Laura Colombino

THE HOUSE AS SKIN

J. G. Ballard, Existentialism and
Archigram’s mini-environments

This paper investigates J. G. Ballard’s vision of the house, tracing its origin to the ideas
expressed by the British architectural avant-gardes of the fifties and sixties; these regarded
inhabited spaces as psycho-physical membranes, bio-architectural constructs functioning as
extensions of the body. The philosophical sources of Ballard’s early fiction are also
investigated to show the impact of Existentialism on his concept of dwelling, both via early
Pop Art and directly through Sartre’s and Heidegger’s works. One of the aims is to disclose
the importance for Ballard of Archigram’s fantasies of bio-technological responsive houses
but also to interrogate the imbrications in his fiction of such fantasies with contemporary
theoretical ideas of dwelling (McLuhan, Banham), authenticity, and the estranging chaos
and unhomeliness of the world (Heidegger). The article discusses specific examples of
Ballard’s unhomely, post-human habitations, from psychotropic houses to the neo-gothic
technological tower-block, showing how they are imbued with contemporary architectural
and philosophical theories. A special emphasis is placed on the uncanny and – so I argue
here – gendered spaces of High-Rise.

Keywords Archigram; Brutalism; Marshall McLuhan; Peter Reyner Banham;

architecture; body; High-Rise

Post-catastrophic, existentialist dwellings

In 1956, the year J. G. Ballard published his first short story ‘Prima Belladonna’, the
Pop Art exhibition ‘This is Tomorrow’ was staged at the Whitechapel Art Gallery,
London, by a loose aggregation of artists, designers and writers known as the
Independent Group, and assembled at the Institute of Contemporary Art. The
exhibition consisted of a dozen stands, each one the collaboration of a different team.
The construction put up by sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi was realised with the external
collaboration of architects Alison and Peter Smithson, photographer Nigel Henderson
and his anthropologist wife Judith Stephen. The installation, titled Patio and Pavilion,
comprised a sort of small and temporary storage room made of recovered wooden
boards with a corrugated plastic roof. On top, inside and outside, there were stones,
bricks and found objects gathered on the roads around Bethnal Green in London’s
East End. As architect Andrea Branzi suggests, ‘[t]he ‘‘great hopes’’ of modernity, the
megaprojects, the new cathedrals no longer exist; in their place lies an opaque

European Journal of English Studies Vol. 16, No. 1, April 2012, pp. 21–31
ISSN 1382-5577 print/ISSN 1744-4233 online ª 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2012.655407
22 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES

