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.
Chapters 10-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “The Drained Lake”
That same night, Laing gets drunk with his clan, like everyone else in the high-rise. A violent, sexual energy drives their parties. As the film critic Eleanor Powell tells Laing, “A low crime-rate […] is a sure sign of social deprivation” (111). Despite the fact that none of the residents sleep during the night, many of them still leave well-dressed for work the following morning, spending their days asleep at their desks.
The following morning Laing leaves his breakfast to investigate raised voices in the hallway. Steele informs him that the upper-floor residents plan to divide the building to secure the electrical system, using the 25th floor as a no-man’s-land: They will have to move upward.
Laing’s sister, Alice, appears from a lower floor looking to use his electricity. In his apartment, Laing is surprised to find himself attracted to his sister, who reminds him of his mother. She accepts his invitation to move into his apartment. While many residents pack for moves upward, Laing resolves to stay put: “He would build his dwelling-place where he was, with this woman and in this cave in the cliff face” (115).
After Alice leaves Laing prepares to go to work. These preparations make him realize how dirty his apartment has become: Rancid food leaks from the fridge and trash bags litter the small rooms. He quickly abandons his cleaning efforts to barricade the door for his absence.
As he steps out of the lobby, Laing is assaulted by the alien atmosphere of bright light and fresh air: “Laing remembered the stale air in his apartment, tepid with the smell of his own body. By comparison, the brilliant light reflected off the chromium trim of the hundreds of cars filled the air with knives” (120). Laing wanders from his car to the concrete basin of the planned ornamental lake. At the bottom of the basin, surrounded on all sides by the curving lines of the ovular depression, Laing longs for the rigid geometry of the high-rise.
Laing returns to his apartment, where the stale odor of his body soothes him. He changes back into his dirty clothes, knowing that he won’t try to leave the high-rise again.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Punitive Expeditions”
Barricaded in his apartment, Laing imagines Wilder and his lower-floor clan setting fire to the middle and upper floors; he fortifies his defense and hides his important documents and medical bag under his floorboards. Laing is glad to hear of a spate of violence that afternoon—the ensuing uptick in nighttime violence will provide a pretext for rescuing his sister.
That night, after a few inter-floor scuffles, Laing and his clan retreat to Adrian Talbot’s apartment. They huddle around torches in the dark and drink whiskey. Even though most floors still have power, the residents prefer darkness, which is broken only by their cameras: “The true light of the high-rise was the metallic flash of the polaroid camera, that intermittent radiation which recorded a moment of hoped-for violence for some later voyeuristic pleasure” (127). This artificial light replaces the sun, inaugurating a new form of life.
The gang descends to the lower floors for more fighting; Laing pauses to vomit over the stairwell railing. Floors below, Steele beckons Laing to an empty apartment. Using a curtain rod Steele has cornered a cat. Laing watches in a mix of horror and fascination as Steele suffocates the cat with the curtain. As Laing leaves he notices the last feet of a pornographic reel playing in the empty bedroom.
Laing finds his sister and retreats with her to his apartment. There they lie on his bed listening to sounds of violence around them.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Towards the Summit”
In the following days the social structure of the high-rise changes: The large clans dissolve into smaller, disparate groups. Out of apathy or paranoia, these groups isolate themselves within their chosen apartments, leading to a decline in violence. Wilder laments this downturn: He relied on offering himself as a mercenary in the clan skirmishes as his means of climbing the building’s ranks.
Trying a new tactic, Wilder tries to insinuate himself with one of the new groups—a duo of women on the 20th floor. Unimpressed with his offer to feature them in his documentary (having already appeared as experts on TV, such residents see no novelty in it), the women send him back to his 17th-floor base camp.
Two days later, Wilder returns from work relieved to reenter the comforting geometry of the high-rise development. He parks in the dead jeweler’s space, claiming the premier spot as his own. Leaving his car, Wilder checks in on his family, as he does every afternoon. Helen, emaciated from a lack of food, is uncharacteristically excited: Some parents have restarted a makeshift school, freeing her of watching her sons every afternoon.
Wilder longs to free himself from his feelings of duty to return to his family every day. He identifies less and less with the defeatism of the lower floors and longs to throw off the shackles of the “system of juvenile restraints” of his marriage (137).
Grabbing his camera, Wilder leaves to forage food and water for his family, something he has long neglected despite Helen’s pleas. In his absence, Helen accepts help from the 29th-floor women’s commune, the members of which travel throughout the building during the daytime armistice to help the many women abandoned by their husbands.
Wilder reflects on the previous night’s fights. Periodically he spotted Royal observing the skirmishes from floors above. Royal plays into the symbolic father-son conflict between him and Wilder: “Royal seemed to be uncannily aware of the confused image of his natural father that hovered in the attics of Wilder’s mind, glimpsed always in the high windows of his nursery” (135).
As Wilder climbs the stairs to the concourse, he half-heartedly pans his camera over the graffitied warnings of curfew time and routes of safe passage—he’s lost the desire to make his documentary. As the curfew nears, Wilder reaches the concourse. The supermarket cashier, feeling an open wound on her forehead, tells him that they’re no longer stocking food for want of demand.
Seeing that the last elevator of the afternoon is traveling to the upper floors, Wilder joins its dozen hostile passengers—he’s finally decided to abandon his family. The coming night promises freedom: Like the other residents, Wilder only feels free under cover of darkness.
Chapter 13 Summary: “Body Markings”
After an elevator delay, Wilder reaches the 17th floor and returns to his base camp—the apartment of a couple named the Hillmans. With Mr. Hillman grievously injured, Wilder has taken over his household role.
