The Garden of Forking Paths

An incoherent manuscript left by a Chinese governor who abandoned power to write a novel and build a labyrinth. His heirs found the novel unreadable and the labyrinth missing. They were the same object.

The frame is a spy story, and a good one — a German agent in wartime England with an hour to live and a message to send. The fictional book sits in the middle of it like a stone in fruit.

Ts’ui Pên’s heirs did what any reasonable family would do with a manuscript in which the same character dies in chapter three and is alive in chapter four: they concluded the old man had gone soft, and blamed the confusion on the novel being unfinished. It is not unfinished. It is finished in every direction at once.

What is striking, reading it now, is the date. In 1941 Borges set down a perfectly clear account of branching time, decades before it became furniture in physics and then in television. He did it in nine pages, inside a spy thriller, as the incidental solution to a literary puzzle. Then he used it to kill a man.

On the readability rating. Albert quotes two contradictory versions of the same battle scene and a single letter. That is the whole of the text we get. The rest is diagnosis.

In-world history

Ts'ui Pên, governor of Yunnan, withdrew for thirteen years to compose the book and construct the labyrinth. He was murdered by a stranger. The fragmentary manuscript was nearly burned by a monk; a single letter in Ts'ui Pên's hand — "I leave to the various futures, not to all, my garden of forking paths" — supplied Albert with the key.

Why it matters

The sinologist Stephen Albert solves the manuscript in the last minutes of his life: the novel is chaotic because in it, every time a character faces a choice, all outcomes happen and the narrative forks. It is a labyrinth of time rather than space — and, incidentally, the first clear description of a branching-universe narrative in modern fiction.

Appearances

The Garden of Forking Paths (1941) — Jorge Luis Borges Collected in Ficciones, 1944

Connected volumes

Related to The Book of Sand · The Fictions of Borges
Related to A First Encyclopaedia of Tlön · The Fictions of Borges

Catalogue record

Category: Labyrinth novel
World: The Fictions of Borges
Language: Chinese
First appearance: "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan", 1941
Readability: Described