territory of objects, of temporary storehouses, but also the courage of a great vitality’
(2004: 439). The installation was a tangible meditation on the demands of the
habitat and a warning against the technocratic fetishism of planning. ‘Paolozzi called
the source of his fascination a ‘‘metamorphosis of rubbish’’’ (Lichtenstein and
Schergenberger, 2001: 59): an affirmation of the messiness of everyday life
challenging modernist abstract formalism and search for perfection.
From the late 1950s, Ballard would associate with art circles including Richard
Hamilton, Peter Reyner Banham and Paolozzi himself. So it is no coincidence that the
description of a pavilion similar to Paolozzi’s should be found in Ballard’s urban novel
Concrete Island (1973) where the shack built by Proctor, a space of debris enacting the
reversal of capitalist society through the apotheosis of its residue (Colombino, 2006:
623), is presented as ‘[a]t least as good as most of the speculative building that’s going
up these days. I can see,’ says Maitland to Proctor, ‘that you’re a real architect’
(Ballard, 1994: 163). In the autobiography Miracles of Life (2008), reminiscing about
his visit to the 1956 exhibition, Ballard foregrounds the striking impression he
received from the installation: the ‘terminal hut, as I thought of it, stood on a patch of
sand, on which were laid out the basic implements that modern man would need to
survive: a power tool, a bicycle wheel and a pistol’ (2008: 187–88). In Ballard’s
works too, dwellings are often, either explicitly or implicitly, post-catastrophic and
display a return to primordial conditions. This again is particularly true of the pavilion
in Concrete Island, which shows the same anti-technocratic architectural discourse and
the same poetics of found industrial materials which featured so prominently in ‘This
is Tomorrow’. This obscure landscape of technological debris was regarded by Pop
artists as the new natural environment human beings were meant to inhabit while, as
Pop Art artists Joe Tilson writes in his book and print artwork The Software Chart
Questionnaire (1968) displayed at the Centre for Modern and Contemporary Art, La
Spezia (Italy), men and women of the post-war world were ‘the primitives of a new
civilisation’.
In Miracles of Life, while reconstructing the encounter with what will become his
privileged sources of inspiration – psychoanalysis, surrealism and, to a lesser extent,
film – Ballard drops the remark that in the late 1940s he ‘was prone to backing up an
argument about existentialism with a raised fist’ (2008: 135). Negligible as it may
seem, this passing statement acquires prominence if seen in relation to his later
interest in architectural projects influenced by Pop Art. In fact, a major element that
inspired the art works of Henderson, Paolozzi and William Turnbull during the late
1940s was precisely the existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. In the catalogue
of ‘This is Tomorrow’, the definition of architecture as ‘[a] particle snatched from
space, rhythmically modulated by membranes dividing it from surrounding chaos’
(Crosby, 1956: section 7, n.p.) is clearly symptomatic of this legacy. The existentialist
sees the human being as confronting in anxiety the chaotic void into which we are
thrown, struggling always to build new islands of being into nothingness. Human
beings are not the measure of the world, nor have they the power to enact the law
they deem good; rather, we are committed to pulling together whatever can be
managed for extreme need and distress. A rickety shack reflecting uncertainty upon
itself, the Patio and Pavilion installation evokes a problematic relationship with the
chaotic forces of nature, the primitive abode providing only a tenuous protection from
the outer unknown and potentially hostile space.
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Existentialism was very much in the air at the time, so it comes as no surprise that
Ballard was enticed by its theories. Yet hardly any attention has been paid to the
subject (with the notable exception of Roger Luckhurst [1997: 662–66]) and certainly
none to how Sartre and Martin Heidegger influenced Ballard’s concept of dwelling.
Therefore, this will be closely investigated here to show the overlapping in Ballard’s
work of existentialist concerns and responses to contemporary architectural practices
and theories. The aim is to disclose the importance for him of the architectural group
Archigram’s fantasies of bio-technological responsive houses but also to interrogate
the imbrications in his fiction of such fantasies with contemporary philosophical ideas
of dwelling and unhomeliness.
In Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre defines dwelling in terms of the accessibility
of surrounding objects. Home is an arbitrary contour: my being-there is a pure given, he
argues, a space on hand whose protective isolation is proportionate to the ‘coefficient
of utility and of adversity’ (2003: 364), and the amount of resistance that surrounding
objects offer to the projects of the self. With its narrow confines and tight ring of
essential items, Sartre’s concept of inhabited space is strikingly reminiscent of both
Paolozzi’s terminal hut (as Ballard terms it) and the form of habitation described in the
Lunghua Camp section of Ballard’s Miracles of Life: ‘[i]n the G Block a boy . . .
constructed a cubicle like a beggar’s hovel around his narrow bed. This was his private
world that he defended fiercely’ (2008: 69). Elsewhere we read, ‘[p]erhaps the reason
why I have lived in the same Shepperton house for nearly fifty years . . . is that my small
and untidy house reminds me of our family room in Lunghua’ (ibid.: 80). As Heidegger
argues in Being and Time (1927): ‘‘‘Being’’ [Sein], as the infinitive of ‘‘ich bin’’
. . .signifies ‘‘to reside alongside. . .’’, ‘‘to be familiar with. . .’’’ (2005: 80) while the
fundamental aspect of dwelling, as he explains in his late essay ‘Building Dwelling
Thinking’ (1951), is staying with and taking care of things. This care is predicated upon
the circle of familiarity (of objects and relationships) constructed out of the estranging
chaos and unhomeliness of the world. The line drawn around one’s place is what lets
things belong to that place and, therefore, be released from the disquieting space
outside. Heidegger argues that the phenomenological essence of such a place depends
upon the concrete, clearly defined nature of its boundary, for, as he puts it, ‘[a]
boundary is not that at which something stops, but, as the Greeks recognized, the
boundary is that from which something begins its essential unfolding’ (1977: 332).
Dwelling ‘as ‘‘residing alongside. . .’’, and ‘‘[b]eing familiar with’’’ (Heidegger, 2005:
233) allows the escape from the anguish of unhomeliness, the indefiniteness of the
world into which we are thrown. Yet, for the early Heidegger of Being and Time, it is
precisely ‘the existential ‘‘mode’’ of the ‘‘not-at-home’’’ (ibid.: 233) which
constitutes the condition for human beings’ recognition of their authentic selves.
This sense of the unhomely as our genuine destiny is one of the elements which
compose Ballard’s presentation of inhabited spaces especially in his early fiction. The
short story ‘The Garden of Time’ (1962) is emblematic in this connection: the whole
story is about waiting for an end felt as inevitable and in the same move its deferral
through the taking care of homely things. A ‘high wall . . . encircled the estate,’ writes
Ballard, whereas outside, ‘dull and remote’, the surrounding plain was a ‘drab
emptiness emphasising the seclusion and mellow magnificence of the villa’ (2002a:
405). While attending to his daily routines and taking care of familiar objects with their
comforting ‘presence-at-hand’ (Heidegger, 2005: 168), Axel, the protagonist of ‘The
24 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES

