High-Rise: Surrealist Dystopia
In 1975 J.G. Ballard imagined a concrete landscape as midwife to a new social class.
I first read High-Rise earlier this year after rewatching the movie. I found the book deeply interesting and exciting but when I wanted to write about it I found there was a lot going on under the surface that I was having a difficult time contextualizing. Last month, I suggested watching the movie for a discussion group with friends so I re-read the book in just a few days. I couldn’t put it down but when I did I felt like I was coming up for air. The experience of reading the novel, like the high-rise itself is oppressive and isolating.
At the moment, I’m completely intrigued by Ballard’s writing as well as Ballard himself. While reading, I took notes, read critical reviews and watched interviews with Ballard, which indicated what I was gleaning from the book and what I was missing. This is the first book of Ballard’s I’ve read so I don’t have a complete understanding of how the themes in High-Rise play out among some of his other works. Keeping this in mind, this post will be an attempt to understand the novel rather than a ‘review’ or analysis.
“Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.”
J.G. Ballard was born and raised in Shanghai to English expatriate parents in 1930. During World War II, he faced hunger and malnutrition while detained in a Japanese detention camp (the subject of his memoir Empire of the Sun). After the war, the family returned to what Ballard described as the culture shock of bored and drab England. He studied to become a psychiatrist until he chose writing over medicine.
Ballard began contributing science-fiction short stories to magazines and wrote his first novel The Drowned World in 1962. In the 1970s he wrote a series of dystopian novels exploring themes of isolation, psychopathology, and the link between man and technology. A “surrealist writer”, Ballard combined the artistic movement with psychoanalysis to create his own form of apocalyptic realist works.
“I define inner space as an imaginary realm in which on the one hand the outer world of reality, and on the other the inner world of the mind, meet and merge. Now, in the landscapes of the surrealist painters, for example, one sees the regions of inner space; and increasingly I believe that we will encounter in film and literature scenes which are neither solely realistic nor fantastic. In a sense, it will be a movement in the interzone between both spheres.” 1
High-Rise, the fourth novel in Ballard’s dystopian series, further explores themes from the three previous novels The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, and Concrete Island. High-Rise presents an “extreme metaphor”: a 40-story concrete high-rise offers it’s 2,000 tenants all the modern conveniences and amenities to suit their every need. They needn’t leave, except to go to work. Everything is taken care of: food, air, water, even a swimming pool and a gym. But when the building breaks down, a new social order forms. The tenants compose themselves into tribal clans, protecting their territory and their resources. Eventually the building becomes completely uninhabitable where only the most ‘adapted’ survive.
Ballard got the idea for High-Rise while on vacation. He noticed a man standing on the beach with a camera pointed up at his apartment complex, waiting to take a photo of some neighbor caught in the act of flinging cigarette butts over the balcony: “…and here's this guy so upset with the misbehavior of those people on the 12th floor that he stands with his back to the sea with his camera, waiting to catch somebody in the act! Some guy who is probably a dentist, so obsessed ... with the sort of hostilities that are easily provoked…”.2 Ballard wrote up the idea first as a social worker’s case history before adapting it into a novel.3
Ballard’s dystopian vision unfolds through the experiences of three residents navigating the ever-changing landscape of life within the decaying building: Richard Wilder, a second-floor husband, father, and filmmaker; Dr. Robert Laing, a 25th-floor recently divorced, thirty-something medical professor; and Anthony Royal, one of the building’s architects living on the top floor. Ballard delivers the novel in prose reminiscent of the social worker’s case history, luring us into the high-rise while remaining oddly detached.
The first chapter starts with minor aggressions and by the end of the novel the building turns into a completely remade hellscape, unrecognizable from the beginning, though not unexpected given the clues and foreshadowing. Ballard uses an extreme metaphor - the high-rise- to explore a hypothesis: when the building’s systems fail, the now-dependent residents will recreate themselves into whatever form their survival depends on. In High-Rise, Dr. Laing comes out on top, though I’m not sure Mr. Rogers would ask the good doctor to be his neighbor.
