SOURCE: Brigg, Peter. “J. G. Ballard: Time Out of Mind.” Extrapolation 35, no. 1 (spring 1994): 43-59.

In the following essay, Brigg perceives Ballard's treatment of time and reality as entities apprehended subjectively by the individual.

… instead of treating time like a sort of glorified scenic railway, I'd like to see it used for what it is, one of the perspectives of the personality, and the elaboration of concepts such as the time zone, deep time and archaeopsychic time.

—J. G. Ballard, “Which Way to Inner Space”

The full implications of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' discovery of human subjectivity are only now beginning to unfurl. While it is a commonplace to assert that each man sees the world in his own way, there remains an unwritten and unstated assumption that the world remains an objective entity and that one is reasonable or sane if one “sees it the way it...