The Garden of Forking Paths

“The telephone directory gave me the name of the one person capable of passing on the information.” 

Almost as if in a protracted joke with a surprise punchline, or as if in a puzzle that eventually solves itself, the true meaning of Tsun’s statement only reveals itself at the end of the story as Tsun assassinates a man with the same name as the town he must convey. The news story of the assassination becomes his coded message, and his victim “passes on the information” when his name appears in the paper. Tsun’s wording creates irony because it shifts agency onto Dr. Albert instead of Tsun, the actual agent in this mission.

“I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, that soon only soldiers and bandits will be left. To them I offer this advice: Whoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished, should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.”

Tsun portrays the harsh world of warfare and strategy, in which the goal of winning each daily battle supersedes philosophy, deliberation, art, and beauty. Because Tsun’s confession (the story’s main text) comes as he awaits execution, the future of his story is, in fact, as irrevocable as the past. The author uses Tsun to show how the mercenary’s path unfolds at the expense of all other choices. Tsun pursues his goal as a reality that is preexistent and thus beyond his control.

“The house is a good distance away but you won’t get lost if you take the road to the left and bear to the left at every crossroad.” 

The faceless children at the Ashgrove station direct Tsun to Dr. Albert’s house, telling him to bear left at every crossroads. This instruction harks to Dante’s Inferno, in which Dante’s guide leans always to the left, the “sinister” direction (the Latin sinistra means “left,” and historically, the leftward direction has been superstitiously associated with evil, while “right” has come to mean “correct” or “proper”). But as Tsun goes on to explain, puzzle solvers reach the central chamber of some labyrinths by choosing the left channel at each intersection.

“I know something about labyrinths.”

As a spy, Tsun might mean he understands the strategy necessary to approach complex problems, making this statement a metaphor. However, he goes on to explain that his great-grandfather was a political figure in China who gave up his position to construct an elaborate labyrinth. This endeavor stands in contrast to Tsun’s single-minded pursuit of his clandestine task.

“I thought of a maze of mazes, of a sinuous, ever growing maze which would take in both past and future and would somehow involve the stars.”

On the path to Dr. Albert’s house, Tsun engages in what he calls “imaginary illusions,” a meditation in which he forgets “my destiny—that of the hunted” (215). Within nature and the infinite possibility of the path’s forking branches, Tsun sees beyond the binary choices of war and conflict. He notes that a man can oppose another man, especially “the differing moments of other men” (215), but that a man cannot be the enemy of an entire country, or “words, gardens, streams, or the West Wind” (215).

“I see that the worthy Hsi P’eng has troubled himself to see to relieving my solitude.” 

Dr. Albert’s first words to Dr. Tsun shock him not only because Dr. Albert misconstrues the purpose of his visit but also because Dr. Albert speaks to him in Chinese. Tsun is greeted also with Chinese music. Tsun suspects he has more of a connection to Dr. Albert than his mission suggested, though Dr. Albert’s face, like the children’s faces at the Ashgrove station, is obscured—but by a lit lantern instead of a shadow.

“I recognized some large volumes bound in yellow silk—manuscripts of the Lost Encyclopedia which was edited by the Third Emperor of the Luminous Dynasty. They had never been printed.” 

Borges’s stories often refer to imaginary or lost works. Dr. Albert’s library holds items that suggest an alternate past and future for Tsun, as if the place itself represents choices Tsun—or his ancestors—might have made that would have created a different future.

“At one time, Ts’ui Pên must have said ‘I am going into seclusion to write a book,’ and at another, ‘I am retiring to construct a maze.’ Everyone assumed these were separate activities.” 

Dr. Albert reveals to Tsun that his ancestor Ts’ui Pên’s infinite novel and his labyrinth are the same creation. This passage contains an imagined quotation from Ts’ui Pên spoken through Dr. Albert as reported in Tsun’s deposition fragment as reprinted in Captain Liddell Hart’s A History of the World War, edited by a figure identified in a footnote as “original manuscript editor” (212). Borges suggests our understanding of the past is an agreed-upon set of ideas, a labyrinth of choices and suppositions, and as uncertain and unknowable as any future.

“I recalled, too, the night in the middle of The Thousand and One Nights when Queen Scheherezade, through a magical mistake on the part of her copyist, started to tell the story of The Thousand and One Nights, with the risk of arriving at the night upon which she will relate it, and thus on to infinity.” 

Albert stands in for the author in these lines, expressing Borges’s fascination for The Thousand and One Nights as a collaborative, infinite text. In a 1937 essay, Borges points out that on Night 602 of the tales, Scheherezade begins to tell her own story, creating a mirror effect in the center of the work. Borges argued that ages of translation and retelling made The Thousand and One Nights a document of collective cultural memory, one whose meaning and significance lies in future re-readings and retellings as much if not more than in its past.

“Naturally, my attention was caught by the sentence, ‘I leave to various future times, but not to all, my garden of forking paths.’” 

Albert quotes Ts’ui Pên’s letter to illustrate the moment that he understood the labyrinth and novel to be one, and that the infinite nature of the novel comes from the author’s decision not to choose one path over another but to pursue all conflicting choices simultaneously. Such a cosmic narrative results in infinite futures.

“With proper veneration I listened to these old tales, although perhaps with less admiration for them in themselves than for the fact that they had been thought out by one of my own blood, and that a man of a distant empire had given them back to me, in the last stage of a desperate adventure, on a Western island.” 

Tsun contemplates the transmission of these tales across time and space, through the unlikely vessel of Dr. Albert, his target and means for sending his own communication from “a Western island.” Tsun’s wonderment is due to the extraordinarily coincidental nature of this convergence, highlighting the motif of irony, coincidence, and parallel. Such momentous coincidences evoke a sense of destiny.

“In a guessing game to which the answer is chess, which word is the only one prohibited?” 

Albert argues that the intentional omission of the word “time” from the novel The Garden of Forking Paths proves time’s significance to the work. He uses this hypothetical example to illustrate the way in which Ts’ui Pên avoids the word “time,” even at the expense of his prose, to make his work into a parable about time. In one of the short story’s many paradoxes, a word’s absence becomes its presence, and its concealment becomes its revelation: Albert sees the solution’s omission as the solution itself.

“Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures and in one of them I am your enemy.” 

Albert demonstrates either unwitting or deeply wise irony, considering that it is in fact the future he and Tsun currently occupy in which Tsun is Albert’s enemy, even though Albert treats Tsun as a valued guest and friend. In addition to its irony, Albert’s remark creates foreshadowing, as readers may intuit the looming assassination.