The Garden of Forking Paths

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1941

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Symbols & Motifs

Labyrinth

Because the device of metaphor essentially offers a dual narrative (i.e., the literal versus the figurative), the central metaphor in Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” serves as a metaphor for metaphor itself. Two characters come to understand that the late Ts’ui Pên’s projects to create an infinite novel and an elaborate labyrinth were actually the same endeavor: His novel entitled The Garden of Forking Paths follows a labyrinthine structure in which the author pursues all possible choices, creating multiple possible narratives. The story builds and expands the labyrinth with each set of simultaneous choices.

Multiple instances of mirroring, repetition, and correspondence shape the story and define its labyrinthine spirit. The story “The Garden of Forking Paths” thus shares an attribute of Ts’ui Pên’s project; the reader can follow more than one interpretation of language, nuance, translation, or bias as these instances unfold. Depending on a word or an assertion, the story may be read with different results. Borges’s story, then, is its own linguistic labyrinth.

As a metaphor, labyrinths can also represent individual choice and self-determination. They can symbolize entrapment and fate, as well as deliberate purpose and meditation. A labyrinth can be a prison, but it can also be a path to greater understanding. Borges presents a series of contradictions and ironies in “The Garden of Forking Paths,” resulting in the presence of multiple literal and metaphorical labyrinths. Tsun follows a forking path on his way to Albert’s home in Ashgrove, where he sees at last his ancestor’s labyrinth of a novel.

Books and Texts

“The Garden of Forking Paths” is a kind of metafiction—a story that, however tacitly, examines or comments on its own narrative elements. As such, this short story participates in its own motif of textual interpretation. Even without the benefit of hyperlinks and embedded images in his lifetime (digital media would have provided an ideal venue for the author’s fluid, multilevel writing), Borges introduced scaffolding by drawing attention to all modes of media delivery available to him. His stories within stories, blurring of historical and fictional events and characters, and self-conscious literary effects like footnotes and dedications all invite consideration of every story’s means of delivery. “The Garden of Forking Paths” refers to published books, rough drafts and manuscripts, translations, transcripts, recorded testimony, letters, and a crucial newspaper article. While the novel The Garden of Forking Paths addresses the central question of time, the story “The Garden of Forking Paths” also examines the question of narrative and its form. The dilemma of textual interpretation leads back to the theme of forking paths, both semantic and cosmic.

Borges’s work anticipates reader interpretation; he loads his stories with clues, twists, irony, and polysemy (when a word or phrase has varied possible meanings). Wordplay so informs Borges’s work that a deep study of any story often requires consulting more than one translation. Borges hints as much in stories like “The Garden of Forking Paths” by offering glimpses of texts undergoing multiple levels of alteration through translation of various kinds: transcribing, copying, translation into other languages, even analysis, as is the case with the novel/labyrinth The Garden of Forking Paths.

Dr. Albert explains the form of Ts’ui Pên’s novel through the lens of another work, The Thousand and One Nights. While Ts’ui Pên’s letter provides the initial clue that the labyrinth and the text are the same creation, Albert harks back to an episode in the text of The Thousand and One Nights in which, due to the “magical mistake on the part of her copyist” (217), Scheherezade starts telling her own story. In this self-referential moment, an infinite spiral emerges as Scheherezade repeatedly arrives at this night on which she begins her own story again. Thinking of this version of The Thousand and One Nights, Albert understands how Ts’ui Pên devised an infinite labyrinth in text form: by choosing all options at once, rather than deciding to pursue one narrative over another. By attributing this moment in The Thousand and One Nights to a copyist’s error, Borges asserts that every translation creates a new fork in the path, another bifurcation in time and space, another intersecting world.

For Borges, every text contains riddles, messages hidden and waiting for the reader. Reading for Borges is rewriting; the adaptation and expansion of his works into hypertexts enacts the kind of living manuscript Borges could only imagine. In this set of forking paths, one man creates infinite worlds of possibility with a central riddle based on time, while his descendant also creates texts—a news story with a riddle meant for an audience of one, and a confession that contains all that is left of his ancestor’s labyrinth of language.

Gardens

The idea of a garden is often a metaphor in the story—a metaphor important enough to have made its way into the story’s title—yet its signification is so manifold, and its application so kaleidoscopically diverse, that it is ultimately a motif demonstrating disparate philosophical ideas. Such ideas include growth (or endlessly branching paths), labyrinthine fates, polysemy, and more.

Early in the story, as he contemplates his impending capture and death, the spy narrator Tsun briefly mentions his childhood “in the symmetrical gardens of Hai Feng” (212); the idea of a garden—intuitively associated with life—creates subtle irony in its emergence among the protagonist’s deathly ruminations. When Tsun reveals his destination as “the village of Ashgrove” (213), the shadow of death deepens. Once in Ashgrove, a town whose name evokes both death and flora, Tsun follows a descending path, always bearing to the left; this harks back to Dante’s journey in The Inferno, in which Dante’s guide Virgil leads him continually leftward in their spiral descent to the underworld (the circular form of Hell necessitates this winding course). Then, the significance of gardens gradually encompasses the ideas of both intricacy and disorientation, as Tsun notes how choosing the left branch also leads to the center of some labyrinths; this reminds him of his great-grandfather Ts’ui Pên, who attempted to create a labyrinth “in which all men would lose themselves” (215). In the forest, making his way to Dr. Albert’s house, Tsun loses himself: “I forgot my destiny—that of the hunted” (215). Tsun then experiences something like the Romantic sublime—aesthetic experience transcending rational comprehension—and feels “cut off from the world” as “the hazy and murmuring countryside, the moon, the decline of the evening, stirred within me” (215). In a meditative interval, he envisions a world beyond personal enmity, one in which a man cannot be “the enemy of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams, or the West wind” (215). Before encountering Dr. Albert, Tsun has already walked his own garden of forking paths and lost himself, if only for a moment.

The idea of gardens approaches the zenith of its multifaceted symbolism when Albert greets Tsun and assumes Tsun’s purpose: “No doubt you want to see the garden?” (215). Each time the word “garden” appears in this passage, it means something different: Tsun believes Albert refers to an actual garden, while Albert never realizes Tsun has not come for the sole purpose of seeing his ancestor’s book, The Garden of Forking Paths.

Tsun soon senses a surrounding garden full of invisible versions of himself and of Albert, the full “restoration” of his ancestor’s vision of multiple simultaneous worlds. His vision collapses when, in “the black and yellow garden” (219), he sees one man: his nemesis, Richard Madden. By the time Borges wrote “The Garden of Forking Paths,” he was functionally blind, and yellow was the only color he reported that he could still see. Tsun’s infinite vision within the garden is cut short, limited, and closed forever as he fulfills his destiny and shoots Albert.