Severance
The start of COVID-19 also marked a return to Ling Ma's 2018 Severance — a historical novel set in the recent past, in which a deadly virus originating from China triggers a global pandemic. The two co-authors of this dialogue — longtime friends both completing PhDs in English departments — were among those who picked up Severance. Jane Hu, who examines Ma's novel in her dissertation about Asian Anglophone popular media, wrote about its too-easy analogies for The Ringer. Aaron Bartels-Swindells read it for the first time after Jane suggested he take a break from his dissertation on twentieth-century realist fiction and racial capitalism in South Africa. Like many others in this cluster, our engagement with Severance has been inescapably shadowed by the specter of the coronavirus pandemic.
Yet, we also wonder how Ma's novel might help us reflect on the secular trends behind the singular event of the pandemic. COVID-19, after all, differs from the infection in Severance. And while we don't wish to downplay the catastrophic impact of the disease — and even anticipate that the virus has triggered a signal crisis in the capitalist world system — it has not yet instantiated a terminal crisis for capitalism or human existence. Any post-COVID world we can imagine will still be inflicted with problems that existed before the pandemic; we need only cite the most recent instances of anti-Black police brutality and anti-Asian xenophobia to illustrate the continuity. In considering what Ma's fictional pandemic can tell us about the real secular trends of our world, however, we keep returning to the one character in Severance who doesn't get sick: Candace Chen, its 20-something Chinese American immigrant protagonist.
WHY DOESN'T CANDACE GET SICK?
Aaron: So, why doesn't Candace become "fevered"?
Jane: I have a theory about Candace that inverts Eric Hayot's "hypothetical Mandarin." Hayot's interested in how 19th-century Oriental stereotypes imagine Chinese bodies as generic and undifferentiated, but Ma's contemporary novel proposes a different thought experiment: What if there were only one Chinese person left on earth? Ma reframes the hypothetical Mandarin as the exemplary Mandarin. Candace's Chinese body is both generic (in both its racialization and characterization) and remarkable (in being one of the few survivors).
Candace's character is asked to bear all these different forms of affective and reproductive labors: from her job repackaging Bibles, to her literal pregnancy, and her work of narration. Many COVID-related readings place even more interpretive pressure on Candace; she becomes representative of a distinctly Chinese body in our moment of world-historical transition from the American to the Chinese century. Ma's fictional character, however, complicates analogies to COVID, because she inhabits an ethnically-marked Chinese body that magically resists Shen Fever.
A: Candace is almost a victim of the novel's success in connecting capitalism and race to an epidemiological crisis. The comparisons in the novel itself — between Shen Fever and West Nile Virus and Avian Flu, along with the suggestion that the fungal spores came to the US via a shipment of goods from China — call forth fears raised by Mike Davis's The Monster at Our Door (2005) and Robert G. Wallace's Big Farms Make Big Flu (2016), which allow it to be read in relation to our growing awareness of COVID-19 as a social contagion.
WHAT GENRE ARE WE IN?
A: Let's stick with the social nature of contagion and steer away from epidemiological or bio-essentialist explanations for Candace's immunity — which the novel doesn't support, anyway. Bob, the novel's antagonist, articulates a theory of genre and character that encapsulates how literary forms mediate social contagion. He perceives the fictionality of the survivors' world via the difference between vampire and zombie narratives. In vampire stories, he explains, "the danger lies in the villain's intentions, his underlying character"; but zombies only pose a threat when "amassed," so zombie fictions are "not about any individual entity, per se, but about an abstract force." Severance doesn't obey Bob's taxonomy, but pushes us to think about genre in terms of the relationship between a character's fictionality and an abstract force like the virus. The virus is an invisible, yet determinate, vector that orients Candace's actions in a manner akin to the conventions of genre fiction.
