52 pages • 1 hour read
J. G. BallardHigh-Rise
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1975A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Matriarchal Mutiny
Content Warning: This section includes the source material’s references to graphic depictions of sexual assault, violence, neglect, and cruelty to animals.
Throughout the novel there are allusions to a growing alliance of female residents. The details of this group remain largely off the page because of the limited narrative perspective of the increasingly self-absorbed male characters. However, J. G. Ballard suggests that this group is a powerful one that ultimately rules the high-rise.
In the first weeks of saturnalia, male and female residents alike join in the rowdy parties and occasional eruption of violence. Both the men and the women embrace these unruly festivities as opportunities to explore their perverse sides, and they cross the limits of consensual sexual encounters. Instead, assault, including sexual assault, is lauded as a welcome progression of the disintegration. At one of these drunken revelries, the film critic Eleanor Powell approaches Laing:
Flushed and excited, Eleanor Powell swayed up to Laing, pointing hilariously at him and accusing him of trying to break into her apartment. Everyone cheered this news, as if rape was a valuable and well-tried means of bringing clan members together (115).
Sexual assault becomes celebrated, rather than protected against, in the building. Men and women stick to their floor-based clans, and floor identity supersedes gender identity.
As the high-rise grows more violent, the clans begin disbanding. Rape and sexual assault become so widespread that Ballard presents women as numbed to these violent acts. Many men abandon their wives and children to pursue their personal fantasies of violence. Wilder abandons his family in his Freudian quest upward. Royal enslaves his wife and other women in his fantasy of becoming lord of the manor. Steele stages his macabre tableaux after his wife ominously disappears. Pangbourne organizes his short-lived cult of women toward his cruel fantasies. As the men lose themselves in their self-consuming fantasies, a group of women begins organizing against the danger and disorder wrought by these feral men.
This group of women first appears when Wilder ventures to the 29th floor with a woman he finds riding the freight elevator. There he encounters a commune of women from all over the building led by an elderly children’s-story writer. Chapters later, Wilder mentions this commune as aiding abandoned women, including his wife, Helen. His description of this envoy of women dispensing aid foreshadows their later efforts to restore order.
The new order of the women isn’t, as the psychiatrist Adrian Talbot predicts chapters earlier, a “happy primitivism” but an order forged amid extreme violence (131). In the final chapters, as Wilder nears the roof, he remains unaware that someone has restored the upper floors to their previous cleanliness. A number of allusions hint that this restoration is the work of this women’s commune. The freshly painted walls of the upper floors “gleam in the afternoon sunlight like the entrance to an abattoir” (185). This ominous simile foreshadows Wilder’s slaughter at the hands of the women’s commune. When Wilder summits the building, he finds a group of well-dressed women presiding over the freshly cleaned roof, supervising children playing in the sculpture garden. Only pages earlier, Royal found the roof covered in flesh and bloody markings—likely a product of Pangbourne’s final acts of brutality. The women prepare a cooking fire and draw knives. In a darkly comic twist Wilder becomes the celebratory summit meal he planned to make of his companion poodle.
The commune isn’t innocent of extreme violence: The women murder and eat Wilder. Even the children in this brave new world aren’t spared contact with death: In the sculpture garden they play with bones. However, the commune affords the women protection and some semblance of order. Their group attests to the ability of humans to forge a semblance of normality from extreme violence, despite the costs.
Nostalgie de la Boue
Suffocated by their sterile apartments and conformist lives, the residents of the high-rise long for a more meaningful, visceral life. As Ballard writes in his novel Kingdom Come, “The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.” The residents of the high-rise seek this passionate world in their long-repressed primal impulses toward dirtiness and perversity. This nostalgie de la boue—literally “longing for the dirt”—drives the disintegration of the high-rise.
A central cause of the malaise driving this nostalgie de la boue is the prevalence of hollow pleasures. Instead of valuing things for their visceral pleasure, these bourgeois only value things for their status. In his fellow residents’ apartments, Royal is “physically repelled by the contours of an award-winning coffee-pot, by the well-modulated colour schemes, by the good taste and intelligence” (98). This uniform good taste is a sign of the hollow superficiality the residents long to escape.
This nostalgie de la boue first manifests in the defilement of the building. Upper-floor residents encourage their dogs to use the lower-floor elevators as bathrooms; lower-floor tenants encourage their children to throw food down on the upper-floor residents’ cars. After the garbage chutes jam the residents keep their garbage instead of throwing it over the side of the building, preserving “the mucilage of unfinished meals, bloody bandage scraps, broken bottles that once held the wine that made them drunk, all faintly visible through the semi-opaque plastic” (159). Like toddlers reluctant to flush their waste in toilet training, the residents of the high-rise rue the loss of a part of themselves in tossing their garbage. This forced destruction (forced first by their parents, then by social norms) prompts them to rebel. Garbage becomes something to preserve, not discard—a record of one’s past.
