Severance, Stuckness, and the Hurricane Fix

This essay focuses on a fleeting climate crisis event in Ling Ma's 2018 novel Severance. For super smart critical work on Severance you should go to the Post-45 cluster on the novel, where you will find terrific pieces by Jane Hu, Eugenia Zuroski, Dora Zhang, and Summer Kim Lee amongst others. Here, what I'd like to do is think about stuckness and gesture towards unstuckness in Severance, and to think about them in relation to our contemporary moment via a narrative structure that I call "pessimism with benefits."

My thoughts here are loosely structured around three concepts of Lauren Berlant's: genre flail, slow death, and cruel optimism. I begin with genre flail, a concept, like so many of Berlant's most productive ideas, I continue to engage, misremember, and reinterpret. Berlant describes genre flailing as:

Ling Ma's Severance is a novel that invites thinking about the numerous genre flails that hit the experience of moving through our worlds in the wake of Covid 19. It's not a novel that wants to fix the world (and, needless to say, my reading of it will not do that either).   However, the novel is a very funny dystopian zombie apocalypse, a late-capital millennial workplace satire, and a moving, melancholic Chinese immigrant family history. It mixes its genres with glee. Its heroine Candace is, by necessity, very much focused on different forms of crisis management as she navigates her way through a zombie apocalypse that appears to be killing nearly all of Earth's inhabitants. Genre flail resonates throughout the novel, but it seems useful also as meta-reflection on how to be here now — in academia, in a Post-45 cluster on stuckness, imagining some world in which writing — yours or someone else's — could help thing unstick.

An ongoing question for me is about work-life amidst all the crises: What genres make sense now, in a novel or a conference paper or a classroom? Berlant argues that "Genre flailing is a mode of crisis management that arises after an object . . . becomes disturbed in a way that intrudes on one's confidence about how to move in it." One of my disturbed objects is the academy; another of course is the world. I'm trying to figure out how to move in critique and academic discourse (and also why to keep moving in critique and academic discourse). Some habits of our profession that used to make sense to me no longer exist, or feel vastly different in the virtual pandemic, climate-change-saturated world we live in. Some versions of "what's at stake" recede when others — the continued existence of your department, for instance, or the near-total collapse of the non-precarious academic job market — eclipse them. And then what am I doing here (maybe what are we all doing here) if not making some gestures towards fixing or understanding the world? (I feel like I'm always sheepishly admitting to a desire to reparative and I can hardly remember why I'm sheepish about it. Maybe it's not rigorous enough? Anyway, I want to be reparative.) Or to refer to the genre-flailing text of Christmas 2021, Adam McKay's climate change metaphor film, Don't Look Up, once we look up at the comet that is about to hit the earth, what then do we do?

Severance follows a millennial worker, Candace Chen, who is one of the last people alive in New York City after a fungal spore disease, Shen Fever, strikes. The victims of Shen Fever become zombie-like creatures of habit — adhering mindlessly to their everyday work and domestic routines until their bodies disintegrate. The narrative jumps back and forth in time, through Candace's childhood in China to her parents' immigrating to Salt Lake City, and, eventually, to an orphaned Candace living and working in New York. Candace works for a large publishing company where she coordinates their Bible production and distribution; this includes outsourcing labour to China under conditions that are deadly to workers. When Shen Fever hits and New York's infrastructure starts to crumble, all of her co-workers flee, but Candace stays behind continuing to go through the motions of work — she is stuck, you might say, but she is also sticking.

Adam McKay's 2021 film about a comet destroying the Earth, Don't Look Up, is, like Severance, an example of contemporary apocalypse genre flail. Both Don't Look Up and Severance represent the apocalyptic endpoint of an American narrative of unchecked globalised capital expansion; and they both dramatize genre and affect flail in relation to the end of it all. They traffic in ambivalence, provoking uncertainty about whether we are supposed to laugh or cry, at or with, their characters. Don't Look Up has been criticized for its failure as allegory, but its failure — if it is a failure — might also be legible as a failure of realism in the sense that realism, as we know it, is no longer adequate to climate disaster reality.1

Don't Look Up portrays genre flail when at different points in the film, the two scientist characters (played by Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio) break down on air as they try to cut through the "light" tone of a popular news show to insist on affects other than flippant and jokey when they talk about incoming extinction. In the tradition of Network, Lawrence and DiCaprio turn to on-air rage, jeremiad, and tears while the popular news anchors look on uncomfortably, thinking about ratings and downers. The genre flail of the film drills down into the dueling affects of the contemporary, especially through Mark Rylance's portrayal of an extraction-crazed, American entrepreneur who exercises complete control over the Trumpian government. Rylance represents a strange brew of an American archetype that ranges from Elon Musk to Andy Warhol and Jimmy Stewart. He captures something terrifying about one version of American capitalism at the present moment, and the willingness to put faith in a megalomaniacal billionaire whose flat affect makes him seem like an innocent and a visionary.

Severance too, veers between genres and affective registers, but at a much lower boil than Don't Look Up, as it is filtered mostly through Candace's detached perspective. 2 (Not too much of a spoiler I hope, but Candace does get a terrifically satisfying moment of rage at white guys toward the end.) The novel begins:

From its satirical first sentences, Severance registers the difficulty of finding the right genre for apocalypse. The Bible and Hollywood have worked traditionally, but these might not suffice now.