J: Bob's zombie versus vampire distinction falls apart because Severance is realist. But Candace's genericness — typical and exemplary, realist and science fictional — helps me understand her character's multiple affordances. As Eugenia Zuroski beautifully illuminates, the diasporic Chinese body is a genre or species that somehow continues to survive anywhere, even as we might have, at least in the Anglo-American context, now "outlasted our purpose, or failed to live up to it, or exceeded it." As far as final girls go, Candace is a fairly underwhelming one. If anything, she seems undermotivated as a survivor. Just as there's little zombie or vampire thrill in Ma's novel, there's little about Candace's characterization that distinguishes her. Ma draws her this way, juxtaposing Candace's repetitive work against the more glamorous production of coffee table books by the "Art Girls." (Candace, for what it's worth, wants to be an Art Girl — though, again, don't we all.) The ambivalent nature of her characterization helps us see, I think, how Candace and the infection share a logic of contingency. This contingency gets expressed through what we might describe as the inscrutable affect of Candace's narrative voice, which multiple writers in this cluster have astutely pointed out as being under-emotive.
IT'S GENRE ALL THE WAY DOWN, BABY!
A: Even when the group heading to the Facility have yet to become fevered, Candace reasons that "most of us must have been in contact with airborne spores that had fevered others." If members of the group have already been exposed, then we're looking for something that triggers their fever. I'm proposing a literal symptomatic reading of Shen Fever. Both Ashley and Bob become fevered in places familiar to them: her adolescent bedroom and his favorite childhood mall. During the stalk of her parents' house, Ashley falls into what Danielle Wong describes as "a trance-like state" while trying on dresses in front of the mirror. Later, as Candace processes what she witnessed, she wonders: "what if nostalgia triggers it?" Yet, as Wong argues, Ashley's routine materializes ideologies of gender and self-possession, and her chilling stare evokes the banality of "screen time." In this light, Candace's hypothesis reads almost as wishful thinking: nostalgia serves as a romantic alternative to the malaise of neoliberal routines.
J: Yes — the lowkey horror here being the grotesque disintegration of the white bourgeois female body, as Eileen Ying argues about a similar earlier scene in their piece. Your symptomatic reading of the virus (lol) as it consumes Ashley and Bob also links it to a nostalgia for the aesthetics of midwestern middle-class American white adolescence: Bob wandering his hometown's suburban mall, Ashley playing dress-up in her childhood home. What triggers the Chinese virus, in the American context at least, is a return of a specifically American repressed. And it's one further haunted by a specifically American form of capitalist consumption, if Bob's suburban mall and Ashley's clothes are any evidence (the frenzy of fashion!).
A: To become fevered is to surrender to the pain of alienation and settle into a monotonous routine. There's a psychodynamic logic to this pattern: the novel illustrates how cycles of behavior — like rehearsing one's sexuality or wandering the mall — can engender a sense of familiarity that acts as a buffer against bad affect, such as those elicited by Ashley's relationship with her parents or Bob's memories of his parents' fights. I'm thinking that these routines, by evoking a sense of the familiar (we might also call these feelings of nostalgia, intimacy, or homeliness), trigger the symptoms of Shen Fever.
J: If monotonous repetition is a coping mechanism, then is the "buffer against bad affect" a different form of weak affect? Scholars such as Sianne Ngai have theorized this brilliantly: weak affect as the aesthetic mode of late capitalism. By Ngai's conceptualization, weak affects are non-cathartic feelings of suspended agency — "hard to describe because it is close to nothing," as Candace puts it — that characterize the increased imbrication between capitalist production and aesthetic experience. Except here, the fevered co-opt these affects in domestic and leisurely spaces, however briefly, turning them solely into an aesthetic experience that only formalizes capitalist production.
A: Your invocation of weak affect gives me another way to think about how the circuit of alienation-routine-symptom ties the fate of individual characters to the infection. It makes Shen Fever less of an abstract force because we can analyze it in aesthetic terms as the inflection point between a character's inner life and society. Before your intervention, our aesthetic understanding of the infection was becoming frustratingly rule-based: "if trigger 'x,' then fever." I like the capacious notion of "non-cathartic feelings of suspended agency" because it loosens knotty ties between subjectivity and context. In what you propose, the routine of the fevered and its social ideation matter less than the corollary production of weak affect. The observable content of Ashley's routine, for instance, as nostalgia, femininity, or neoliberal self-possession is less significant than her co-opting of the feeling it engenders to keep alienation at bay. Our interpretation thus becomes less of a question of what's to blame for the fever of routine — trauma, sexuality, political economy — and more about the specificity of the original alienation. Rather than attribute the fever to economic, racial, or gendered factors in any predetermined manner, we have to look to the narrative to interpret alienation and understand why Candace remains healthy. Candace's first-person narration weaves pre- and post-pandemic time, which gives us a privileged vantage for the process of her alienation. It would be productive to analyze the specificity of her alienation and the atypicality of her weak affect, which I believe is most visible in the convergence and divergence between her subjectivity and society's determinations of who she should be.