As the clans disband and residents withdraw into isolated units, they become preoccupied with marking and defending these cells. Like a dog peeing on an elevator door, Laing marks his territory with the products of his body—his odor, his excrement, his garbage. By embracing his filth, Laing reclaims his body from the sterility of his former life and reconnects with the lost animal part of his humanity. He finds newfound confidence in this rejection of personal hygiene:
The sweat on Laing’s body, like the plaque that coated his teeth, surrounded him in an envelope of dirt and body odour, but the stench gave him confidence, the feeling that he had dominated the terrain with the products of his own body. Even the prospect that the lavatory would soon be permanently blocked, something that had once filled him with polite dread, was now almost inviting (128).
Laing colonizes his apartment with the products of his body, transforming it into an extension of himself.
This nostalgie de la boue also has an element of sexual perversity. The residents long to explore this part of themselves that they were prevented from exploring by their overly affectionate parents. The psychiatrist Talbot tells Laing, “Our neighbours had happy childhoods to a man and still feel angry. Perhaps they resent never having had a chance to become perverse” (131). In an obscene move, Wilder begins hanging his genitals out of the fly of his pants. Laing pursues a newfound sexual attraction to his sister. People have sex in public, film amateur pornographies, and show blue movies in the concourse cinema. These illicit acts inject an element of visceral pleasure into the residents’ lives.
In the end, residents indulge nostalgie de la boue as a means of self-realization. In dirtiness and depravity they discover a more real version of themselves, long obscured by their sterile, conformist lives. Despite the dangers involved, the residents find more emotion, more meaning in a life lived in the literal and metaphorical dirt.
Psychogeography: Setting as Mind
An overarching theme in Ballard’s fiction is the way in which architecture generates unique psychological atmospheres. Another common theme is the need for characters to reconcile themselves to their hostile, alienating surroundings in order to become free. The high-rise and surrounding development exert an outsize influence on its residents, changing the way they think and behave. In turn, the residents use the high-rise as a theater in which they’re free to pursue their most repressed, taboo impulses.
The prison-like architecture of the high-rise provokes rebellion by making the residents feel trapped. After Paul Crosland rebuffs one of Wilder’s attempts to climb the building, Wilder feels particularly imprisoned as he outlines his documentary: He describes the other high-rises in the development as “Alcatraz blocks” and the representative unit of his opening shot “one cell in this nightmare termitary” (61). Like termites, the residents are condemned to live as worker drones.
Additionally, the motif of prison imagery signals a broader economical shift occurring. Such high-rise developments relegate bourgeois professionals to the societal isolation historically suffered by the proletariat: “[T]hese people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these expensive apartments with their elegant furniture and intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape” (99). The isolated high-rise development confines these bourgeois professionals to a life lived apart.
With its hierarchical design, the high-rise encourages its tenants to indulge their visceral territorial instincts, long attenuated by their safe lives. At first, the residents of the middle and upper floors defend their apartments out of the kind of territoriality of typical NIMBYism. Pangbourne summarizes this suburban instinct in his response to Royal asking why he doesn’t leave the building: “‘I’ve only just moved here. Why should I concede anything to these people?’ He pointed expressively at the floor with a bloodstained finger” (102). As Pangbourne’s bloodstained finger indicates, the civilized veneer of this territoriality soon crumbles. Each resident treats their neighbors, particularly those below them, as trespassers in their private domain.
The high-rise makes each resident feel like the main character of their own drama, feeding their solipsism. Each longs (and fears) to be alone in the building, to colonize it with violence and the products of their body. For Wilder, this drama is his unresolved Oedipal conflict. His quest to summit the building is a quest to reconcile himself with his father, symbolized by Royal, and free himself from his reliance on his mother. With the high-rise as an extension of Wilder’s mind, Royal becomes the symbolic architect of Wilder’s psyche. Just as a father acts as the superego to his child, defining the rules of his world, Royal defines the rules of Wilder’s world by designing his living space. The high-rise is an outsize manifestation of Royal’s oppressive, patriarchal force:
[Wilder] was constantly aware of the immense weight of concrete stacked above him, and the sense that his body was the focus of the lines of force running through the building, almost as if Anthony Royal had deliberately designed his body to be held within their grip (58).
Wilder’s revolt against the building is a rebellion against his father’s rules, a longing to resolve the “ultimate confrontation” between himself and his father (139)—the unresolved drama of his life that prevents him from living as a fully realized adult.
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