Reports from an Expanding Universe: J. G. Ballard and Sensory Deprivation

Abstract

For biographer John Baxter, J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) echoes the work of neurophysiologist John C. Lilly, who, from 1954 onwards, conducted a series of sensory deprivation experiments with floatation tanks. Lilly’s work paralleled that of psychologist Donald O. Hebb. Hebb used soundproof isolation chambers to simulate the withdrawal of sensory stimuli from test subjects. James Kennaway’s novel The Mind Benders (1963) drew on these experiments whilst Paddy Chayefsky’s Altered States (1978) took the visionary aspects of Lilly’s work as its basis. In the case of Ballard, language redolent of this field of post-war experimentation appears across his career, in The Drowned World and short stories such as ‘Manhole 69’ (1957), ‘The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon’ (1964), and ‘The Enormous Space’ (1989). In each case the lack of sensory stimuli results in experiences of spatial, psychological, and temporal expansion. After unpacking the link between Ballard’s texts and the surrounding context of sensory deprivation, this article marks out his thematic difference from the likes of Lilly, Kennaway, and Chayefsky et al. In examining this representation of men in the process of disappearing, this article uses the literature of sensory deprivation to re-focus Ballard’s post-literary status back to the functionality of his writing. Further, it argues for a posthuman understanding of Ballard’s predilection for terminal identities framed as transformative states.