Garden of Time’, deceives himself into thinking no threat is impending the encircled
world he shares with his wife. In these moments of oblivion, he lives not, as Heidegger
would have it, as ‘the authentic Self’ but as the ‘they-self’, that is, as society prescribes ‘the
world and Being-in-the-World which lies closest should be interpreted’; complying with
such a prescription . . . ‘brings tranquillized self-assurance – ‘‘Being-at-home’’ with all its
obviousness’ (2005: 167 and 233). So, reassuringly ‘[s]hielded by the pavilion on one side
and the high garden wall on the other, the villa in the distance, Axel felt composed and
secure, the plain with its encroaching multitude a nightmare from which he had safely
awakened’ (Ballard, 2002a: 409–10). At other times, though, the couple’s existentialist
strain seems fully fledged: ‘[his wife’s] use of ‘‘still’’ had revealed her own unconscious
anticipation of the end’ (ibid.: 409). Anguish is the emotive situation which, for
Heidegger, accompanies the attainment of authenticity, because it reveals, in the form of
anticipation (a crucial term in Being and Time), our being-for-death. The advancing throng
will soon bring the couple face to face with their genuine destiny: the final triumph of the
chaotic world outside is accomplished when the impending inchoate and ‘ceaseless tide of
humanity’ (Ballard, 2002a: 412) finally overcomes the villa.
Ballard’s later short story ‘Motel Architecture’ (1978) is a further example of
existentialist dwelling, but with the notable difference that here the cold, abstract,
geometric forms of the apartment are themselves the avatar of our mortal destiny:
modernism is an ‘architecture of death’, Ballard states in the newspaper article ‘A
Handful of Dust’, and in this respect, its style is existentialist (2006a: 16). So the usual
connotations of interior and exterior are turned inside out in ‘Motel Architecture’, and
the estrangement of Pangborn, the protagonist of the story, is produced by his very
enclosure within the confines of his apartment. His alienation is not fled from but fully
embraced and probed in search of a more authentic condition: in ‘the immaculate glass
and chromium universe of the solarium’, which he has never left over the last 12 years,
Pangborn embarks, along with the imaginary intruder haunting his flat, ‘on their
rejection of the world and the exploration of their absolute selves’ (Ballard, 2002b: 503
and 512).

