All great stories are realist. I recently discovered this enduring truth by watching a TV show—neither realist nor, it must be confessed, a book. Television has ruined the imaginations of many writers, so it’s nice when the medium does us a favor. Returning with a second season on January 17th, AppleTV’s Severance is a compelling case-study for how the best stories are obsessed with reality, with getting some part of our world into the work in a way that surprises, confronts, offends, or distills our understanding. This is especially true when it comes to what we call genre storytelling.
Set five minutes in the future, Severance refers to a surgical procedure that allows you to disassociate your workday on demand. If so desired, you can have a chip put into your brain that will split your memories in two. You become severed. Everything outside of work will be outside of work, and everything inside of work will be inside of work. As a character explains in a pre-recorded message to herself, “access to my memories will be spatially dictated.” You enter your office building, you ding your badge, and a chip in your brain puts “you” to sleep. What remains is yourself sans any personal, conscious memories. Your work self wakes on a table in a conference room on your first day in the new job and has to be told your name. “Do I have a family?” asks one woman in her orientation. “You’ll never know,” answers her manager.
Mark Scout is one such severed employee. A widower, he’s given up his academic career to work in a featureless corporation moving around strange numbers on a computer. I mean that literally. He works in “Macrodata Refinement” and his job is displacing numbers on a screen in a way he doesn’t understand and for reasons he’s never been told. You want a story with stakes that ripple into reality? There’s never been a more accurate depiction of internal auditing. When he moves the numbers correctly, he gets a certain uncanny feeling that confirms he is accomplishing his mission.
The symbolism isn’t subtle. Stuck in a pointless desk job, Mark’s not himself at the office. Again, literally. Having gotten the severance chip, he becomes what the show calls his “Innie”—the person inside the job. Co-workers know each other during the day but are strangers as soon as they step onto the elevator to go home.
What should be a clunky, allegorical sendup of modern life in the workspace is instead a masterful, even existential brainworm. If you work in an office, it’s hard not to think of Severance when you open the building door or when you hire a new staff member. You walk into your own office and feel a smile, a mood, a shadow self awaken. Like Mark, you become your work posture. You are only this way in relation to the world, to other people, as a condition of the job. Severance, as such, is realist in the broadest, least technical, but most vital sense. An aspect of reality has been plucked from the invisible flow of our life and projected onto the screen with startling insight.
Not all dystopias are good stories, of course. And even fewer TV shows are worth using as a preamble to discussing good fiction. The main reasons for Severance’s excellence are form and craft and acting and so on. Everyone knows this line of thought by now, or should. From the writer’s side of a story, the art must deal with itself in formal terms almost exclusively. The how of a thing is what makes it an incredible thing, mostly. Realist novels, goodness knows, aren’t great because of their tepid, granular content. Perhaps the greatest realist of all time, Tolstoy, has been aptly described by Janet Malcolm as a master of the dream-technique.
Events flow in Anna Karenina, Malcolm insists, without the painstaking descriptions that we tend to associate with realism. But the very aversion to documentary detailing amplifies the text’s embodiment, its depiction, of life’s contingency. Why does Anna Karenina throw herself in front of a train? The action isn’t sufficiently prepared, in many ways. But the movement of her life, the way she finds herself in situation after situation that can both be explained wholly as her moral action and also as a kind of accident of her culture and temperament and the brute movement of time—that is art rendering reality in fresh brush strokes. The crossroads of our lives might not be a shock, but they’re generally only recognizable as part of a larger chain of events in retrospect. We are caught in the movement of the world, in some vise of what we value and how we feel pressing against what we actually experience and choose.
From the reader’s side of a story, though, the how of a great work only withstands scrutiny, only offers a greater pleasure when re-reading, if the formal leverage is at least partially applied to reality. Insisting good fiction is realist, however loosely I’m throwing the word around, might sound like I want every writer to make sure they tell me about a character’s shoe style or that the scope of the narrative should be limited to boring people trying to have relationships in a boring way. It might make some wonder if I’m even suggesting, contra art for art’s sake, that moral theses and political messaging have been neglected in our current, vapid, status-based media culture.
But the issue with most fiction, especially anything mesmerized by a cultural fad—whether social or political or technological—is that its view of reality is too narrow. One of the most entertaining beach reads of this century, Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go Bernadette?, is successful largely for how it plays with different storytelling frames. Bernadette is an architect who runs away from her stay-at-home life. Bee, her fifteen-year-old daughter, wants to figure out both why she left and where she’s gone.
The result is a novel that jumps from straight narration to letters to memos to emails between office workers, all compiled and annotated by Bee. The way a modern parent’s life, and a modern teenager’s, is both outlined and harried by official reports zips the reader from subplot to subplot. We feel the hemming-in of a personality like Bernadette’s, a creative and socially aloof character, in the switching registers. The old blogs, school reports, ER bills, and more capture the competing restrictions of meritocratic striving.
