision not found in the novel. In this respect, at least, Severance does not seem particularly prescient, and I, for one, am glad.

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Dora Zhang is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. Her first book, Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel (Thinking Literature series, University of Chicago Press), will be published in October 2020.

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