Regressive and responsive houses

Paolozzi’s pavilion, with its dusty transitoriness, seemed to mark the end of a period,
the breaking away from the old theorems of modernism and its megaprojects.
However, an important phenomenon was soon to emerge which denied this toning
down of architectural experimentation. From the early 1960s, the young English
architects who had lost faith in formal modernity would embrace the new idol of
technology. It was the architectural style of New Brutalism that produced this
resurgence of ‘creative thought on the certainties of modern architecture, which via
Reyner Banham would lead to Celdric Price and Archigram’ (Branzi, 2004: 440). This
architectural group was founded in 1961 and included Warren Chalk, Peter Cook,
David Greene, Mike Webb, Dennis Crompton and Ron Herron. Central to
Archigram’s philosophy was the concept of modularity, the use of standardised and
interchangeable units. Archigram’s Plug-in City project (1964), for example, offered a
new vision of the city of the future made up of components plugged into networks
and grids. The high flexibility of the urban system, combined with the fantasy of a
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responsive environment capable of feedback, was symptomatic of the 1960s belief that
inhabited spaces could be rendered adjustable to the changing needs of their
inhabitants. This adaptability put into question the very externality of body and
architectural space to one another, producing the imaginary collapse of any distance
between them; to the extent that dwellings were often conceived by contemporary
architects and intellectuals as a continuation of our biological and sensorial systems. By
placing its emphasis firmly on introvert spaces, Archigram signalled its distance from
Guy Debord’s psychogeography and his theory of urban dérive which were so
influential in the Parisian cultural scene at that time. With the rapid growth of mass
media, the contested realm of the city became evacuated for Archigram, which
favoured the individual over the collective viewpoint, indicating a turn from the
environments at the urban scale to the isolation of individual bodies in their
technological houses. This marked a most significant departure from earlier,
modernist urban theories as well as contemporary Situationist ones. First radio, then
television, were regarded as the conduits for society’s attempts to domesticate
fantasy; and with the rise of technologies for controlling the domestic interior, the
street became increasingly irrelevant, qualifying as a mere artistic attraction. This
insight is shared by Ballard and the protagonist of his short story ‘Motel Architecture’:
‘[w]hat would once have been called the ‘‘real’’ world, the quiet streets outside, the
private estate of hundreds of similar solaria, made no effort to intrude itself into
Pangborn’s private world’ (2002b: 506).
So all sense of urban locality is lost for Archigram but the idea of place is
reintroduced in a regressive guise through the dwelling. This can be observed in a
number of architectural projects such as Cook and Greene’s Spray Plastic House Project
(1961), a proposal for customised cave-like dwellings formed by excavating spaces
from large polystyrene blocks, and in Chalk’s Capsule Homes (1964), ‘the ultimate in
self-existent, conditioned mini-environment with man as extension of machine’
(Steiner, 2009: 138). Similarly, Greene’s Living Pod (1966) was ‘designed to resemble
an organism, complete with inflatable ‘‘womb’’ seat’ (ibid.: 140). Ballard’s urban
space – especially in the novel Crash (1973), with the car as a narrow habitat – is
clearly reminiscent of the claustrophobic, responsive mini-environments experi-
mented with by Archigram: the car becomes a mobile dwelling space altogether
similar to the Cushicle and Suitaloon designed by the architect Michael Webb in 1966–
67 as extreme expression of the auto-environment concept. Environments’ sensorial
response was a central objective in many of these projects where technology ‘began to
insert itself more and more into the biological equation’ (Steiner, 2009: 14). The
Bauhaus photographer and designer László Moholy-Nagy, who had a strong appeal to
the post-war London-based alternative art scene, ‘had long argued that the speed of
modern life required biological adaptation’ and ‘that a fully realized modern
architecture required symbiosis with human biology’ (Steiner, 2009: 18–19). A
driving force on the London scene of the time, Banham reports enthusiastically on his
experience of Archigram’s reactive and adaptive pneumatic structures so similar to
organic shapes where ‘[e]very slight change of state inside or out – even a heated
conversation – brought compensating movement in the skin’ of ‘the enclosing
membrane’ (Steiner, 2009: 162). In Understanding Media (1964) Marshall McLuhan
describes the ideal of the house as skin as the logical outcome of the experimentation
with space capsules, air jet, and buildings with walls and floors that can be moved at
26 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES

will. ‘Such flexibility,’ writes McLuhan, ‘naturally tends toward the organic. Human
sensitivity seems once more to be attuned to the universal currents that made of tribal
man a cosmic skin-diver’ (2001: 138). ‘Housing as shelter,’ he states, ‘is an extension
of our bodily heat-control mechanisms – a collective skin or garment’ (ibid.: 133).
The psychotropic (PT) houses imagined in Ballard’s short story ‘The Thousand
Dreams of Stellavista’ (1962), which react and adjust to the movements and feelings
of dwellers and visitors, are further evidence of the early impact of architectural
avant-gardes on Ballard. Borrowing Hal Foster’s words, it could be said that Ballard’s
PT houses envisage ‘technology as a prosthetic extension of the human sensorium’ and
share Archigram’s ‘imperative that architecture and design not only express but
engage contemporary technologies, however blunt or delirious the effects might be’
(2002: 14). So the house becomes hypersensitive in this story, absorbing and
responding to the psycho-physical reactions of every new owner. Ballard’s
descriptions echo Banham’s visionary response to Archigram’s projects and articulate
it narratively: ‘He put his hand on the wall behind us. The plastex swam and whirled
like boiling toothpaste, then extruded itself into a small ledge. Stamers sat down on
the lip, which very quickly expanded to match to contours of his body, providing back
and arm rests’ (Ballard, 2002a: 416). In the modern electric age the whole humanity
is our skin, McLuhan would argue soon, and houses are themselves extensions of that
skin. This sense of total complicity between the subject and the world is predicated on
the assumption that dreams, fears, obsessions and perversions are no longer lodged
exclusively in the individual mind but also and primarily outside, in the mass
unconscious; and, even more significantly, that they find a material and spatial
extension in the inhabited environment. This is a pivotal concept for Ballard, too and
is most clearly shown in ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ where the social
unconscious and the architectural interior conflate to produce a single psychophysical
membrane around the subject. In this respect, Ballard’s concept of dwelling differs
from the unique, intimate chez soi conceived by Gaston Bachelard in La poétique de
l’espace (1958, Eng. transl. The Poetics of Space, 1964), a place of introspection which
still implies, in McLuhan’s terms, the old bourgeois subject with its individualism.
Conversely, the dwelling described by Ballard (and McLuhan) is one where nothing is
any longer intimately and exclusively one’s own: ‘[m]any medium-priced PT homes
resonate with the bygone laughter of happy families, the relaxed harmony of a
successful marriage’ (Ballard, 2002a: 419).
But ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ is also a modern reassessment of the
gothic uncanny, in that it revisits the tradition of the ghost story through the theme of
the haunted house where a murder has been committed. Yet the return of the dead
does not come under the traditional guise of a ghost, the phantom of an outward
human appearance, because now the real essence of the subject is firmly located
elsewhere, in the neural system. So the spectre loses its human outline to disperse as
reflexes and instinctual responses, frissons and nervous pangs, bodily smells,
breathings and heart beats, all of them emanating from the dwelling. This is also true
of ‘Motel Architecture’ where Pangborn ‘could hear the intruder’s pumping lungs and
feel his frightened pulse drumming through the floor into the arms of his chair’
(Ballard, 2002b: 515). Ballard’s redefinition of the revenant can be further illuminated
if seen in relation to his idea of transcendence expressed in the autobiographical
Miracles of Life. Recounting his experience as a medical student in Cambridge, he
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associates dissection with the re-emergence of personality: ‘each of the cadavers