IS CANDACE A GENERIC ASIAN AMERICAN PROTAGONIST?
J: One great pleasure of Candace's descriptions of a pre-fevered NYC are all the cultural references — her mother's Contempo Casuals dresses, the flashing Coke signs — that feel distinctly American, as Summer Kim Lee's essay about the genre of the NYC party reminds us. Yet if the genres of the virus in Severance are associated with an American nostalgia, then Candace's Chinese American immigrant body complicates her fit amid the grooves of the novel's cultural references. Christopher Fan is working on the 1.5 Chinese American immigrant narrative, and I think he's entirely right in locating this middling generation as a distinct cohort unto itself. Even in the relatively short history of the Asian American novel (I'm thinking from Penguin's Asian American Classics up to Maxine Hong Kingston), Ma differs in having her protagonist not actually born in America. I mean, Severance isn't just generically novel in being part of what Andrew Hoberek has called the recent "genre turn" in twenty-first century literary fiction; it's also generically novel in the context of twenty-first-century racialized genre fiction, in which Severance joins South Asian Anglophone novelists such as Amitav Ghosh and Mohsin Hamid and, of course, the more established tradition of African American speculative literary fiction. As with the virus, Candace's diasporic body might be viewed as underdetermined — a play on the opposite of overdetermined — in having no national history as the cause for her character, no national history that accounts for her origins.
A: I love how Candace's narration of her parents' past and their migration from Fujian to the US gives us a micro-history of one family, even though the novel isn't primarily an immigration narrative. You're helping me to see Candace's underdetermination in light of the social relations of capital and race that historically produce Asian-American subjects. When enacted in social practices, such as playing mah-jongg or eating moon cake, these relations make Candace legible in labile — and maybe even contradictory — ways at different moments. This dance across legibility and illegibility may manifest in her visual presentation and voice, or, per your reading, her weak affects. A tactical deployment of underdetermination illuminates the specificity of Candace's alienation as an effect of the constant symbolic displacements of her diasporic body across different geographical zones. It's illustrative and heartbreaking when she says "I've been an orphan for so long I am tired of it." Maybe Candace is so underdetermined and alienated that she can't get fevered, but it seems a little more complex due to her nostalgic memories of her childhood. I'm lingering on that moment she recalls a distinct feeling of belonging when walking in Fuzhou at night as a child — she calls it "Fuzhou Nighttime Feeling."
J: You're right that "Fuzhou Nighttime Feeling" is key — those passages are distinct in being some of the most affect-drenched. Fuzhou is Candace's parents' hometown, which she used to visit as a child, recalling how the "Senior citizen ladies roll out before bedtime in pajamas pants printed with SpongeBob or fake Chanel logos. There was a Mickey D's and a KFC, street dumpling stands, bootleg shops, karaoke bars." This merging of American brands and Chinese culture is further blurred as time passes:
But the feeling, the feeling of being in Fuzhou at night, remains the same. When I was a kid, I named this feeling Fuzhou Nighttime Feeling. It is not a cohesive thing, this feeling, it reaches out and bludgeons everything. It is excitement tinged by despair. It is the despair heightened by glee. It is partly sexual in nature, though it precedes sexual knowledge. If Fuzhou Feeling were a sound, it would be early/mid-nineties R&B. If it were a flavor, it would be the ice-cold Pepsi we drink.
As an affective category, Fuzhou Nighttime Feeling "is not a cohesive thing." Instead, it's defined by its eradication of generic boundaries, as Candace draws on sensory categories ranging from the emotional, the musical, and the gustatory. Over time, Candace supplements her memories of Fuzhou with cultural references to American TV, the American musical genres of "early/mid-nineties R&B," and the American Pepsi soda brand. To be "made in China," Candace's Asian American immigrant narrative suggests, is already and inevitably to feel through the generic categories of US commodities.
