Walking around Lake Bluff that night was an eerie experience – rows of ghostly houses, sunk in the darkness. It wasn’t until late the next afternoon that the power came back on. Twenty hours without electricity is a long time, and it continually reminds you of how dependent you are on modern technology for almost all aspects of life. Victims of catastrophic storms often go for days without power, while living in proximity to areas that continue as normal. At the back of my mind in situations like this is the unsettling question: how long will people tolerate it before they start to revert to barbarism?
The event brought to mind the work of J. G. Ballard, the great imaginer of technological and civilizational breakdown. One of Ballard’s techniques is to create “zones of reversion” in the midst of modern civilization. In one discrete area, everything breaks down, while the world outside this zone goes on as normal. In his novel Concrete Island, the archetypal modern man Robert Maitland (an architect, married to a doctor, and driving a Jaguar) winds up marooned on a strip of land next to a highway due to an accident. He spends the rest of the novel trying to get off this “island,” while the bustling city of London, all around him, goes about its usual business.
The social manifestations of this sort of reversion are explored in depth in High-Rise. In this novel, a modern apartment building falls into dilapidation as it becomes the scene of a class war among its residents (with one’s status in the social hierarchy corresponding to how high up one lives in the building). The struggle is not just class-based but also psychological and anthropological; Ballard fuses insights from Marx, Freud and Darwin together into one lurid but very localized story of status competition.
Unlike Maitland, who struggles to leave his island in the middle of the city, the denizens of the high-rise commute back and forth between their collapsing habitat and the “normal” world. Ballard does not really explore how this daily interplay of two worlds affects them, or indeed why they continue to live in the collapsing high-rise. This engenders speculation. Do they in some way enjoy living in a bifurcated world – half civilized, half barbarian? Are they stuck due to habit, along the lines of The Exterminating Angel?
Notwithstanding Ballard’s bleak view of human nature, even if the blackout had gone on longer, I wouldn’t have expected the people of Lake Bluff to start eating dogs and murdering each other, as the characters in High-Rise do. But events like this make me wonder where people have their breaking point, after which civilization begins to fall apart, and what we and our neighbors should be doing to prevent the worst outcomes.
You can read interesting reviews of High-Rise here and here.