seemed to have a distinct personality – the girth and general physique, the profile
bones of the face coming through the skin and reasserting themselves . . . Dissecting the
face . . . was a way of entering the private lives of the dead physicians and almost of
bringing them back to life’ (2008: 144, emphasis added). In the PT houses, these
physical signs of personality succeed in transcending death because they are elements
migrated from the body to achieve a new, independent existence of their own as
constituents of a dwelling. Yet their treacherous re-emergence implies that the post-
human house will vie with other biological forces and engage them in a deadly
struggle for survival. This theme will be considered in the following, final section
through the example of the Promethean housing unit described in the novel High-Rise.

Bio-technological monsters

In High-Rise (1975), the joint forces of Existentialism and Brutalism are active in the
conception of the ‘vertical city’ as ‘an architecture designed for war’ (Ballard, 2006b:
10). If Le Corbusier deemed that his modernist housing units would produce ‘des
rapports émouvants’ (Sbriglio, 1992: 5), in ‘A Handful of Dust’ Ballard contends that
the opposite was true. Modernism ‘excelled in the architecture of death’, he states,
and its ‘dark ghosts haunted the brutalist architecture so popular in Britain in the
1950s’ (2006a: 16). The spread of this practical and modern style was the result of the
1956 Housing Act, which gave impetus to the building of standardised, poor-quality
tower-blocks meant to respond to the problem of high-density urban living. ‘Out of
favour now,’ writes Ballard, ‘modernism survives in every high-rise sink estate of the
time, in the Barbican development and the Hayward Gallery in London . . . . We see its
demise in the 1960s kitchens and bathrooms, white-tiled laboratories that are above all
clean and aseptic, as if human beings were some kind of disease’ (2006a: 16).
The nihilism which, for him, is implicit in modernist abstract and rectilinear
forms features prominently in the tower-block described in High-Rise, whose ‘appeal
lay all too clearly in the fact that this was an environment built, not for man, but for
man’s absence’ (Ballard, 2006b: 25). Brutalist housing units ‘lacked mystery and
emotion’, Ballard suggests, and were ‘a little too frank about the limits of human
nature’ (2006a: 16); in philosophical terms, they expressed our Heideggerian being-
for-death. Although fascinated with the blunt recognition of our mortality inherent to
modernist architecture, Ballard shows an ambiguous attitude to the movement: ‘I’ve
always admired modernism and wish the whole of London could be rebuilt in the style
of Michael Manser’s brilliant Heathrow Hilton. But I know that most people, myself
included, find it difficult to be clear-eyed at all times and rise to the demands of a pure
and unadorned geometry’ (2006a: 16). In ‘Motel Architecture’, there is some
admiration on Ballard’s part for Pangborn’s search for his ultimate, authentic self
through his confinement in the chilling, ‘anonymous rectangles of blank skin’ (Ballard,
2002b: 516) that form his modernist apartment. Furthermore, the same fascination
seems implicit in the depiction of Pangborn’s existentialist anticipatory decision:
‘[e]ager now to merge with the white sky of the screen, to find that death in which he
would be rid forever of himself, of his intruding mind and body, he raised his knife to
his happy heart’ (ibid.: 516). Yet what he is so anxious to dispose of, the long-
28 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES

repressed corporality perceived as foul and ‘the intrusive fact of his own
consciousness’ (ibid.: 516), is at the same time what Ballard ambiguously propounds
elsewhere as ‘the one small node of reality left to us’ (1995: 5).
For Ballard, architectural forms are the foreclosure of a given culture’s own
imaginary. As such, they are a ground of both projection and recognition: they
materialise the subject’s image of itself and, in the same move, generate its need to
imaginatively remake itself so as to adjust, physically and psychologically, to the vision
of the individual and the world that inhabited spaces incarnate. ‘A new social type was
being created by the apartment building, a cool unemotional personality’ (2006b: 35),
he suggests in High-Rise, and this physical and psychological transformation is sensed
by Laing, the protagonist of the novel, as occurring right under his epidermis, in the
muscles and nerves which generate expressions and emotions: ‘[h]e touched the
tender skin, prodding the musculature as if searching for another self, the physiologist
who had taken a quiet studio in this expensive apartment building six months earlier’
(ibid.: 34). Darwinian environmental adaptation produces human beings’ quick
adjustment to the lines and forms provided by specific dwellings, which implies that
narration itself originates precisely from the transformative power of architecture: the
protagonists’ destiny, unknown to them, is already inscribed in the autonomous,
cryptic geometries of the places they inhabit.
Architectural forms are the codes and traces of the cerebral activity which produces
(and in turn is produced by) them. In High-Rise, for example, ‘the ragged skyline of the city’
centre which Laing has left to move into the rectilinear space of the modern block of flats,
‘resembled the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis’ (2006b: 9).
Constructional modules are signs on the collective skin of spaces and dwellings; tattoos of
civilisation which have detached from individual bodies to achieve their own independent
being and uncanny ontological existence. This is true of ‘The Thousand Dreams of
Stellavista’, as I have already argued, but is worth exploring further, and conclusively, in
relation to High-Rise. Indeed, the novel could be seen as an urban gothic tale where the
Corbusian unité d’habitation features as a bio-technological monster: ‘[s]he referred to the
high-rise as if it were some kind of huge animate presence . . . the elevators pumping up and
down the long shafts resembled pistons in the chamber of a heart. The residents moving
along its corridors were the cells in a network of arteries, the lights in their apartments the
neurons of a brain’ (Ballard, 2006b: 40).
In tune with Ballard’s association of modernist megastructures with fascism, the
apartment building is a place of regimentation whose small dictator, the architect
Anthony Royal, is a man of science in his way, in that he uses the high-rise monster he
has created as a social laboratory. Royal’s selfsame physical features and attire (we are
insistently reminded of his white jacket and pale hair) are significant in this
connection; their somewhat WASP character is meant to symbolise, as elsewhere in
Ballard’s fiction, an imperialist, technological and even fascist power. Fascist
architects and architectures are recurrent in Ballard: the designer of Vermillion Sands
in ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’, an exclusive, fully automated desert resort,
appears in photographs ‘glowering out of 1950-ish groups with Le Corbusier and
Lloyd Wright, stalking about some housing project in Chicago or Tokyo like a petty
dictator, heavy-jowled, thyroidal, with large lustreless eyes, and then the Vermillion
Sands: 1970 shots of him, fitting into the movie colony like a shark into a goldfish
bowl’ (Ballard, 2002a: 427). Ballard’s architects usually conceive of themselves as
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omnipotent; so, he seems to wonder, ‘[w]ill modern technology provide [them] with
hitherto undreamed-of means for tapping [their] own psychopathologies?’ (Ballard,
1995: 6). Modernist utopias’ realisations are of very varied nature for Ballard, going
from fascist regimes through ‘the styling of Mercedes cars, at once paranoid and
aggressive’ (2006a: 16), to Le Corbusier’s machine for living in; but whichever the
shape, for Ballard, the materialisation of twentieth-century dreams of paranoid
control have always slipped into social catastrophe. Rosi Braidotti’s discussion of
today’s technologies for artificial insemination is useful in this connection: she makes a
strong case that ‘the test-tube babies of today mark the long-term triumph of the
alchemists’ dream of dominating nature through their self-inseminating, masturbatory
practices . . . a long history of self-generation by and for the men themselves – men of
science . . . capable of producing new monsters and fascinated by their power’ (Weiss,
1999: 107). This lure would be the result of their fear of woman’s natural generative
power: her ‘excess, her ‘‘monstrosity’’, the monstrosity of (Deleuze’s) becoming-
woman, a becoming that has made her a site of fascination and horror’ (ibid.: 107).
Contemporary bio-technologies, argues Braidotti, ‘give us an illusory sense of control
over the monstrous/maternal, domesticating our horror and fascination, but, in so
doing, create new monsters, nonmaternal, cybernetic monsters who may end up
controlling us’ (ibid.: 109).
My final argument here is that Ballard’s high-rise is precisely the realisation of such
a fantasy, through which Royal unconsciously attempts to domesticate the generating
woman by means of his bio-technological creature. This contention is not wide of the
mark if we consider that the concept of woman’s procreative power as inversely
proportional to man’s strength is explored in Ballard’s early short story ‘Mr. F is Mr.
F’ (1961), where the gradual growth, extending throughout the tale, of a wife’s womb
corresponds to her husband’s increasingly retreating figure; so that, in the climax, the
baby’s birth coincides with the man’s death. But let us return to High-Rise. Here the
scientist does not succeed in eliminating the maternal monster and the novel ends
suitably with men succumbing to the new, powerful matriarchy of a ‘group of outcast
wives’ (Ballard, 2006b: 133) who practise cannibalism to breed their children. The
uncanny kindness of women lies in their final annihilation of the wicked male power
through men’s dismembering and physical incorporation. But even more to the point,
this regressive fantasy of a return to the womb is mirrored by the parallel
transformation of the inhabited spaces in the high-rise. The imposing housing unit, with
its phallic bio-technological armature and orthopaedic totality, is itself dismembered
into what Lacan would describe as a morcelated body (2003: 5), fragmented into mini-
environments which recall Archigram’s uteruses in which to live. Hastily raised
barricades and claustrophobic shanties are womb-like, devouring spaces which
constantly threaten to engulf the male protagonists: ‘[a]lmost everything movable in
the apartment, however small, [his wife] had added to the barricade, at times
threatening to entomb them for good . . . Once Wilder woke to find that she had
incorporated part of his left leg. Often it would take him half an hour to dig his way out of
the apartment’ (Ballard, 2006b: 124). With the gradual demise of the male housing
monster which yields to a uterine inchoate space, the aseptic flats of the vertical
concentration city, ‘dovetailed into each other to minimize space’ (ibid.: 9), revert to
post-catastrophic dwellings constructed out of found materials and objects. Reminiscent of
the pavilion Ballard observed at the Institute of Contemporary Art exhibition in 1956,
30 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES

these abodes are no more than dens carved out of the hostile, chaotic space of a new
primitive environment: in the high-rise, Laing ‘would build his dwelling place where he
was, with this woman and in this cave in the cliff face’ (ibid.: 99).

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Laura Colombino is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Genova,

Italy. Her major research interests are in post-1900 fiction and culture, with a special
focus on the inter-art analogy and inter-disciplinary studies. She is the author of Ford
 THE HOUSE AS SKIN 31

Madox Ford: Vision, Visuality and Writing (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008) and editor of Ford
Madox Ford and Visual Culture (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009). She has
published articles on Thomas Hardy, Ford Madox Ford and Robert Byron, and on
contemporary novelists such as J. G. Ballard, A. S. Byatt, Michael Moorcock, Geoff
Ryman and Iain Sinclair. Current projects include a forthcoming book entitled Spatial
Politics in Contemporary London Literature: Writing Architecture and the Body (London and
New York: Routledge). She has been a regular speaker at Ford Madox Ford and Literary
London conferences in England, France and Italy, and has lectured students at the
University of Genova and the University of Bologna. Address: Universitá degli Studi di
Genova, Dipartimento di Scienze della Comunicazione Linguistica e Culturale, Facoltá
di Lingue e Letterature Straniere, Piazza S. Sabina 2, 16124 Genova, Italy. [email:
laura.colombino@lingue.unige.it]
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