The Garden of Forking Paths

In his short story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Jorge Luis Borges uses the metaphor of the labyrinth to suggest the presence of infinite possible realities. First published in 1941 under the Spanish title “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan,” the story reflects new modes of thought and expression, ranging from developments in quantum mechanics to the advent of detective thrillers. A spy mystery, a philosophical puzzle, and a mythic history all in one, the work invites readers to interpret and question the characters, circumstances, and even the genre itself. This first of Borges’s stories to be translated into English made its appearance not in a literary journal but in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

This guide refers to the version of “The Garden of Forking Paths” anthologized in The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories, edited by Roberto González Echevarría (1999) and translated by Helen Temple and Ruthven Todd. This version includes the author’s dedication to his friend and fellow writer Victoria Ocampo, as well as the framing introduction and footnote. In many of Borges’s stories, the author includes fictional dates, places, and bibliographical support in order to question our understanding of reality and to destabilize our assumptions about the past; in “The Garden of Forking Paths,” such ancillary textual features refer to both historical and imaginary people and events.

The story begins by identifying itself as an artifact and a fragment. The opening paragraph claims the main text to be a transcript of a deposition included in a book called A History of the World War by Captain Liddell Hart. According to Captain Hart, this testimony from Dr. Yu Tsun—Chinese professor of English, a spy for Germany, and the story’s main character—explains the reasons for postponing a July 1916 British offensive against German troops at Serre-Montauban. The book and its author exist in the world outside “The Garden of Forking Paths”; Captain Liddell Hart was a famed British soldier and strategist whose chronicle The Real War was reprinted as A History of the World War (1914-1918). The character of Dr. Yu Tsun, however, is Borges’s invention.

The rest of the story is set in England and comes in the form of Tsun’s fictional deposition, taken as he awaited execution. The first paragraph of the excerpt begins mid-sentence—“…and I hung up the phone” (212)—emphasizing the introduction’s acknowledgement that two pages of the confession are missing from Liddell Hart’s account. Tsun’s first-person narration starts with a description of the phone call—a conversation in German with English agent Captain Richard Madden, Tsun’s nemesis. Madden speaks with Tsun from the apartment of Tsun’s ally Viktor Runeberg, a German agent. Tsun knows when he hears Madden’s voice that Runeberg has been captured or killed, setting into motion Tsun’s desperate actions to follow.

Tsun possesses vital intelligence: the location of a British artillery park. He needs to convey this information to his handler, the Chief, while eluding Madden, who closes in after killing Tsun’s associate, Runeberg. Tsun embarks on a plan after locating in the telephone directory “the name of the one person capable of passing on the information” (213), a man whom the reader soon learns is named Dr. Stephen Albert (the reader also eventually learns just why Tsun has zeroed in on this name). In a brief aside, Tsun’s narration explains that he performs his espionage not to support Germany but to prove a point; the Chief seems prejudiced against the Chinese, and Tsun wants to show him that an Asian can be competent and valorous. He dresses himself and gazes in the mirror, momentarily feeling his mind drift away. Finally, pursued by Madden, Tsun sets out for the town of Ashgrove. As Madden races down the station platform, unable to catch the departing train, Tsun is already on board and celebrates a small, temporary victory.

When Tsun disembarks in Ashgrove, he meets a group of children whose faces are all obscured by shadows. They ask him if he is looking for Dr. Stephen Albert’s house, and from their instructions, Tsun finds his way down the road as it keeps “descending and branching off” (215). The children’s directions included turning left at every crossroad, and as he ponders this guideline, he remembers that it is the same age-old rule for guiding oneself through a labyrinth. (This is sometimes called the “left-hand rule” for mazes.) He ambles onward but gets lost in a daydream, recollecting how his great-grandfather, Ts’ui Pên, planned to write a novel with “more characters than there are in the Hun Lou Meng, and to create a maze in which all men would lose themselves” (215). Tsun now imagines different kinds of labyrinths—mythical, Edenic and cloistered away on a mountain summit, infinitely sprawling and transcendent, containing both the past and the future. Immersed in his reverie, Tsun loses track of time altogether and feels carried away by the seemingly endless beauty of the night.

As he arrives at the iron gate of Dr. Albert’s property, he is surprised to hear Chinese music coming from inside a nearby pavilion. Albert appears at the gate, his face eclipsed by a shining paper lantern, and asks Tsun if he has come to see the Garden of Forking Paths. In a moment of both confidence and disbelief, Tsun identifies himself as the descendant of Ts’ui Pên, the architect of the Garden of Forking Paths.

Dr. Albert thus allows Tsun into his house without knowing Tsun’s true mission. Tsun notices a large clock on the wall and, reading the time, calculates that Madden won’t catch up to him for at least an hour; Tsun can therefore linger for a while in conversation with Albert, though Tsun feels that this is only delaying the inevitable. A Sinologist—an expert in Chinese culture and history—Albert knows the story of Tsun’s ancestor, the provincial governor who retired his post to write an infinite novel and to build a labyrinth. He shows Tsun the writing cabinet that once belonged to Tsun’s ancestor, Ts’ui Pên, then explains that the labyrinth is inside—the labyrinth and the novel are one and the same. Albert produces a letter from Ts’ui Pên as evidence that the Garden of Forking Paths is both labyrinth and novel—it is also the name of the Borges story unfolding. Albert goes on to explain how Ts’ui Pên created the infinite narrative of the Garden of Forking Paths: Rather than choosing a direction at each intersection of events in the novel, Ts’ui Pên chooses “all of them” (217). The resulting work branches in multiple directions, encompassing all possible futures and unlimited contradictions.

As Tsun listens to Albert read sections of his ancestor’s book, Tsun experiences a sense of communion with his ancestor across time. Albert has determined that the central issue of the novel (and the labyrinth) concerns the problem of time; to clarify this rationale, he says, “In a guessing game to which the answer is chess, which word is the only one prohibited?” (219), and Tsun responds, “chess.” Albert explains that, likewise, as he translated the novel, he observed that the word “time” occurs nowhere in the text, suggesting that time is the answer to the riddle of the labyrinth. He further remarks that Ts’ui Pên had an unconventional philosophical conception of time that differed from Newton and Schopenhauer; instead of postulating time as something constant, invariable, or uniform, Ts’ui Pên conceived of an “infinite series” of different but co-occurring times—an immeasurable web of bifurcations, divarications, confluences, contradictions. According to this model, every possible version of reality exists at once. Albert concludes, “Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures and in one of them I am your enemy” (219). This theorem overwhelms Tsun, whose increasing agitation culminates as he senses multiple present realities in which he and Albert appear simultaneously in numerous invisible forms all around him. That vision breaks apart as Tsun glimpses Madden striding up the path toward the house.

Madden’s arrival moves Tsun to action. He asks Albert to retrieve his ancestor’s letter once more from its cabinet. When Albert turns away, Tsun uses the one bullet in his revolver to kill him. Madden breaks in and arrests Tsun, but Tsun’s Chief learns the name of the city to be bombed—Albert—by reading about the seemingly motiveless murder in the newspaper. Though he will hang, Tsun completed his mission; his deposition notes that the Germans have successfully bombed the English artillery. The heartsick Tsun ends his confession by revealing his true sorrow at having killed the man who returned the words of his ancestor to him.