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.
Character Analysis
Dr. Robert Laing
Laing is a 30-year-old divorced man who teaches at the medical school across from the high-rise. Laing moves to the development seeking a new life in the privacy of an apartment complex. The somewhat bohemian Laing initially stands out among the inveterate conformists; however, ultimately this independence makes Laing the best-suited to finding a new, more meaningful lifestyle in the high-rise. As he notices, the high-rise is “a huge machine designed to serve, not the collective body of tenants, but the individual resident in isolation” (11).
Royal describes Laing as the building’s truest tenant (89). This is the reason that, of the three main characters, Laing is the only one who not only survives but thrives. Laing survives because, unlike Wilder and Royal, he accepts his position in the high-rise. As his neighbors move upward into abandoned units, Laing stays in his apartment to start a new life with his sister and Eleanor. In this domestic arrangement Laing finds both freedom and singular purpose in his role as provider.
Laing’s name is an allusion to the psychiatrist R. D. Laing, a prominent figure in what the public called the antipsychiatry movement (unlike others in this movement, Laing believed in treating mental illness). Laing posited that conditions like psychosis and schizophrenia were caused by environmental factors, not biological or psychic ones. He also believed that with the right supervision, mental illness could help someone become more in touch with themselves. This idea that environment has an outsize effect on mental health and that psychosis can be transformative clearly appears in J. G. Ballard’s Laing: By making him delirious, the extreme environment of the high-rise reveals to Laing the life he wants to live.
Richard Wilder
Wilder is a documentarian who lives on the second floor of the high-rise with his wife, Helen, and his two sons. Wilder represents the id—unfettered primal impulse—and immaturity. A mother’s boy, Wilder feels constrained by the “whole system of juvenile restraints he had been trying to shake off since his adolescence” (141). Despite his awareness of this hang-up, Wilder tries to reproduce his relationship with his mother in his marriage to Helen.
At the beginning of the novel, Wilder personifies the rowdiness of the lower floors: His raucous parties on the second floor make him an object of scorn to the middle- and upper-floor tenants. Wilder has a far more physical, animalistic presence than his fellow professionals. His stocky, powerful body, his background in rugby, and his brash manner all separate him from the mannered, unphysical bourgeois type that predominates in the high-rise. In contrast to this vacant, anonymous type—epitomized by the Steeles—Wilder is aggressively human. As Laing says, “Wilder was real enough, but hardly belonged to the high-rise” (22). While his physicality is a strength in the first stages of the high-rise’s decline, his pronounced, albeit base, humanity ultimately dooms him.
The farther Wilder ascends, the further he regresses. A mother’s boy who feels constrained by his prolonged childhood, Wilder climbs upward in an attempt to resolve his Oedipal conflict. However, the higher he climbs, the more crude and violent Wilder becomes. He loses his desire to make a documentary of the high-rise, abandoning this mediated quest for domination for the visceral pleasure of physical domination. This intellectual regression coincides with his loss of intelligible speech and symbolic marking of himself with war paint, both of which indicate that his battle against the building has become mostly physical. Wilder’s eventual abandonment of his camera marks his (however subconscious) realization that life in the high-rise isn’t meant to be documented; it’s meant to be lived. There is more fulfillment, more visceral pleasure in unmediated living than in spectating. Wilder’s absurd embrace of his murder by the women’s commune—a perverse conclusion to his Oedipal drama—attests to this fact; ironically, this death has more meaning to him than his life ever did.
Anthony Royal
Royal is the high-rise’s architect and penthouse resident. He is the only one of the building’s many architects who lives in the building. Despite having a small role in its design—responsible only for the lobby, concourse, and sculpture garden—Royal is strongly invested in the building’s success. Royal insists that it is his wife, not he, who’s afflicted by upper-class insecurity, but his dress and bearing suggest otherwise. With his white safari jacket, chromium cane, and white Alsatian always at his side, Royal affects the look of a colonial lord adapted to modern life. His self-conscious aloofness suggests that he’s anxious to live up to the distant, regal image his name conjures.
Like many of the other characters, Royal is self-destructive. Having come from nothing, he feels imprisoned by success; he goes so far as to wonder whether his car crash was an unconscious impulse to shatter this cage. Royal stays in the building despite his awareness of its growing danger, curious to see how things will progress. Royal is gripped by the Thanatos, the death drive, seemingly determined to destroy himself.
Though Royal eventually embraces his given role as the helmsman of the high-rise, this role becomes meaningless in the final stages of disintegration. Royal lacks the cruelty that keeps Pangbourne alive, the anonymity that protects Laing, or the killer instinct that shields the women’s commune. Royal cannot reconcile himself to the extreme violence of the high-rise. After Wilder shoots him, Royal spends his final hours dragging himself down to the 10th-floor pool, which has become a mass grave. This Herculean effort is both penance for designing a building that fomented such violence and a renunciation of his status—he goes to die with the lower-floor tenants.
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By J. G. Ballard
