The Garden of Forking Paths

The text begins by embodying one of the story’s central themes: We live among many potential alternate historical timelines in which the facts we assume to be the most foundational to our reality may shift slightly, profoundly changing our current circumstances. The story presents discrepancies: Liddell Hart’s A History of the World War is a real-life text and a revision of an earlier work (The Real War) by the same author—but Tsun appears nowhere in actual version of Liddell Hart’s history as the short story suggests (in this edition of the short story, the deposition is said to appear on page 212 of Liddell Hart’s work, but in others the account begins on page 22 or 252). Additionally, the Serre-Montauban incident is historical, not fictional, and began on July 1, 1916—but in Liddell Hart’s history as Borges presents it, it began on July 29. While such inconsistent details may seem like minor errors, Borges reminds us in these variations that there are layers of voices in the story: an editor, one whose judgments and errors can alter the reader’s understanding of historical events; Liddell Hart, author of the text from which the deposition is ostensibly excerpted; Dr. Yu Tsun, confessed assassin; the transcriptionist who records Tsun’s confession as he recounts it. Excerpts from an infinite novel at the story’s center call up the role of translators and copyists. Throughout “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Borges examines the way one individual voice makes its way to another individual, relayed across time and space through varieties of interpretation, translation, and medium.

Rather than viewing any textual inconsistencies as flaws, the reader comes to understand how Borges embraces contradictions and multiple possible interpretations throughout the story. Borges suggests the constant unfolding of meaning with each new reading. The loopholes, uncertainties, and unanswered riddles within the story reinforce Borges’s idea that each re-reading of a text is in fact a rewriting. The more possible interpretations—the more forks in the path—the more vital and alive the narrative will remain. For Borges, the true meaning of a work must be in its future, not in its past.

“The Garden of Forking Paths” may also be read in more than one context, as it threads genres, functioning differently in each. First, Borges’s work could be considered historical fiction, a story using a real context for an imagined spy caper, except that Borges adds fictional details about Liddell Hart’s actual book. Published in the American market in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, the story also features a spy’s strategy and subterfuge like a popular thriller would. Additionally, during Tsun’s interval with Dr. Albert, the story takes on a philosophical and at times mystical dimension, addressing questions of literary legacy and the nature of time. Tsun and Albert also consider the text of Ts’ui Pên’s infinite novel as a word game, noting that the manuscript’s complete omission of the word “time” constitutes evidence that time is the answer to the work’s central question. Since Borges’s story shares the same title with Ts’ui Pên’s cryptic work, the explication of The Garden of Forking Paths applies on more than one level.

Tsun calls his voice “weak” (213) and “feeble” (220). He conducts his mission in the story in a state of “utter terror” (214), seeing himself as “a man already dead” (214). Through this flawed and fragile character, Borges portrays humans less as inherently evil; rather, all people become capable of evil actions because those choices constitute branches on the path of all possible futures. Tsun searches for answers in nature and art along the way but ultimately fulfills his role in the world that is Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths.” In another world, he escapes capture. In another, he is the author of the story. Borges’s depiction of multiple realities unfolding at once would go on to influence science and speculative fiction, film, and other media.