Part II: The De Granville Files

General Considerations for The De Granville Files' side.

The De Granville Files part of the story is narrated by Granville himself in first person, but in the past tense. This means that he is telling us his story from a point in the future. Some parts of the text, however, are written in the present tense. These are the dialogues, which are obviously reenacted as if they were happening again; and other parts in which Granville makes reflections about something that can be somehow connected to the main story, but that is usually not a part of it.

In this chapter we have the important announcement Granville makes on Monday (section Out There), after realising what he was going to say thanks to a dream he had on Sunday:

I had the dream one Sunday night. (section Dream)

The use of 'one' before 'Sunday' indicates us that this time the narrator is positioned in a distant future from that day, because this denotes ambiguity and that he doesn't remember which was the exact night when he had that dream, he only remembers that it was a Sunday. Obviously he does because he knows it was the previous day to his important announcement to the world, which took place on a Monday. In the announcement, in section Out There, he makes a couple of interesting temporlal references:

"I know you expect the crisis won’t happen for thirty years or so. A crash, not enough service workers, economic chaos. Or maybe you think the population will continue to increase and we will all gradually strangle in our own waste." (section Out There)

"I’m not concerned with thirty years from now. I’m concerned with forty thousand years before now." (section Out There)

Being aware of the public's worry of the future in thirty years he dismisses them and claims that that which occupies his mind in the present moment is what happened forty thousand years in the past. The ending 'before now' establishes the point from which the forty thousand years must be discounted from. '40.000 years' is a recurring phrase all over Granville's narration from this chapter forward, usually with the intention of remarking how extraordinary it is that they are able to investigate events that occured so long ago.

In this chapter there are also some references to the recent past, most particularly the 20th century:

There are nearly as many sightings of Cro de Granville as there were of Elvis back in the late 20th century. (section Good Time)

The Good Time section is one of those which are atemporal, as it makes reference to a fictional internet article that talks about Granville. After the article is finished he makes some statement in the present tense, which again distances him from the main plot. Another sections that do this in this chapter: Full Brain and Global Bus, which are again narrated in the present tense.

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