The pastness of the past, and its presence.

In Archive Fever, Derrida writes that

. . . the question of the archive is not, we repeat, a question of the past. It is not the question of a concept dealing with the past that might already be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive. It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in times to come. Perhaps. (36)

Interesting, then, that it is not until page 527 that Saleem seems to bring his narrative to the present moment, making promises about tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

But this passage leads me back to the last paragraphs of Midnight's Children, where Saleem asserts, "I shall have to write the future as I have written the past, to set it down with the absolute certainty of a prophet. But the future cannot be preserved in a jar; one jar must remain empty . . . What cannot be pickled, because it has not taken place, is that I shall reach my birthday[. . .]" (532).

Is Saleem's treatment of the future, whether as "prophecy" or as emblematized by the empty jar, what Derrida had in mind when he said that the question of the archive is "a question of the future"?