I want to suggest that the mixed tones and genres of contemporary apocalyptic /comic narrative testify to the way we think about fast and slow death now. We know that capitalism and climate crisis cause deaths that are both fast and slow, and that these deaths are distributed unevenly.4 Severance makes use of the zombie genre's conflicting temporalities to dramatize the ways in which slow and fast death overlap; Shen fever is a fungal infection that spreads extremely rapidly, but it causes zombification that makes people die slowly, stuck in their late capital, domestic, or nostalgic routines. Don't Look Up presses home the point that the popular narrative of climate change as slow death (it won't happen until generations in the future, still time to make it better) ignores the fast facts — it is happening already, it is here now.5

I'm going to zoom in now on a different kind of representation of fast death in Severance, a version of fast death that doesn't quite happen. The novel contains a hurricane that mirrors 2012's Hurricane Sandy, but in Severance, this disaster barely registers. It is overshadowed immediately by the rapid spread of Shen fever and the ensuing zombification of the city. Candace describes the first signs of what will be Hurricane Mathilde:

Hurricane Mathilde doesn't actually wreak much devastation, functioning instead as a romantic interlude. Because of the incoming hurricane, and the fact that his basement flat will flood, Candace's estranged boyfriend Jonathan contacts her (she has been ghosting him; unbeknownst to him, she is also pregnant with his child). Jonathan stays over at her place to escape the hurricane, and they hook up for a final time before he leaves the city for good. Climate change flooding leads to something akin to fun — a mini-break during the apocalypse (although the encounter is also bleak as well).

There are other ways in which the hurricane provides a break from the stuckness and zombification of everyday, globalized, late capital life. If the novel as workplace satire dramatizes global capital's stuckness and repetition, the hurricane promises a break in routine, a reaffirming of community amidst crisis. As Summer Kim Lee and Aviva Briefel show in their articles in the Contemporaries cluster on Severance, the New York hurricane is connected affectively to a kind of communal joy, promise, resilience, escape from norms, as well as proleptic nostalgia for the City that is always already broken, but which Candace (and so many others) finds it hard to sever themselves from. This is a story or myth that emerges strongly in New York disasters. Think of the heroicized stories and memes that converged post 9/11 or around Sandy, or during New York City's many blackouts, when a sentimentalized love of the city was at its height. These are images of sharing the common disaster — people of diverse skin colours and backgrounds helping each other out, heroically, or doing stupid funny things, or just being with other people in bars and on the streets. The common disaster becomes a story of pleasurable shared communal experience for those who are not entirely destroyed by the disaster.

As the hurricane is just starting to hit Candace notes:

But there is also another, maybe more specifically millennial cause for the good cheer. When Jonathan says he doesn't understand the festive mood, Candace says "Well, they won't have to work tomorrow," and the text goes on to say, "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." 8

This quasi-crisis that provides a respite from, and critique of, the ideology of work under capitalism is also stressed by Aviva Briefel in her analysis of this scene:

"The perfect equilibrium of fucked-upness" is a brilliant glossing of contemporary genre flail. This is a satirical but also not entirely satirical moment, pointing toward the question of what happens when work stops, when capitalism slows down or grinds to a halt. What might become possible (along with what falls apart)?

Briefel's gloss of the Hurricane moment in Severance resonates with a dynamic structure I've been exploring in relation to the portrayal of adolescents and romance in dystopic/apocalyptic narratives and YA novels. I call this structure "pessimism with benefits" and it is, I think, a generational thing, made available to the young. "Pessimism with benefits" is something that occurs in apocalyptic stories about adolescents who are constitutively threatened by catastrophe or early death, who, because of their youth, can, more fully than adults, let go of cruel optimism, who might be better able to inhabit unstuckness, drift, beginning, or a kind of potential in relation to a collapsing future that is untethered from the expectations of the past, than the adults whose stuckness precedes them.

Pessimism with benefits is in this sense the converse of Berlant's cruel optimism. It might be the hook-up in the hurricane that was not, after all, the end of the world. The hurricane hook-up highlights the shifting of the grounds of stuckness, as it marks the moment when people working at their bullshit jobs notice that they can stop. Pessimism with benefits appears in this moment as a raw individualised erotic form, as it does also in a song like JP Saxe's "If the world was ending, you'd come over, right?" But it is not just about the individual sexual or romantic connection found at the holiday in the storm.  It is also communal — in New York right before the hurricane, when the skies are yellow and everyone stops work and goes out on the street looking up or down or at each other, wondering which genre to turn to (romance, zombie-apocalypse, workplace satire). Wondering how we will all move in what comes next.

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Pamela Thurschwell (@pamthur) is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature and Unhistoric Acts at the University of Sussex. She is the author of Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, 2001) and Sigmund Freud (Routledge, 2009). She has published on psychoanalysis, adolescence, popular culture and many novelists including Henry James, Doris Lessing, and, Ali Smith ("Never Being Boring: Ali Smith's Amends" in Ali Smith Now, Post45 (May 2022): https://post45.org/2022/05/never-being-boring-ali-smiths-amends/. She is currently writing a book on adolescence and time.

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