“I would say that a lot of my fiction is, if you like, open-ended. I leave for the reader to decide what the moral and psychological conclusions to be drawn from my fiction should be. For example, in the case of Crash, High-Rise and The Atrocity Exhibition, I offer an extreme hypothesis for the reader to decide whether the hypothesis I advance (this extreme metaphor to deal with an extreme situation) is proven.”4
Below we’ll explore four themes presented in High-Rise: technology, psychopathology, environment and the new social class.
Technology
“…there’s some dubious pleasures of life in advanced technology tapped -- they canalize & tame & make tolerable perverse impulses that in previous societies would've been nipped in the bud -- the body on the beach -- the prowl cars would've been around in no time at all. Modern technology makes possible the expression of a guilt-free…sort of institutionalized, morally free psychopathology emerging, in which people will be able to, almost encouraged by the nature of the societies in which they live, to give vent to all sorts of perverse impulses which won't be socially damaging!”5
Ballard uses the high-rise, a machine not unlike a computer or smartphone, to show how technology might expose the repressed desires of it’s tenants. When some piece of technology provides for one so completely, what might one do to remain in that state, complete and utterly free to fully explore and express themselves?
While reading I thought that Ballard must have a pretty pessimistic view of humans and society. I learned that, in fact, Ballard felt he was not a pessimist and that he thought technology could help people get over their obsessions and achieve some sort of ‘peace’, creating a wholly new and transformed human, like Dr. Laing. Ballard said that High-Rise looks at the ‘opportunities that modern technology offers us to play games with our own psychopathologies’. Technology brings out elements of human nature which we might not even understand or realize; exploring this could be dangerous, Ballard said, but it’s still worth exploring. 6
Earlier I compared the high-rise to a computer or smartphone. We can imagine how these devices might inform one’s sense of identity. (In fact, Ballard foresaw our current media obsession). If we follow Ballard’s “extreme metaphor”, what might happen if the internet were suddenly wiped out or every smartphone and computer was destroyed? How would that re-shape our identities, our lives, our society? How has it already shaped our identity, our lives, and our society?
Ballard believed that the great catalysts of change in the modern era were science and technology and that the invisible ways in which high-tech buildings, computers, satellites, and motorways change society is causing deep repercussions, more so than anything before. This is what Ballard writes about, the ‘inner space’ of the present day within the human mind, instead of the cosmos. He highlighted the changes he saw taking place in the present and with a surrealist lens imagined what might occur, leaving it up to the reader to decide what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The future is here now and we must open our eyes to see what’s occurring and imagine where it might go.
Psychopathology
“Psychopathology may become the last repository of the human imagination.” 7
Ballard said that he wasn’t concerned with character studies, that he saw them as a means to explore psychological roles. Through each of the protagonists accounts, Ballard presents a case study of Freudian psychoanalysis. Chris Hall wrote that Wilder represents the Id, Laing the ego, and Royal the superego.
Ballard sets the scene in the opening chapters. The building is breaking down and the residents have clung to their ‘mother’ and adapt rather than leave. Differing social classes emerge, first warring factions, then tribal clans, and finally hunter-gatherers. As each new iteration is born, more ‘perversities” emerge.
“By it’s very efficiency, the high-rise took over the task of maintaining the social structure that supported them all. For the first time, it removed the need to repress every kind of anti-social behavior, and left them free to explore any deviant or wayward impulses. It was precisely in these areas that the most important and most interesting aspects of their lives would take place. Secure within the shell of the high-rise like passengers on board an automatically piloted airliner, they were free to behave in any way they wished, explore the darkest corners they could find. In many ways, the high-rise was a model of all that technology had done to make possible the expression of a truly ‘free’ psychopathology.”
“A psychotic would have a ball here, Wilder reflected.”