A: Your analysis reminds me that novels allow us to grasp the relation between things in a fairly unique way. While novels can't represent capitalism schematically, the affective register of Fuzhou Nighttime Feeling allows us to apprehend how global supply chains shape Candace's experience of the world. It's easy to underplay the import of this sort of aesthetic mediation when supply chains are vital to the setting of the novel's action because of Candace's job at the contracting firm Spectra. As we learn in fairly elaborate detail, Spectra subcontracts to plants in East and Southeast Asia because of the low costs of labor-intensive manufacturing there. As the laborers are Asian and the beneficiaries American, the firm sits within commodity chains structured by racial and national difference, which, as we noted at the start of our conversation, causes Shen Fever. Ma, undoubtedly, has written a novel around the inescapable "realities of this world": that the majority of production occurs in the global south, now home to the majority of the global proletariat. That said, the connections I've just drawn only amount to a thematic case for the novel's relevance. What you've described as Candace's constitutive genericness is an effect of the racial capitalism that both undergirds the supply chains and gives the novel its conceptual structure. This is how the novel narrates the antagonistic relationship between Candace's experience of the capitalist world system and its influence in shaping her character, key to what we've just been calling underdetermination.
J: Yes, completely. The novel's brilliance is how it shows how the over-commodification of aesthetic life — how our attachment to cultural forms — might override or persist long after our supply chains fail.
A: In that way, the novel turns our historical narrative of racial capitalism inside out. By racial capitalism, I don't just mean "capitalism that happens to be racist." After Cedric Robinson, the term describes the historical emergence of capitalism from a preexisting set of racial distinctions, subsequently perpetuated and recast the world over. Severance depicts a complementary inversion of history, in which racial ideologies of capitalism permeate social life long after the last checks have been deposited. The final scenes of the novel thus pose a problem for cultural critics of capitalism: when nobody is making their own history apart from Candace, can these ideologies and their determinations be traced back to the mode of production? As Candace drives to Chicago, racial capitalism persists in her memories and manifests in her attachments. Candace's narrative consciousness represents a palimpsest of otherwise disjunctive temporalities — capitalism and post-capitalism — and allows us to apprehend how pre-pandemic processes of underdetermination continue to condition her experience after the crisis.
IS CANDACE A MILLENNIAL?
A: Candace's character is formed before the plot begins. Early in the novel, Jonathan chides her for proposing that favors work like economic exchanges: "you think like that because you live in a market economy." The tension between them seems typical of the generation we know as millennial (born between 1981 and 1996): although they have absorbed the logic of late capitalism, he also wants them to get part time jobs so they can work on their art. Perhaps it's a little simple to call Candace a millennial in light of these exchanges, because, unlike many of the college-educated who entered the labor market after the 2008 crash, she doesn't work a precarious job without health insurance. ("Millennial," after all, is more of a meme than a descriptor of a socio-economic class.) Still, I think Candace's millennial-ness is legible in her attitude to work.
J: Candace's millennial-ness is palpable in terms of her aesthetic tendencies. I still can't get over the detail of Candace wearing her late mother's old Contempo Casuals dresses. Her early twenty-first-century attachment to a late twentieth-century fashion throwback feels so millennial, and in a way you can only grasp through a certain socioeconomic class attachment to the bygone aesthetic experience of shopping at the mall. Candace's throwaway Contempo Casuals references, almost always in relationship to her mother, function differently than how Theodore Martin understands the categorizing impulse of the contemporary "decade novel." As one of Candace's sole maternal inheritances, the Contempo Casuals dresses frame generational distance less in terms of the traditional Asian American immigrant narrative, than in terms of a "casual contemporaneity" with her mother. So much of Candace's lingering attachment to her mother is routed through American brands and their attendant rituals, like the Clinique set. She reminisces about her mother's "daily facial routine" and maxims about the importance of moisturizer; later, Candace burns "Clinique anything" as an oblation to her mother, and also recalls sending the sets to her aunts in China after her mother's death. This shiny commodity becomes freighted with personal significance for their diasporic mother-daughter relationship, an object for its cathexis. Candace's attachment to her mother's attachment to American capitalism also complicates what you rightly describe as her millennial attitude to work. In contrast to Jonathan, Candace's devotion to work is not a product of millennial precarity, but is instead a product of an ethnicized relationship to American capitalism. Rey Chow's concept of the "protestant ethnic" understands this figure as forged in the structural collaboration between modern society's subjective belief in salvation and "capitalist economism's way of hailing, disciplining and rewarding identities constituted by certain forms of labor."
