The Garden of Forking Paths

Dr. Albert illuminates Tsun’s past and explains his ancestor’s mysterious creation, the labyrinth-novel called The Garden of Forking Paths—“an enormous guessing game, or parable, in which the subject is time” (219). Borges uses Albert’s analysis of Ts’ui Pên’s novel to analyze his own story from within the story itself. With its parallels and contradictions, the story of the same name must concern itself with the same question of time.

According to Albert, Ts’ui Pên rejected traditional, linear concepts of time, embracing instead the idea that many intersecting worlds exist simultaneously, webs of experience that share some events and characters but not others. Each instance of conjuncture branches into multiple directions, creating infinite possible futures. The narrative itself in “The Garden of Forking Paths” echoes this idea in its layered structure: We hear from Ts’ui Pên through Albert, reading his own translation. We hear Albert’s account through Tsun’s deposition, a confession he spoke to a transcriptionist before his execution, which has already happened by the time the transcript is published. The deposition’s transcript, the main body of the story, appears as a fragment within a work by Captain Liddell Hart—a work ostensibly quoted from by Jorge Luis Borges, author of this story that begins with a dedication to another historical figure and Borges’s close friend, the writer Victoria Ocampo. A footnote to Borges’s story identifies “the original manuscript editor” (212), but the “manuscript” to which the footnote refers is unidentified. Borges provides a clue: In the world of the footnote, Viktor Runeberg and Captain Richard Madden, Borges’s fictional characters, exist as historical figures. In “The Garden of Forking Paths,” time takes the shape of a web, or a labyrinth; “the future exists now” (220), and “things happen only in the present” (212).

The book by Liddell Hart, A History of the World War, exists in this world as a revised version of an earlier work by Liddell Hart. But Tsun does not appear on page 212 of any version of Liddell Hart’s history. Different versions of Borges’s story mention various page numbers for the deposition. In this version, the page number is 212, but in others the account appears starting on page 22 or on page 252. The military offensive against Serre-Montauban did occur on July 1, 1916, but in Borges’s rendering of Liddell Hart’s history, it happened on July 29. In these shifting details, Borges undermines any attempt to envision historical events as concrete, even as he includes a frame for his fiction that suggests an intersection with the historical past. Borges questions assumptions about history and reality in other works, such as his short story “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” which assumes an alternate world in which this foundational literary work exists, but with a different author.

Both fugitive and agent, Tsun wrestles with time throughout “The Garden of Forking Paths.” He marks time in the old manner, noting the positions of sun and moon, but he also credits the modern train schedule for allowing him to elude Madden; having successfully boarded the 8:50pm train, Tsun celebrates the fact that Madden will have to wait until the next train at half-past nine. While Tsun yields himself to the elegance of Albert’s conversation, he does so only after noticing “a large circular clock” (216) that allows him to estimate the amount of time he can spend before Madden’s possible arrival.

Even before Tsun learns about his ancestor’s work and his effort to extend the boundaries of time, Tsun reveals his own ideas about potential simultaneous worlds. He gives advice to “soldiers and bandits,” the inhabitants of the coming world: "Whosoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished, should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past” (214). Tsun appears to share Einstein’s idea that time exists as a human construct and that each world unfolds as it will, unchangeable. Tsun refers to himself throughout his deposition as already dead; because he relates the story primarily in past tense, Borges does not reveal whether Tsun thinks of himself as already dead while he completes his mission or while he awaits execution, as both of those past moments exist in the present in the world of the story. Tsun’s advice constitutes the only passage in the main body of the story told in present tense. The only other sentences in present tense are the first and last of the final paragraph, when Tsun claims that anything left after Albert’s death “is unreal and unimportant” (220). In the final sentence of the deposition, only Tsun’s sorrow remains as “infinite” and unknowable (220).