The “uncanny valley” is a phrase coined to describe our revulsion for things that seem very nearly human, but are not quite “right”. The term, proposed by engineering professor Masahiro Mori in 1970, is normally applied to human responses to animations, robots or computer imagery that is so recognisably like us that any tiny difference is all the more noticeable, and disconcerting or even horrifying. It’s territory in which JG Ballard seems to have spent a lot of time.
Among the unsettling things about High-Rise, Ballard’s 1975 novel, is how close it comes to our normal human experience, while skewing it. We can, for example, recognise that the setting has foundations in reality. We know about tower blocks: malfunctioning lifts, power outages; the petty inconveniences of life in the building seem all too familiar (and presumably had even greater resonance when the book was first published).
The people, too, are instantly recognisable: 70s sophisticates, partygoers, social climbers. They are aspirational, middle-class, everyday. Ballard emphasises their normality by labelling them according to professional type – doctors, TV presenters, architects and lecturers. Partly, he shows them as respectable, successful people because there’s a thrill of dissonance in observing the gulf between their working lives and their activities in the tower.
Partly also, it’s funny to see the thrusting middle classes living in their own mess. It’s a joke that works especially well because it’s at our expense. Ballard’s readers are more likely than most to see something of themselves in those university-educated, chattering-class hooligans. He chose these people because he knew they would resonate most strongly with his intended victims: us.
We Ballardians, chatterers, readers of broadsheet newspapers and speculative literary fiction can’t help but feel kinship with the inhabitants of High-Rise. He holds up a mirror. When Royal, the architect designer of the dysfunctional building, sprouts horns, so does our reflection. When everyone begins to run amok, it feels all the stranger because it is happening in our world.
High-Rise contains enough that is (in a phrase Ballard repeats throughout the novel) “matter-of-fact” to make the fantasy seem more lurid. The book’s realism makes it uncanny.
Perhaps “reality” is the wrong word. Ballard often maintained he was “surreal”. “The essence of the surrealist imagination,” he told a German magazine, “is its ability to translate the apparent forms of the world, the outer forms, into inner ones, into mental forms. The surrealist painter doesn’t seek to interpret the outer world as the classic schools of painting did … the surrealists recreate the outer world, completely in fact. And this was exactly the right method for SF, which needs something very similar. I used this concept of ‘psychological space’, and that again I found in surrealist paintings. I thought, that’s exactly what I need in science fiction.”
That idea can clearly be applied to the strange conditions whereby the High-Rise building seems to have a mind of its own and the real is so out of kilter. Ballard was a surrealist. High-Rise is strange, disturbing and disconnected from most normal experience. Yet the novel draws much of its power from ‘the real world’ and historical fact. Ballard suggested it had direct inspirations.
In 1978, he told Jon Savage (then a young punk journalist writing for Search & Destroy) that he first had the idea for High-Rise thanks to “the most incredible triviality” of the arguments that used to break out in a luxurious block of flats near his parents house in Victoria. There, Ballard said, the residents “spent all their time bickering with one another, complaining about small things constantly: ‘Who’s going to pay for the maintenance of the potted plant display on the 17th floor landing?’”
He went on to tell a story of renting a flat on the Costa Brava (near, he enjoyed pointing out, to “Dali’s place”). Most of those in the resort were middle-class French: “they all had their bloody boats”. And they, too, spent an “enormous amount of their time” bickering about nothing. One of the residents filled in the hours “with his back to the sea” training his camera on Ballard’s 12-storey apartment block.
Ballard at first assumed the man was a “peeping Tom” because, he said “my girlfriend was walking around in the nude”. But the author eventually realised the man was taking photos because of “an enormous amount of antagonism between the people of the lower floors and the people in the top”. He was snapping people dropping cigarette ends and other rubbish from the upper floors on to lower balconies. The man announced this, eventually, by putting up a sign threatening to shame the litterbugs by pinning his photos on a noticeboard. “Who would believe it? A holiday in this expensive block, and here’s this guy so upset with the misbehaviour of those people on the 12th floor, that he stands with his back to the sea, with his camera, waiting to catch somebody in the act. Some guy who’s probably a dentist, so obsessed with the sort of hostilities that are so easily provoked.”
So far, so High-Rise, and funny. But there’s a crueller reality. The novel might have drawn some immediate inspiration from this bickering and rivalry on the Spanish Costa, but the violence and extremism had another source. Ballard had experienced confinement, isolation and societal breakdown in the second world war, when he was interned in a Shanghai prisoner of war camp. Physical imagery from this experience coloured his writing (the dried-up and discoloured swimming pools were something he saw in Shanghai). He had also seen the moral abdication of middle-class professionals – including his own parents – when cast adrift and thrust into a fight for survival.
Possibly the most upsetting thing about the sense of the uncanny valley in JG Ballard’s book isn’t where the novel deviates from humanity. It’s where there’s a deeper reality behind the fantasy; where the apparently strange acts of his protagonists have historical precedent. Where the unlikely starts to feel all too familiar. Where we realise that truly frightening people walk among us. That they might be you and I.
