The Garden of Forking Paths

Jorge Luis Borges

4 ideas

1. Murder used as a coded message

   In 1916 Yu Tsun, a Chinese spy for Germany in England, must tell Berlin that the British artillery park is in the French town of Albert before the agent Richard Madden catches him. He picks a man named Stephen Albert from the phone book, visits him, spends the evening discussing his own ancestor Ts'ui Pên's labyrinthine novel, and then shoots him. The newspapers report the killing, Berlin reads the victim's surname as the target and bombs the town, and Yu Tsun is sentenced to hang, feeling endless contrition and weariness.

2. The novel as a labyrinth of time

   Ts'ui Pên's apparently chaotic novel is the labyrinth he promised to build, and it is made of time rather than space. Where an ordinary narrative picks one outcome at each decision point and discards the rest, this book takes every outcome at once. Each branch then forks again, which is why a character can die in one chapter and reappear alive in the next.

3. The forbidden word reveals the riddle

   Stephen Albert argues that in a riddle whose answer is chess, the word 'chess' is the only word that may never be used. Ts'ui Pên's enormous book never uses the word 'time', so time must be its hidden subject. Leaving the key term out on purpose, and repeatedly working around it, is the most emphatic way to point at it.

4. Every present act is one branch

   If all possible times coexist, then any relationship or act is only the version found in this branch. In some branches Yu Tsun and Albert do not exist, in some Albert is his friend, and in this one Yu Tsun comes to kill him. Seeing events this way makes the chosen path feel contingent, crowded with unrealized alternatives that the actor can almost sense, yet it gives no escape from the consequences of the path actually taken.

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