Ruling the Lawless: Rise of Authoritarianism in Times of Crisis in Ling Ma's Severance

Abstract

The existence of a political authority is such a customary part of our daily lives that often we are able to ignore and even forget it. However, only when we imagine its absence from our lives via post-apocalyptic fiction, we realize the importance of a democratically chosen and built governance over what would have been an authoritarian rule. Similarly, Ling Ma's first novel Severance with the eerie similarity of its events to the Coronavirus pandemic, is one of those works that shows us the unadulterated social and political chaos emerging from the lack of a central government or authority, through the story of nine survivors of a globally destructive disease. Moreover, since the emergence of an authoritarian rule during times of crisis is one of the key elements found in Severance, this paper aims to examine and analyze the ways in which the power of the leader turns into an authoritarian control during a global pandemic that resulted in the annihilation of almost all humanity.