The example of Where’d You Go Bernadette? isn’t an unmixed success, however. The formal choices impart a sense of our official e-trail, of the way family and career too often exist in a battle of institutional obligations. But the neatness of all those emails, the way the characters can tell such perfect anecdotes that advance the plot, ultimately lessens the effect. Emails between co-workers are boring. And when they’re not, they’re gothic basements of the soul bejeweled with pithy exclamation points or—for some reason—emojis. The strain behind even pleasant exchanges, the tension of trying not to be misunderstood while also trying not to antagonize, doesn’t make for neat storytelling. The ingenuity is ultimately limited by a somewhat naive view of the self’s legibility.
A far different example, relevant for its experimental credentials, is the 2005 novel Remainder, by Tom McCarthy. Often held up as a novel about reading novels, Remainder is compelling twenty years later because it transcends this meta-critical cage. Famously reviewed by Zadie Smith in her essay, “Two Paths for the Novel,” Remainder came into notoriety branded as a “rejection…of lyrical Realism.” A rejection, that is, of the kind of novel where interiority and epiphanies pile upon each other until a climax of self-knowing is reached, or perhaps breached. That doesn’t mean that McCarthy’s subject isn’t our experience of the world or its own sideways depiction of the world itself.
A novel about a man with no name who wins money from a mysterious accident and spends his fortune staging increasingly elaborate reenactments of banal scenes from his life, Remainder is about the nascent dopamine culture that powers binge-reading, binge-watching, and certainly binge-scrolling. It’s not a Neil Postman thesis, per se, but it’s also not a novel primarily about itself vis-a-vis realism. It’s a novel about you and I needing to read, needing to scratch an itch that forever twinges. Clearly this is a topic that might transcend even our urge for entertainment, speaking directly to our weary search for some kind of settled context of personal coherence, a search whose very restlessness and banality become increasingly dangerous. The reenactments in Remainder become fantastical, including a drive-by shooting, as a reaction to the man’s initial desire to control the scenes.
One can even find this reality thesis thriving at the wellspring of modern fantasy. Lord of the Rings is a great story for many reasons, but the most enduring is how Tolkien successfully fits a bunch of chaps drinking at the pub into the same adventure as both King Arthur and Beowulf (essentially) without the text feeling schizophrenic. He does this through an attention to language that most of his detractors can’t even detect. When the reader witnesses the King Arthur figure, Aragorn, return to Gondor, the city of his long-awaited rule, the chapter switches from a courtly romance scene befitting the old ballads to a Gondor gossip chatting with her cousin.
Tolkien is no less obsessed with language than a writer like James Joyce, but his project is social and historical. The range of language, not simply invented languages but the interweaving tones and dialects, is also how he creates such rich and varied friendships among the many characters. They overcome how they talk past each other and about each other. Imitations of Tolkien are typically dreadful not just because they fail to match his mythic imagination, but because they fall short of his capacious sense of reality. The two feed each other.
In Severance, the fantasy is likewise at the service of an emotional reality. Mark Scout, we learn quickly, isn’t simply alienated at work, he’s alienated from living. The death of his wife won’t leave him. He opts for severance because it means he has eight more hours of the day not to think about his pain. He takes comfort in his workplace alienation, a wrinkle in the allegory that brings the story part of its punch. Life out in the world isn’t so great. He might not know what escalating horrors exist for his work self, but he knows the destructive, slow immolation of self-help and bad dinner parties and drinking and grief can’t get much worse. Or that’s the gamble. Let work rule you, so that you don’t have to rule yourself.
Severance is a reminder that a story’s commitment to reality in art is too often confused with strict documentation. The social, spiritual, metaphysical, psychological conditions of life deserve a story’s unique pressure, its unique way of recasting the threads we all feel or observe or forget. The trouble is reality can be hard to pinpoint, to depict, to re-draw in ways that uncover its persistent, but slippery dynamics. Worse, television and books and plays are all symbolic operations. They must manipulate artificial circumstances to produce whiffs of our actual situation in this life. Or the good ones must.
While it trucks in tantalizing Lost-like mysteries, the first season of Severance is haunted by how many of us are both prisoner to, and dependent on, the alienation of modern office life. It can be realist in terms of its technique—detailed about the material conditions of its characters, the dialogue between friends and siblings and co-workers—but it is captivated by the emotional tension of not being yourself at work in a way that is both hell and also maybe core to what is best in you. To this end, it risks surrealism and fantasy and innovative camera work and the ennui of characters endlessly walking through halls with a confidence born of simply knowing how to get from the desk to the bathroom by the shortest route. It might not mean much to make a certain patch of carpet your personal walkway, but some days it’s enough.
If we can never finalize a taxonomy of good and bad types of stories, we can at least admit there are better and worse individual examples. The better ones go beyond a pleasant excuse not to talk to people for a few hours, which is the highest praise. Not talking to people for a few hours is the reason we invented novels. The first season of Severance is likewise a fun way to be alone with someone else’s thoughts. But the tenacity with which it probes our work-life stalemate is also why it’s the greatest tale about having a desk job since the three best scenes in Office Space. And those three scenes are a modern masterpiece.
