General Considerations for Mouth's Journey's side.
Mouth's Journey part of the story is narrated in 3rd person. We do not know who the narrator is, but he/she is talking in the past tense, therefore is situated in some point in the future after Mouth's adventures. Dialogues are logically in the present tense, with the exceptions to some references to the past. During the unravelling of the story we will encounter several independent sections which will tell us about past events that are related to the story, but which are independent from the main storyline.
In Mouth's Journey, and especially in this first part, we find an interesting theory about the nature of time that is kept and mentioned all along the story.
The unfolding takes place every day. It involves an elaborate pleating, or rather, unpleating, of the space-time continuum, so that space and time are discontinuous and they are, together, no longer a continuum. Discontinuous continuum makes for unfolding, as if... Oh, never mind. Fortunately, seriously disjunctive unfolding takes place only at rare and unpredictable intervals, so the dislocation isn't too severe, at least not over aeons or other relatively lengthy time intervals.
Mouth, of course, lives, or lived, during such a time. It is what makes his story possible. (section Unfolding)In other words, according to this theory the time continuum is not a continuum, therefore time is not linear, which means that the concepts of past, present and future are not really important. The only reason we see it that way is because of our limited human perception. The word unfolding becomes a synonim of very ancient times, as we can see in this example regarding ancient paintings in a cave:
Hands, outlined in red. Little hands. Four fingers and a thumb. Since the beginning of the unfolding. Animals. People, elongated roundheads grinning down at him, bones visible inside their bodies. (section Busy)
Mouth and his family seem to be aware of years, which they define by means of the repetition of the Rainy Seasons
Year after year the same thing, heat and dry, heat and wet. We ought to go somewhere else." (section Leaving)
It was the first year he and Pouch had spent in the desert, where it had been so blessedly dry for several months. (section Rainy Season)
This last quote also serves as an example of flashback, of which the text contains several examples, always regarding the origins of Mouth's family, with the story of Nape and Pouch, the now family grandparents. The narrator is conscious of the flashback, as we can appreciate in the first line of the following paragraph:
Back in the present, where the story of Mouth takes place, Nape wants to leave again. (section Leaving)
As we can see the narrator is purposedly and consciously changing the time frame of the story. Also relevant I think it is the fact that Nape hates repetition, which is a very important concept in About Time. Somehow I believe repetition somehow becomes attached to the concept of unfolding, as if the unfolding of time had repetition as a result.
Academic year 2008/2009
© About Time (Rob Swigart/Wordcircuits)
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Víctor Ortuño Domínguez
vicordo@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press