Mrs. Hillman greets Wilder like a mother anxious about an unruly child. She begs him to show her his gift—dog food from the supermarket—and like a child pleads with him to get her a pet dog. Hoping to provoke Mr. Hillman, Wilder begins fondling Mrs. Hillman. Put off by Mr. Hillman’s impassiveness and Mrs. Hillman’s willingness, Wilder stops.
Mrs. Hillman hands Wilder a loaded shotgun from the tangled barricade she’s built against the door. Despite the prevalence of firearms in the building, there is an unspoken agreement among the residents not to use them. Wilder returns the gun, rejecting Mrs. Hillman’s plea for revenge against the upper-floor residents.
At 2:00am Wilder rouses his neighbors for an expedition upward with a fabricated accusation of pedophilia against the psychiatrist Adrian Talbot; the obvious falsity of this accusation only further ignites their anger. At dawn, after they have trashed Talbot’s apartment for the 10th time, Wilder retreats to an empty 26th-floor unit. Upset by the cleanliness of the abandoned apartment, Wilder trashes it until he sees his exposed penis in the mirror, the sight of which calms him.
For hours Wilder drinks wine and records his grunts and burps on a tape recorder, clipping the tape into a cacophony of his bodily noises. The owner of the apartment returns, whom Wilder dimly recognizes as Charlotte Melville. Charlotte, who has been sheltering three floors above, barely recognizes Wilder, who has marked his grimy, naked body with the blood-red wine. When she approaches him, Wilder plays her his tape. He then hits her, drags her into the bedroom, and rapes her, recording her cries and playing them back to her throughout the assault.
After the assault Charlotte and Wilder eat a breakfast of cat food and red wine on the balcony. Wilder is intoxicated not only by the wine but by the height of the balcony. Below, a police cruiser approaches. A trio of neatly dressed residents leaving for work pacify the officer, who drives away. Shaken by this interaction with an outsider, the trio returns to building. Comforted by this image, Wilder falls asleep in Charlotte’s arms as she strokes the markings on his chest.
Chapters 10-13 Analysis
The violence of the high-rise is strongly influenced by television. TV is everywhere in the complex. When Wilder shoots film for his documentary on the building he’s reminded of a televised disaster: “a slow-motion newsreel of a town in the Andes being carried down the mountain slopes to its death, the inhabitants still hanging out their washing in the disintegrating gardens, cooking in their kitchens as the walls were pulverized around them” (125). Like the people in the Andean town, the residents of the high-rise continue their everyday tasks as a gradual (slow-motion) disaster carries them to their deaths.
The chaos transforms many residents into amateur documentarians, mondo filmmakers, and pornographers. Residents film the eruptions of violence both to document crimes and because they are accustomed to seeing violence from a distance—the camera allows them to detach themselves from the violence. The residents try to make their own violence as spectacular as the violence they see on TV for the pleasure of later rewatching it in the concourse cinema, where they screen these amateur mondo reels.
Like the violence on TV, the violence in the high-rise requires a spectator. This is why Steele summons Laing into the apartment where he’s cornered a frightened cat—his pleasure in killing the animal relies as much on Laing’s reaction as it does on the act itself: “The lights continued to flicker with the harsh over-reality of an atrocity newsreel. […] By some ugly logic the dentist’s pleasure in tormenting the creature was doubled by the presence of a squeamish but fascinated witness” (116). Just as viewer demand drives the airing of atrocity newsreels, Laing’s presence drives Steele’s torture of the cat.
The high-rise creates its own atmosphere, an atmosphere that increasingly keeps the residents within its walls. The anonymous backdrop of the building is a screen against which the residents see themselves projected. The residents colonize the sterile building with the dirt and odor of their bodies, injecting themselves into the environment. The spread of each resident’s dirt and odor over their apartment represents a territorial victory. This presence of themselves in their environment is comforting. This is nowhere more apparent than when Laing tries to leave the high-rise for the last time. The imagery of him stepping outside the lobby illustrates the stark contrast between inside and outside: “[H]e was struck immediately by the cooler light and air, like the harsh atmosphere of an alien planet. A sense of strangeness, far more palpable than anything within the building, extended around the apartment block on all sides” (120). The high-rise becomes an extension of Laing’s body and mind; to exit the high-rise is to enter a world in which there is no trace of his comforting presence.
The imagery of Laing’s exit from the building makes clear that this contrast between inside and outside is the contrast between self and other. The walls of the high-rise are the new boundary separating Laing and his fellow residents from the world: No longer do their selves end at their skin. The outside becomes a threat to Laing—as he leaves the building he’s assaulted by the fresh air: “Laing remembered the stale air in his apartment, tepid with the smell of his own body. By comparison, the brilliant light reflected off the chromium trim of the hundreds of cars filled the air with knives” (120). The imagery of air filled with knives underlines the severity of the threat that the outside represents to Laing.
The other thing that makes the outside hostile is sunlight. When Laing steps outside he’s assaulted by the “brilliant light” (120). Even within the building, sunlight is a sort of pacifier that, by virtue of illuminating everything, discourages violence. In contrast, the ubiquitous flash of polaroid cameras at night feeds the violence: “The true light of the high-rise was the metallic flash of the polaroid camera, that intermittent radiation which recorded a moment of hoped-for violence for some later voyeuristic pleasure” (115). This artificial light replaces the sun and everything it gives (life, bearing, vision), inaugurating a new order of life based not on nature but its absence: “What depraved species of electric flora would spring to life from the garbage-strewn carpets of the corridors in response to this new source of light? The floors were littered with the blackened negative strips, flakes falling from this internal sun” (115). As the metaphor of the internal sun suggests, this new order is an artificial one based on the landscape of the unconscious. External space becomes the domain of the mind.
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