A: That's helpful in understanding Candace's contradictory financial situation, which I'd been parsing via the generational political economy of the millennial. On the one hand, Candace could live comfortably off her inheritance for a decade; but she also has few savings, no retirement fund, and worries about being priced out of her neighborhood. Candace isn't really forced into earning a wage but she still feels precarious. You offer a socio-cultural explanation for why she subjects herself mentally to the logic of the market economy, even though it's not clear that she's compelled to sell her labor on the market, per a Marxist account. The choice between the millennial and "protestant ethnic" seems like another instance of underdetermination.
J: I was going to suggest that we might call Candace a millennial protestant ethnic — one whose secular belief in certain forms of labor (in what Amy Wong might call "being a person of use") must be understood in terms of her Chinese immigrant inheritance.
A: Yes, maybe it's a new iteration of what Chow describes and thus is both. Candace's subjectivity is difficult to pin down, especially in relation to work. She "can't look at a bible without disassembling it down to its varied, assorted offal," but she's clearly conflicted about the job and tries to quit. Candace is consistently ambivalent about her work. I wonder if this ambivalence is due to her role representing a subcontractor. The process of subcontracting is largely rent seeking: it generates surplus value from the difference between the amount that the publisher is willing to pay and the amount Spectra can pay a firm abroad to produce a commodity. It's apt that Steven calls Spectra a "consulting firm" because the production process is not central to its financial success and the firm does not create value itself. It is useful to its shareholders, not society. With the "millennial protestant ethnic" in mind, it strikes me that Candace's role as a subcontractor is incongruent with the ambition her mother utters during her death rattle: "no matter what, we just want you to be of use." Subcontracting is incongruent, then, with her Chinese immigrant inheritance.
J: I wonder if Candace's subjectivity is hard to pin down, as you say, because her racial character as an Asian American protagonist intersects with her generational characterization as a millennial stereotype who is savagely committed to her work and ruthlessly competitive. You can't help but want her to get on a boat and join Jonathan in his white flight from NYC (have the baby, raise it on a goat farm!), but you also understand why she remains at her job, whether out of some leftover protestant ethnic compulsion or guilty overcompensation in the aftermath of her parents' premature deaths. In ways, Candace's millennial characterization renders her an exemplary protestant ethnic, who works — as millennials do — overtime (she eventually moves into the Spectra office) at the end of the world.
IS CANDACE A MINI CAPITALIST?
A: It's a genius move on Ma's part to put Candace in the middle of the supply chain, subcontracting work to firms in East and Southeast Asia. During our first view of Candace at work, a supplier of semiprecious stones unexpectedly closes because its production process proves lethal to workers. The publisher Candace calls is unmoved by their plight and threatens to contract directly with Indian producers. She throws the phone into the trash in frustration, but then recomposes herself and calls the Hong Kong office to arrange for a new supplier. Candace isn't a shareholder of Spectra — she is not a capitalist per se, maximizing profits to accumulate and reinvest in more efficient production — but her subcontracting job requires her to act like a capitalist. She must find the cheapest supplier (and, by implication, labor) both to maximize surplus value for Spectra and to enhance their market competitiveness as a contractor. Candace's actions contribute to the motion of global capitalism in China as well as the US, where Phoenix Sun and Moon Ltd. plan to reinvest their profits and expand their operation.