Wilder (the Id) is the first to understand what was occurring but wants to dominate the high-rise by rising to the top. Despite his efforts he regress to childlike impulses and is killed by a mob of cannibal women. Laing (the ego) moved into the high-rise to escape his old life, hoping to disappear into the collection of invisible professionals contained within the building. By the end, he has become a “model tenant”, someone he was at first afraid of, but wanting to remain in his home, his “cave in the cliff face”, he adapts, transforms, and survives. Royal (the superego) may have known about the building’s problems even while it was being built, but yet he chose to live in the building, staying far after any reasonable means of escape remained because he hoped to see his ‘experiment’ come to fruition, a giant zoo in the sky. Royal is shot by Wilder, and left to die in the swimming-pool/graveyard by Laing.
Dr. Talbot, a psychiatrist in the building, offers some more insight:
“The model here seems to be less the noble savage than our un-innocent post-Freudian selves, outraged by all that over-indulgent toilet-training, dedicated breast-feeding and parental affection…Our neighbors had happy childhoods to a man and still feel angry. Perhaps they resent never having had a chance to become perverse . . .”
While reading I wondered why the residents stay? Ballard asks us to suspend some disbelief, informing us that the high-rise provided an environment where the tenants expressed their repressed desires and obsessions. This circles back to Ballard’s comments on how technology might allow humans to come to terms with aspects of our nature we might not yet fully understand. It’s interesting to see how the psychology of each protagonist unfolds. At first the high-rise is a “huge and aggressive malefactor… determined to inflict every conceivable hostility upon them” and each protagonist feels something disorienting about living there. Later, the high-rise is a model civilization, a successful experiment. Dr. Laing is “happy” and feels that the building “had been kind” to him.
“Each one brought them a step closer to the ultimate goal of the high-rise, a realm where their most deviant impulses were free at last to exercise themselves in any way they wished. At this point physical violence would cease at last.”
Environment
“All my fiction is in a sense about isolation and how to cope with isolation. I'm talking about man's biological isolation in relation [to] the universe, his isolation in time, the sense of his finite life in the face of this panoply of alternatives from which he is excluded, and latterly the isolation between man the individual and this technological landscape, which offers more hope perhaps. This is what impels me to write books like ‘Crash’ and ‘High Rise’, where I feel for the first time, that far from being the alienating landscape which most people assume, the technological landscape offers the possibilities of peace, some sort of union with everything.”8
Throughout the novel the protagonists describe the physical and mental isolation from their neighbors, their environment, and their city. Wilder can’t wait to get home work, realizing that the only thing ‘real’ is what’s going on in the high-rise. Royal is completely isolated from the lower floors and soon finds out that his own upper floors residents have moved on without him. Laing is a survivor, content to squirrel away and mind his business. How does he succeed?
In his review, Rick McGrath writes that “High-Rise explores and reveals Ballard's ideas about the quick mutability of reality, and the kind of mental state most likely to adapt and succeed in times of extreme and rapid change in an isolated environment.” That mental state is presented, McGrath writes, in the form of Laing who “survives because his driving psychic force is self-preservation through isolation and passivity.”
This sounds bleak but Ballard thought that given certain environmental factors, technology might help to a new social class, one that might be unthinkably harsh to our standards but might offer some form of peace, as Ballard said in the above quote. I’m not sure what sort of peace he’s referring to. I think he means that given the right conditions, humans might be able to work through their obsessions and repressed desires and be born anew. This world of Ballardian ‘peace’ is hard to imagine without the author’s surrealist lens.
“The high rise was a huge machine designed to serve, not the collective body of tenants, but the individual resident in isolation.”
