JG Ballard’s ‘The Delta at Sunset’

JG Ballard’s The Delta at Sunset, written in 1964, bears more than a passing resemblance to Hemingway’s much more famous The Snows of Kilimanjaro, from 1936. Whether or not Ballard ever acknowledged the influence, the debt is unmistakable. And yet there are profound differences between both stories, which not only reflect Ballard’s and Hemingway’s vastly different outlooks and backgrounds, but also make The Delta at Sunset an original story, that is in no way lessened by the borrowings from Hemingway’s earlier tale.

The Delta at Sunset revolves around an archaeologist, Charles Gifford, who has had an accident while leading a scientific expedition to some (fictional) Meso-American Toltec ruins, located close to an (also fictional) delta, that may be vaguely located along the Yucatán coast. As a result of the accident, Gifford is prostrate in a stretcher chair and feverish with a gangrenous foot. The party waits for a boat or a helicopter that may transport them to a distant settlement, a rescue that we know will not arrive in time to save Gifford’s life. His wife, Louise, continues to work on the archaeological dig together with their assistant, while Gifford is cared for by Mechippe, a local Indian who he knows from previous expeditions, and who he appreciates in his own rather odious way. Beyond letting us know that Charles married Louise for her money and that he is a self-hating misanthrope who thinks of himself as something of a failure, Ballard does not tell us much more about his characters. This is where Ballard’s borrowings from Hemingway end, and where the differences begin.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro is almost entirely focused on Harry, a failed journalist who married Helen for her money and who is dying of a gangrenous foot in the African savanna. He is more deeply odious than Charles Gifford, perhaps because Hemingway was better at understanding humans, and at writing about them, than Ballard was. Or perhaps because Ballard was a better human being than Hemingway. I can appreciate Hemingway’s greatness as a writer, but as a fervent animal lover I will never be able to come to terms with his murderous devotion to hunting and bullfighting, and with his very human hubris towards species other than his own. Ballard’s characters are more often than not psychological wrecks, and deeply unsettling, and often suffer horrendous mental and physical fates. But there is not one instance of animal suffering, that I can recall, in all of his writing.

In Hemingway’s story there are glimpses of the African savanna and descriptions of the everyday history of interwar Europe that are almost cinematographic in their realism. The climax, of course, is Harry’s imaginary flight in a small airplane, as he dies in his tent. I keep reading Hemingway, despite my dislike for the man, because he brings to life like few other writers, albeit like a good number of photographers, places and times that I missed by only a few decades and that, for a number of reasons, I wish that I had been able to be a participant of. In contrast to Hemingway’s real-life depictions of Harry and Helen, we only get to see a blurry photograph of the characters in The Delta at Sunset. But that is fine because, as with much of Ballard, his dystopian landscapes are what truly matters. Humans are the vehicles that he uses to convey those alien, ghostly and wonderful vistas which are what I have associated with the adjective “ballardian” since I first read The Drowned World some half a century ago.

The Delta at Sunset opens with a typically ballardian scene, as a “dense powdery dusk” encroaches over the mud flats of the drying delta. It is the beginning of summer and also of the dry season. This of course would not be correct if the story actually took place in Yucatán, where summer is the wet season. But that is quintessential Ballard. Many of his stories are set in geographic locations that one can easily identify with actual places, but the match is seldom exact. In this case the differences are subtle, and perhaps unintentional. In other stories, such as Deep End and The Day of Forever, they are profound and carefully crafted. But they always create a unique sense of “realistic unreality”, as it were. We know that those places, as described by Ballard, do not exist. Yet they might just as easily be real, whereas what we believe to be the reality of those places is an illusion.

Every evening, as Gifford watches the end of the day over the mud flats of the drying delta, his mind travels 50 million years back in time, to lagoons crawling with ancient reptiles, which stood where the delta is now. As with his geography, Ballard’s time perspective is not correct; 250 million years would have been closer to the mark. But this is a minor detail. The primeval landscape that Ballard manages to impress upon one’s mind is powerful, because of its undeniable plausibility, even if the ancient reptiles exist only in Gifford’s feverish dreams. He sees a multitude of snakes appearing on the mud flats every evening at exactly the same time, that are no more real than the reptiles. They are hallucinations that he suffers as he wakes up from bouts of fever, which are explained by Ballard as symbols of the deep loathing that Gifford (and Ballard?) feels towards his own species. And yet the reader accepts all of these ghosts, the ancient lagoons, the Mesozoic reptiles, the snakes, as parts of a solid reality.

Ballard is supremely skillful at converting seemingly comprehensible time intervals (“fifteen years earlier, when Gifford had come to the delta with his first archaeological expedition….”) into unbridgeable abysses of time. The worlds separated by a decade or two of Ballard’s time are more often than not as different as if they had never shared a common past. Conversely, the tens of millions of years that separate the present from an alien geologic past are easily absorbed by the reader in a torrent of wonder that few other writers can conjure. In The Delta at Sunset Gifford’s foray into deep time takes place only in his mind, but this is not so obviously the case in stories such as Now Wakes the Sea, and most notably in Prisoner of the Coral Deep, perhaps one of his greatest short masterpieces.

Reading Ballard one is always drawn into a universe that is at the same time familiar and deeply alien, that one yearns for precisely because of its terminal dystopia. A universe from which it would not be possible to return to the reality that we know, but at the same time a universe that one would willingly travel to, even if it meant giving up all that one loves of the real world. This is Ballard’s genius. And there is, from my point of view, a close parallel to Hemingway, in the sense that both writers describe places and times that I would have chosen over my lot, if I had had the chance. Ballard’s empty vistas, often immersed in frozen dusk, almost always quiet if not for musical flowers or singing statues, are a refuge from the horrendous babble of the age of instant messaging. Our overcrowded, vacuous, meaningless world is the past of Ballard’s peaceful and empty universe. I would, however, also jump at the opportunity of escaping from the banality of the twenty first century by moving three quarters of a century back in time, to an era masterfully captured by Hemingway, when there were meaningful causes to fight for.