J: It's also a genius move to have Candace's work trips to Shenzhen (China's first special economic zone, as a number of the essays in our cluster explore) always lapse into leisurely shopping trips in Hong Kong. Ngai, again, has explored the merging of work and play in late capitalism — which she conceptualizes in terms of the aesthetics of the "zany" — and Candace's trips back home to China make this clear: "There was an insatiable frenzy to shopping in Hong Kong, to using a foreign currency that felt like play money. There was no guilt. I couldn't calculate the exchange rate fast enough." Hong Kong's peripheral relationship to China also helps identify it as a space of transition for Candace (a midway point from Shenzhen's space of manufacturing labor back home to US capitalist distribution). As a space of geopolitical tension between Chinese and US, Hong Kong itself overlaps with Candace's own diasporic subjectivity, and heightens her position here as one through which capital flows: "I couldn't calculate the exchange rate fast enough."
A: Candace's currency conversion is almost arbitrage — except that she plans to wear her wares back in the US rather than sell them for a profit, although her cultural and social capital are ambivalently in and on the market. I think we're both talking again about that mode of thinking that absorbs the logic of the marketplace. It is an index of how capitalism reforms human subjectivity, and makes Candace look like a capitalist when she's subcontracting, even though her relation to others does not actually make her one. We see those instincts at work again when Candace pressures Balthasar to reprint a bible, "emphasiz[ing] the scale of this project, and the opportunity that you may be turning down on behalf of your company." Playing on his interests, she treats Balthasar as a proxy for whomever owns Phoenix. She sees herself that way, too, when she justifies sending an insensitive email: "I owed it to the client . . . I owed it to Spectra. I owed it to my contract." Yet, Candace's final obligation to her contract reminds us that she is ultimately a worker. Even in the midst of a world-ending pandemic, the logic of the market economy compels her to bind herself to a contract. This imperative helps explain why she accepts a "delirious offer" and keeps on working: all the things Candace imagines that it will allow her to do amount to freedom from the labor market. To contribute another meaning of severance to those enumerated by Dora Zhang and Amy Wong, Shen Fever severs the links in the supply and value chains that constitute the global economy. Candace's windfall is only possible because of supply-chain severance: instead of being funneled to the shareholders, surplus value accrues to Candace and promises a life of consumption and leisure that can never come. Candace's severance package successfully lampoons the utopianism of the so-called globalists. It takes a malfunction in the regime of accumulation for Candace to imagine permanently freeing herself from imperatives of the labor market. Her freedom from the market is contingent upon a financial deus ex machina and, like her survival, is an exception
J: The contingency of that final windfall is maybe what's most millennial about her? So often, Candace's choices in the novel feel like things that happen to her. Her pregnancy, and decision not to tell Jonathan about it, both feel like forks in Ma's narrative that could have just as easily gone the other way. It's also why I'm so fixated on her subsequent commitment to the unplanned pregnancy, because it comes to represent a material and embodied form of reproductive labor so distinct from the other kinds of work Candace does as a mediating actor amid capitalism. I'm not fetishizing Candace's motherhood by any means here, though I do think that in a narrative where so much of what is solid melts into air, Candace's pregnancy promises a different kind of outcome. The fact that Candace is pregnant might ultimately be my best guess at why she doesn't die — though not because the child allegorizes futurity (a la Children of Men, or in the way that Bob, who clearly does fetishize Candace's reproductive possibilities, seem to think). Instead, the baby holds Candace at bay because of how it moors her to the past — by which I mean, how it moors her back to her own mother. If Candace is a 1.5 Chinese American protagonist, then her child would technically be the narrative answer to the contemporary Asian American novel — one that draws the line from Candace's mother to the novel's still unfolding present, even in its final pages. Severance becomes its most science fictional toward the end, when the ghost of her mother visits Candace, trapped inside a refurbished L'Occitane in Bob's mall, and galvanizes Candace's escape to Chicago: where her mother always wanted to live, and where Jonathan once did. Fueled by these narrative energies — drawn from her mother's once counterfactual future, and Jonathan's nostalgic past — Candace takes her most motivated action just as the novel ends. But this also makes sense to me: Candace can't get fevered yet, because the baby has yet to be determined. In other words, the unborn child is still narrative contingency, is not yet nostalgia — the baby is, we might say, Candace's hypothetical Mandarin.
Aaron Bartels-Swindells is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania.
Jane Hu is a PhD candidate in English and Film & Media at UC-Berkeley.