New Social Class
“There's a new class emerging … a sort of professional class which includes everyone from cost accountants to dentists to air-traffic controllers, etcetera, all the people who make up the ‘High Rise.’ Now these people, regardless of their background, have more in common with each other than with the children they played with at home…High technology has given these people a very strong sense of identity. Now I was interested in studying this new class and wondering what would happen if it came under extreme internal stresses… the anonymity of say, such a huge high-rise building as the one I describe, which plays into the hands of barbarism, but also provides a new set of connections on the other side: what that new order is I leave to the reader to decide. Royal and Wilder are not tuned into the logic of the High Rise. A new type of person is emerging, a neutral, affectless, emotionless character who doesn't mind the intrusion into his life of data processing outfits, credit registers and so on, and in fact welcomes it because it provides a sense of togetherness -- maybe all the togetherness that people need. Laing is at one point in the book reflecting on this new kind of cool, unemotional type who just likes sitting in his room with the TV on but the sound turned down. But it's ironic that at the end of the book he turns into just such a person as he apparently feared…all this is to show the beginnings of a new order. He is a happy tenant of the High Rise. I leave it open to the reader to decide whether it's a good thing or bad; he is not a completely passive spectator of events.” 9
The main hypothesis in this extreme metaphor of Ballard’s is that given the environmental breakdown of the building, the residents re-order, re-identify, and re-make themselves to survive the high-rise. Is the new guy on the block ‘bad’ or ‘good’? He leaves it up for us to decide, but the last sentence offers a horrifying (to me) conclusion:
“Laing looked out at the high-rise four hundred yards away. A temporary power failure had occurred, and on the 7th floor all the lights were out. Already torch-beams were moving about in the darkness, as the residents made their first confused attempts to discover where they were. Laing watched them contentedly, ready to welcome them to their new world.”
Is Laing crazy? How can this man still be thinking about how to cook a dog with the right amount of garlic? I’m struggling to see how this kind of ‘new class’ could bring ‘peace’. But I need to change my understanding of peace - Ballard’s world is a dystopia, but one that is, at the end, non-violent through the use of technology to explore the darker or misunderstand sides of human nature.
How would an entire civilization of ‘peaceful’ individuals change society, or what would a society of these people resemble? Maybe technology would be their religion, their god, as it brings them everything they ever needed or desired, from the basic essentials to quelling their innermost desires. Maybe privacy would be a thing of the past, with everyone openly filming everything, laying bare the entire person as a whole, instead of the repressed facade we bring to the world now. What would humanity look like? Are we evolving towards some sort of peace through technology or devolving to our basest instincts?
“A new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality, impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere. This was the sort of resident who was content to do nothing but in his over-priced apartment, watch television with the sound turned down, and wait for his neighbors to make a mistake.…their opponents were people who were content with their lives in the high-rise, who felt no particular objection to an impersonal steel and concrete landscape, no qualms about the invasion of their privacy by government agencies and data-processing organizations, and if anything welcomed these invisible intrusions, using them for their own purposes. These people were the first to master a new kind of late twentieth-century life. They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed.”
Well, that was a lot. Having written this I once again feel like I’ve come up for air after wrestling with the profound implications Ballard is juggling here. I’m interested to read more of his works to see how the themes of science/technology, psychology, and environmental factors might coalesce into some sort of surrealist Venn diagram.
High-Rise must be a masterpiece of Ballard’s - it does exactly he wanted it do. It creates a premise, sets up a hypothesis and executes step-by-step how such a scenario might play out (perhaps it already has or will). I was surprised to learn about Ballard’s affinity for surrealist art, that he studied as a psychiatrist and his experience in a Japanese detention camp. These were the missing pieces which helped to understand where he was coming from.
This is a novel about how the breakdown of a housing ‘machine’ births a new social class, that of the isolated, emotionless, middle-class professional who wants to be completely ‘free’ to enjoy his perversities. This is a surrealist dystopia where technology and extreme environmental factors expose our true psychological natures.
I wonder what a sequel might look like. Does Laing return to the medical school? Does he return to the rest of society? Will the same sequence of events happen to the other high-rise? When Laing “welcomes them to their new world” what then?
But now take that sequel and put it in our time, instead of the 1970s. What does that surrealist dystopia look like?
Until next time,
Keith
Wow! Great interpretation and break down of such a psychologically heavy book.