Extreme exaggerations

From High-Rise

I realised that while hammering out an essay on Jules Verne.

Verne conceived of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea after seeing a submarine — well, a model of one — at the world fair.

So a machine that took passengers under water existed in 1867.

Verne’s innovation was making the technology sleeker, grander, faster — capable of wonders:

Once Verne had conceived of a submarine with sodium-mercury batteries and floodable tanks, he could derive the rest of his plot.

A craft like Nautilus could travel for 20,000 leagues under the sea. It would be a pity not to make the journey.

But I have a frustration with A Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Because ripples from the invention don’t reach wider society.

What happens under the sea stays under the sea. And that leaves a lot unexplored.

This thought strikes me, because I’ve just read High-Rise by J. G. Ballard — a science fiction author who more sociologist than inventor.

Ballard was writing a hundred years after Verne. Submarines had gone nuclear. Skyscrapers propagated like mushrooms.

He lived in a city enamoured with concrete. London poured the material into high-density building projects: Balfron Tower, Trellick Tower, The Barbican.

Those developments were big. So Ballard went bigger in his novel High-Rise.

If Verne was turned on by engineering and inventors, Ballard was stimulated by architecture and theorists.

Theorists like Newman who suggested that people need to be surveilled to stay civilised. Like Ehrlich who thought a ‘population bomb‘ would cause catastrophic overcrowding. Like Calhoun who stuffed rats into a box (this was science in the ’70s).

They gave Ballard a set of anxieties to dramatise.

Over the course of the novel, the middle-class residents devolve into:

And they are exaggerations of the reader. You can choose your avatar.

Will you be Anthony Royal, who attempts to restore order to the high-rise?

Dr. Laing, who passively follows events?

Or Richard Wilder, who thrives on the carnage?

These pure types — made by Ballard to represent the id, ego and super-ego — allow readers to tussle with themselves during passages of awful beauty.

He enlarged the deliriums of a decade, so we can see where their shadows stretch into our own.

Aidan Clifford writes for Pinstripe Poets – artists who love their day jobs. This post is part of a series called ‘Write like the Greats’. See the rest here.

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