Short Story Club: Borges
The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Louis Borges
Life is too short to read all the great works, but not too short to try.
Though many unread classics may loom large on our bookshelves, intimidating in their vast size, others are surprisingly slim. Indeed, masters of the short story, like Kafka, Borges, or Calvino, can contain more of life’s complexity in a few pages than some novels do in thousands.
So, let’s spare a few moments of our day to read some great literature. After all, our time on earth is finite. Let us not squander it; let us read instead.
The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Louis Borges (1941)
Borges is unusual for a great writer in that he exclusively composed essays, poems, and short stories, never once giving over to the temptation of long-form writing. I suspect this is a result of, rather than in spite of, the genius of his literacy: so tight and economical was his prose, so methodical and mathematical his mastery of form, that he was able to contain within just a few pages infinite worlds.
Borges’ love of paradoxes and labyrinths is well known; in an essay on Kafka’s precursors (which he identifies as Zeno, Kierkegaard, and Browning, among others) he writes, “Every writer creates his own precursors”; how delightfully recursive then, that we should see in Borges himself no greater influence than Kafka (one can’t help but read that essay and smile; the Argentine knew exactly what he was doing). Indeed, in the preface to my edition of Labyrinths, André Maurois says that Borges could himself have written The Castle, but “he would have made it into a ten-page story, both out of lofty laziness and out of concern for perfection.”
One of his most celebrated stories, “The Garden of Forking Paths” was first published as the title story in a 1941 collection, before being republished in Ficciones (1944), Borges’ best-known Spanish language title. It is ostensibly a spy story, but within its dozen pages contains infinitely more than simple espionage: a theory of the eternal present (“I reflected that everything happens to everyone precisely, precisely now.”); the idea that the future is as irrevocable as the past (“The future already exists…”); the idea, which foreshadows the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics by some sixteen years (!), that every present moment divides into an infinite series of possible futures (“…a growing, dizzying network of diverging, converging, and parallel times.”).
David Foster Wallace once wrote of Borges that “his stories are intent and hermetic, with the oblique terror of a game whose rules are unknown and its stakes everything,” while the Argentine himself believed that any lasting story must be ambiguous. With that in mind, I’d love to hear how you interpret the metaphor of the “garden of forking paths”.
Here is a link to the story. Alternatively, if you prefer listening to your fiction, here’s a video of someone reading the story aloud.
Please have a read when you have time today, and come back to this post for our discussion group in the comments. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
How do you interpret the metaphor of the “garden of forking paths”?
I understand the "Garden of Forking Paths" to be the unfolding of individual lives. Our decisions, as well as expected or unexpected events are the forks that create our past and our future. I notice that this story was published in 1941 in the midst of WWII and Argentina was impacted significantly by this European war because of its past connections to the British, but more significant relationships with the Germans and Italians. I think this background is important to the story. Yu Tsun and the soldiers in the tale have made "irrevocable decisions" in wartime. Actions against their own interests because of war. The final lines reflect the universal lament in war, "...I had no other course open to me than to kill someone of that name. He does not know, for no one can, of my infinite penitence and sickness of the heart."
Further thoughts--I hadn't ever read the Borges story and really got into it:
I have not read Hung Lou Meng (the novel 'Dream of the Red Chamber'), but I am familiar with it. For me, its inclusion in Borges' tale, is more important than the comparison to Albert's later tale. Hung Lou Meng is dream like tale of many stories, like 'Scheherezade's 1001 Nights' also mentioned in Borgia's tale. The creation of Yu Tsun's ancestor is described by Albert as, "A symbolic labyrinth,..An invisible labyrinth of time", his Ancestor's explanation is that "I leave to various future times, but not to all, my garden of forking paths."
At the beginning Yu Tsun reflects '...that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now.' Now indicates a connection to time-- before is past, after is future.
Borges' story also has vague indefinite allusions to time and a dreamlike atmosphere, abandoned streets, Albert's strange 'garden' and connection to Yu Tsun's ancestor and the 'garden of forking paths'.
Early in the story, Yu Tsun makes an 'irrevocable decision' that we later learn is to kill a man named Albert. It seems like this takes him out of the flexibility of time, out of the 'garden of forking paths', something about his circumstances (spy) has clinched his future, irrevocably.