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In questo romanzo i punti di riferimento pittorici sono Jours de Lenteur (1937) di Yves
Tanguy, leggibile in chiave shakespeariana 208 , e La persistenza della memoria (1931) di Salvador
Dalì. Un altro capitolo s’intitola come un’altra opera di Tanguy, “Multiplication of the Arcs.” Come
in Concrete Island, anche qui alcuni dei personaggi richiamano quelli di The Tempest, come il
giovane minorato mentale Quilter (Calibano) e Miranda Lomax (Miranda) 209 . Il titolo del quadro di
Tanguy è preso in prestito per il capitolo finale del romanzo, e il quadro stesso figura tra gli
elementi della narrazione:
Behind it, the ark of his covenant, stood two photographs in a hinged blackwood frame. On the left
was a snapshot of himself at the age of four, sitting on a lawn between his parents before their divorce. On
the right, exorcizing this memory, was a faded reproduction of a small painting he had clipped from a
magazine, ‘Jours de Lenteur’ by Yves Tanguy. With its smooth, pebble-like objects, drained of all
associations, suspended on a washed tidal floor, this painting had helped to free him from the tiresome
repetitions of everyday life. The rounded milky forms were isolated on their ocean bed like the houseboat on
the exposed bank of the river 210 .
Lo scorrere dell’acqua del fiume corrisponde allo scorrere del tempo, perciò il letto vuoto
del fiume suggerisce un’interruzione del flusso temporale. Pertanto la ricerca dell’acqua da parte di
Ransom rappresenta la bramosia dello scorrere del tempo, immobilizzato in un eterno presente 211 .
In The Drought l’interrompersi del corso del fiume rimanda dunque all’interruzione del flusso del
tempo 212 .
Il secondo dipinto, le cui sabbie lo ricollegano al primo, suggerisce, come nota Gasiorek, il
rapporto con il ricordo 213 . Questo stesso quadro di Dalì sarà poi oggetto dell’attenzione di Talbot,
una delle varie incarnazioni del protagonista di The Atrocity Exhibition:
The Persistence of Memory. An empty beach with its fused sand. Here clock time is no longer valid.
Even the embryo, symbol of secret growth and possibility, is drained and limp. These images are the residues
208 «[…] within the painting's frame, Lomax is at once Prospero and Lear, Quilter Caliban and Miranda Lomax a
hideous deformation of Shakespeare’s Miranda.» R. Luckhurst, op. cit., p. 347.
209 «Ballard’s perverted treatment of motifs from The Tempest is also apparent in the character bearing the name of
Miranda in The Drought, who reveals herself to be the antithesis of the Shakespearean model of innocence and
virginity.» M. Delville, op. cit., p. 95.
210 J. G. Ballard, The Drought, London, Jonathan Cape, 1965, p. 11.
211 «[Ransom’s] search for water figures the desire for time in the desert of eternity.» E. Gomel, op. cit.
212 «There is a complex description of the river as losing its “forward flow” like the procession of linear time; what
matters now, in the movement of temporality, are the “random and discontinuous” eddies, multivallic intervals that
traverse the space between catastrophe and apocalypse.» R. Luckhurst, op. cit. (1997), p. 64.
213 «In this text the quest is for release from memory through a kind of self-purging ascesis […]. As with the visions of
Delvaux and Ernst in The Drowned World, so the imagery of the Tanguy and Dalì paintings that permeates The
Drought suggests that the events depicted exteriorise psychological adjustments and transformations: “The unvarying
light and absence of all movement made Ransom feel that he was advancing across an inner landscape where the
elements of the future stood around him like the objects in a still life, formless and without association” [The Drought,
p. 181].» A. Gasiorek, op. cit., p. 32.
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