![]() ![]() In my reading of this prescient novel, I suggest that Severance identifies those sociocultural factors that make neoliberal society especially susceptible to pandemic disease and societal collapse. Though Severance preceded the COVID-19 pandemic by more than a year, its presence on various COVID-19 reading lists is a testament to its relevance in our current pandemic era. (One infected retail worker, for example, continues to fold clothes regardless of the fact that her flesh is rotting and her jaw is almost entirely detached from her head.) The fungus, named for China’s Shenzhen province, where it emerges from the conditions in a manufacturing district, reveals the pervasiveness of neoliberalism’s networks as it quickly decimates the human population. Ma’s “zombies” are people infected with Shen Fever-a fictitious fungal infection that causes loss of cognition but keeps bodies completing the motions of their daily routines. Nevertheless, they carry all the horrific weight of the traditional American zombie of anti-capitalist works like George Romero’s 1978 film Dawn of the Dead. ![]() ![]() Instead, Ma deploys zombies who are more like jet-lagged office workers than rabid dogs. Ling Ma’s 2018 novel Severance is a book about a zombie apocalypse that involves no cannibalism, no hordes, and no explosions. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |