The Garden of Forking Paths
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Yu Tsun arrives at an iron gate and is let in by a tall, thin Englishman with a priestlike aspect and a grey beard. This is Stephen Albert—a stranger to Yu Tsun, as it turns out, but also a famous sinologist who has dedicated his life to studying his grandfather’s novel. So astonished is Yu Tsun by the coincidence, he hesitates to carry out whatever plan he has in mind (“the irrevocable act could wait”) and so the two men sit down to talk. “My pursuer,” calculates Yu Tsun, thinking of Madden, “could not arrive for at least an hour.”
The topic of conversation is The Garden of Forking Paths. Albert claims that everyone has misjudged it. The novel is not incoherent. It is a complex masterpiece. The problem is that when Ts’ui Peng retired to “compose a book and a labyrinth,” everyone imagined two works. No one guessed that the book and the labyrinth were one and the same. Two circumstances alerted Albert to the solution: The rumour that Ts’ui Peng planned to construct an infinite labyrinth; and the fragment of a letter in which the author says of his novel, “I leave to the various futures (not to all) my Garden of Forking Paths.” Almost instantly, Albert understood: The Garden of Forking Paths was the chaotic novel; the phrase, “the various futures (not to all)” suggesting a forking in time, not space.
Albert shows this letter to Ts’ui Peng who reads it with fervour and hands it back again.
“In a work of fiction,” Albert continues, “each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others. In the fiction of the almost-impossible-to-disentangle Ts’ui Peng, he chooses—simultaneously—all of them.” And, what is more, each of these futures becomes the point of departure for additional bifurcations. Albert is careful to add that Ts’ui Peng was both novelist and metaphysician. Thus, The Garden of Forking Paths was not an idle rhetorical experiment but, “an incomplete, but not false, picture of the universe as Ts’ui Peng conceived it.” Unlike Newton and Schopenhauer, Ts’ui Peng did not believe in a uniform time. He believed in an infinitely proliferating web of times that contains all possibilities. “In one of those possible pasts,” adds Albert with a smile, “you are my friend; in another, my enemy.”
For Yu Tsun, this is a moment of superstitious misgiving. “From that moment on,” he writes, “I felt about me and within my dark body an intangible, invisible swarming.” Suddenly, the humid garden surrounding the house seems, “infinitely saturated with invisible persons. Those persons were Albert and I: Secret, busily at work, multiform, in other dimensions of time.” In another moment the spell is broken. Yu Tsung sees that in the garden there is only one man—Captain Richard Madden advancing on the house to arrest him. Realising that only moments remain, he asks to see the letter again. And when Albert rises from his chair and turns his back to his guest for a moment, Yu Tsun shoots him. “Albert feel uncomplainingly,” he adds guiltily—for his admiration of Albert is obvious. “I swear his death was instantaneous—a clap of thunder.”
In the last paragraph of the story, the spy’s hitherto inscrutable intentions are fully explained. The location of the secret British artillery station was, “Albert Park,” and Yu Tsun’s problem was how to report this to Berlin, “over the uproar of war.” In the end, he had, “found no other means to do so that to kill a man of that name.” He adds that his plan worked. “Yesterday it was bombed—I read it in the same papers that posed to England the mystery of the learned sinologist, Stephen Albert, who was murdered by a stranger, Yu Tsun.” And so everything would appear to be squared away—or almost everything. The action and metaphysical exotica are apt to make us forget the first sentence of the story but an astute reader may, with a vague qualm, have occasion to leaf back to it. And if he does so he will be confronted with a puzzle.
Liddell Hart, recall, writes in The History of World War I that an attack by the British artillery station was postponed five days due to torrential rain (an insignificant episode) but says nothing about it being destroyed by German bombs. Thus Hart’s history and Yu Tsun’s testimony directly contradict each other and cannot both be right. One possible solution is that Hart is wrong. Another, more plausible, solution is that Yu Tsun’s confession is fraudulent. But there is a third solution—the one which the story itself gives us the explanatory resources to formulate and which also leaves all fictional data intact.
First, consider three parallel worlds which we may designate W1, W2 and W3. In W1, the artillery station is not bombed and Yu Tsun either does not exit of fails in his mission. This is our world—the world occupied by Captain Liddell Hart, Borges and the reader of his story. In W2, Yu Tsun exists, succeeds in his mission, and the artillery station is bombed. In that case his confession is true but Captain Liddell Hart does not exist or else he exists but page 242 of The History of World War I reads quite differently. And yet the story in our hands cannot be unproblematically situated in either of these worlds. Yu Tsun’s testimony is false in W1 and Hart’s history is false in W2. But there is a third world in which it may be so situated: W3, in which the events of the war correspond to W1 but into which a document from W2 has somehow been secreted or transposed. In other words, to resolve the contradiction set up by the first sentence we are forced to accept the theory of time set forth in Ts’ui Peng’s novel The Garden of Forking Paths.
This is the characteristic feature of Borges’ best work: The structure of the story subtly conspires to substantiate the themes that it articulates.
The topic of conversation is The Garden of Forking Paths. Albert claims that everyone has misjudged it. The novel is not incoherent. It is a complex masterpiece. The problem is that when Ts’ui Peng retired to “compose a book and a labyrinth,” everyone imagined two works. No one guessed that the book and the labyrinth were one and the same. Two circumstances alerted Albert to the solution: The rumour that Ts’ui Peng planned to construct an infinite labyrinth; and the fragment of a letter in which the author says of his novel, “I leave to the various futures (not to all) my Garden of Forking Paths.” Almost instantly, Albert understood: The Garden of Forking Paths was the chaotic novel; the phrase, “the various futures (not to all)” suggesting a forking in time, not space.
Albert shows this letter to Ts’ui Peng who reads it with fervour and hands it back again.
“In a work of fiction,” Albert continues, “each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others. In the fiction of the almost-impossible-to-disentangle Ts’ui Peng, he chooses—simultaneously—all of them.” And, what is more, each of these futures becomes the point of departure for additional bifurcations. Albert is careful to add that Ts’ui Peng was both novelist and metaphysician. Thus, The Garden of Forking Paths was not an idle rhetorical experiment but, “an incomplete, but not false, picture of the universe as Ts’ui Peng conceived it.” Unlike Newton and Schopenhauer, Ts’ui Peng did not believe in a uniform time. He believed in an infinitely proliferating web of times that contains all possibilities. “In one of those possible pasts,” adds Albert with a smile, “you are my friend; in another, my enemy.”
For Yu Tsun, this is a moment of superstitious misgiving. “From that moment on,” he writes, “I felt about me and within my dark body an intangible, invisible swarming.” Suddenly, the humid garden surrounding the house seems, “infinitely saturated with invisible persons. Those persons were Albert and I: Secret, busily at work, multiform, in other dimensions of time.” In another moment the spell is broken. Yu Tsung sees that in the garden there is only one man—Captain Richard Madden advancing on the house to arrest him. Realising that only moments remain, he asks to see the letter again. And when Albert rises from his chair and turns his back to his guest for a moment, Yu Tsun shoots him. “Albert feel uncomplainingly,” he adds guiltily—for his admiration of Albert is obvious. “I swear his death was instantaneous—a clap of thunder.”
In the last paragraph of the story, the spy’s hitherto inscrutable intentions are fully explained. The location of the secret British artillery station was, “Albert Park,” and Yu Tsun’s problem was how to report this to Berlin, “over the uproar of war.” In the end, he had, “found no other means to do so that to kill a man of that name.” He adds that his plan worked. “Yesterday it was bombed—I read it in the same papers that posed to England the mystery of the learned sinologist, Stephen Albert, who was murdered by a stranger, Yu Tsun.” And so everything would appear to be squared away—or almost everything. The action and metaphysical exotica are apt to make us forget the first sentence of the story but an astute reader may, with a vague qualm, have occasion to leaf back to it. And if he does so he will be confronted with a puzzle.
Liddell Hart, recall, writes in The History of World War I that an attack by the British artillery station was postponed five days due to torrential rain (an insignificant episode) but says nothing about it being destroyed by German bombs. Thus Hart’s history and Yu Tsun’s testimony directly contradict each other and cannot both be right. One possible solution is that Hart is wrong. Another, more plausible, solution is that Yu Tsun’s confession is fraudulent. But there is a third solution—the one which the story itself gives us the explanatory resources to formulate and which also leaves all fictional data intact.
First, consider three parallel worlds which we may designate W1, W2 and W3. In W1, the artillery station is not bombed and Yu Tsun either does not exit of fails in his mission. This is our world—the world occupied by Captain Liddell Hart, Borges and the reader of his story. In W2, Yu Tsun exists, succeeds in his mission, and the artillery station is bombed. In that case his confession is true but Captain Liddell Hart does not exist or else he exists but page 242 of The History of World War I reads quite differently. And yet the story in our hands cannot be unproblematically situated in either of these worlds. Yu Tsun’s testimony is false in W1 and Hart’s history is false in W2. But there is a third world in which it may be so situated: W3, in which the events of the war correspond to W1 but into which a document from W2 has somehow been secreted or transposed. In other words, to resolve the contradiction set up by the first sentence we are forced to accept the theory of time set forth in Ts’ui Peng’s novel The Garden of Forking Paths.
This is the characteristic feature of Borges’ best work: The structure of the story subtly conspires to substantiate the themes that it articulates.