High-Rise

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1975

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-9

Chapters 10-13

Chapters 14-19

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

The Primal and the Televisual

Television is everywhere in High-Rise. Muted TVs are always on in residents’ apartments. Many of them work in television—such as the newsman and middle-floor leader Paul Crosland. Wilder plans to make a TV documentary on life in the high-rise. TV seeps into the lives of the residents, and in turn they imitate TV scenes: When Laing’s clan assaults the masseuse at the elevators, they appear to Laing like “a group of unrehearsed extras playing a lynch scene” (38). Such scenes indicate a breakdown of the boundary between fiction and reality: TV infects the minds of the residents with the impulse to recreate its scenes.

TV is more meaningful than the residents’ actual lives. Throughout the novel the residents are described as behaving like TV actors on set. When the cocktail party on the roof accosts Laing, they suddenly walk away when the jeweler calls out like a director: “[T]he guests casually dispersed, like a group of extras switched to another scene. Without thinking, they strolled back to their drinks and canapés” (31). Such metaphors make the residents appear as if they are on TV—and in fact they are, in a way—producing their own mondo reels of theatrical violence and sex for later viewing in the cinema.

The residents also act and treat each other as if they’re on TV. At a party early in the high-rise’s decline, the news anchor Crosland outlines his strategy for securing their floors in his overwrought announcer’s style. As he does, the drunken Eleanor Powell treats him as if he’s actually on TV: “Now and then she reached forward with one hand, as if trying to adjust Crosland’s image, perhaps alter the colour values of his fleshy cheeks or turn down the volume of his voice” (48). There is no distinction between Crosland the man and Crosland the image on TV. The middle-floor residents gravitate toward Crosland as their leader because he injects even more televisual style into their lives.

Despite their infatuation with TV, the residents long to replace its hollow pleasure with something more visceral—life with consequence. The disintegration of the high-rise is a process of abandoning the televisual for the primal. This is already apparent in the fact that all the residents mute their TVs—even in the early stages TV serves only as background inspiration for the spectacular violence. At Charlotte’s first party, her TV shows a prison break: “[T]he silent images of crouching warders and police, and the tiers of barricaded cells, flickered between her legs […] The same images glowed through his neighbours’ doorways when [Laing] returned to his apartment” (35). This early scene foreshadows the residents’ own attempt to break free of the grip of televisual narratives on their minds. Once the power in the building fails completely, TV disappears, allowing them to pursue more visceral pleasures.

Gulls

The flock of estuarine gulls that occupies the roof becomes a fixture in Royal’s narrative, symbolizing the possibility of spiritual transcendence through a return to the primal. The appearance of the gulls heralds the building’s descent into barbarism. As this barbarism ramps up, Royal notices they feed on this decay. They scavenge the remains of a cocktail party on the roof, giving the scene a prehistoric atmosphere:

The remains of a cocktail-party marquee, bedraggled in the rain, lay in the gutter below the balustrade. The gulls, heavy wings folded, strutted among the cheese sticks scattered around a cardboard carton. The potted palms had been untended for months, and the whole roof increasingly resembled a voracious garden. The sense of a renascent barbarism hung among the overturned chairs and straggling palms (96-97).

Royal envisions these living dinosaurs—“flown from some archaic landscape, responding to the same image of the sacred violence to come” (97)—as the crusaders of the atavistic wave sweeping the building.

In Jungian psychology, birds—in their ability to fly—symbolize spiritual transcendence. The ominous, deathly gulls indicate that violence is the means of achieving this transcendence. Through imagery and association the gulls are characterized as emblems of violence and death. Royal sees the gulls clustered on the elevator heads: “Like birds at dusk waiting among the cornices of a mausoleum, they flicked their wings against the bone-like concrete” (103). Later, the gulls appear amid the blood and flesh coating the roof, their appearance in these signs of death further connecting them to the ritualistic violence of the high-rise.

When the women’s commune restores order to the high-rise—symbolized by their restoration of the upper floors—the gulls disappear. On the morning of his summit, Wilder awakes to find that the incessant crying of the gulls has stopped. The barbarism that gripped the high-rise for months has disappeared, replaced by the new order of the commune.

The Animate High-Rise

In the psychogeographical interplay between the characters and the high-rise, the building is a character unto itself. The high-rise is personified as a looming, leviathan presence like an evil manor in a gothic horror story. The first act of violence—Wilder’s drowning of the Afghan hound—awakes this leviathan: As Laing looks over the pool reflecting on the event, “the slight lateral movement of the building in the surrounding airstream sent a warning ripple across the flat surface of the water, as if in its pelagic deeps an immense creature was stirring” (26). This warning ripple portends the incipient waves of violence.

Rather than an inert backdrop, the high-rise is a protean structure that reacts to the residents like a living organism. When Laing returns from work, it often looks as if the high-rise has grown in his absence, becoming even more menacing. The malfunction of its services seems intentional, as if the building is antagonizing its tenants. When the air-conditioning fails and the vents begin spurting clouds of dust, Wilder feels as if the building is “a huge and aggressive malefactor […] determined to inflict every conceivable hostility upon them” (68). By provoking the residents with malfunction, the high-rise drives them to violence against it and each other.