How does the human mind work? What is it really like? What lurks beneath the carapace of our civilized existence, with its polite motion from work to home to entertainment venue via the internet and television. What would the unconscious say if it could?
According to Freud, the unconscious is a savage place full of incestuous drives, malign wishes and uncanny desires. The unconscious of Freud (or at least the id) emerges in slips of the tongue, symptoms, and - when thwarted - is responsible for virtually all our psycho- and physiopathologies. Whether you believe this to be true or not, it does make for interesting fiction.
High-rise, J.G. Ballard’s taut and addictive novel about a hypermodern city in the sky whose social structure descends into tribal warfare and cavemanlike manners, is a novel that takes the Freudian id and extrapolates what would happen were it allowed free rein. The super-repressed inhabitants, going mad with the pettiness of communal life, break free of societal norms in their self-contained world. Dogs run wild, gangs loot freely, men grunt and rape.
There is no escape from the logic. The book resists all attempts to offer a ‘normal’ perspective. Like the characters who try to go to work but find the cloacal miasma of the high-rise to be more comforting. Being so very extreme, it may be considered pointless to say whether or not it is psychologically accurate. Yet, if you ask individual questions provoked by the book, the results are revelatory:
Do people living in the lower floors of a high rise feel oppressed?
Does the anonymity of the high rise encourage mindless vandalism?
Do people enjoy wallowing in their own distinct smells?
Do groups of people automatically stratify along class lines?
Can architecture induce psychosis?
Do humans become inured to bizarre circumstances if these circumstances are introduced gradually?
The answer to all of these questions is a tentative “ye-es, but“, which is the very definition of unheimlich: close-but-not-quite-home.
When I was reading High-rise, I tried to imagine what the novel would be like if Freud had never existed or if Ballard’s mind were inclined towards, say, NLP. My guess is that it would be more Sadean, with a powerful leader bringing pain to the innocents in the tower block. As it is, everyone is complicit, every mind is tainted.
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