Borges’
The Garden of Forking Paths tells the
story of a German spy, Doctor Yu Tsun. Through acts of espionage Tsun discovers
an artillery base located in a city named Albert and the only way he feels he
can discretely reveal this location to his German superiors is to murder
someone whose name includes the word Albert; successfully executing the murder
would place Albert’s name in the British Empire’s newspapers, which under heavy
German surveillance, would provide German forces the only hint they needed to
bomb the artillery base. Tsun’s journey to Dr. Stephen Albert’s house was his
fate, which was caused by the successful lineage of various times. Throughout
the story Borge is able to cunningly express the complexity of time, ‘forking
paths’ and fate through the strategic placement of key moments,
characters, and symbols, all the while challenging the reader to think in
non-conventional ways.
In traditional fiction, characters are presented with alternatives and are able
to choose only one alternative, ultimately giving an option of either or; pursuant
to specific choices, stories are told using only one direction, making the reader think of only one branch of a decision. However, in
this story the reader is presented with an abstract concept that was
ironically presented through a work written by Tsun’s great-Grandfather,
Ts’ui Pen. This idea was that people are able to make choices simultaneously,
thus creating various futures and branches of time which will go on to bifurcate into
other times; creating an infinite sense of time. These different branches of time
will diverge, converge and ignore one another. The branches often cross paths
at precise moments, establishing an interconnectedness, or “forking”, that
serves as an invisible hand to someone’s fate.
Borge chooses to make Tsun’s journey successful in order to properly illustrate
how time is intermingling and depict the impact one branch on another. For
example, when Tsun reaches the train platform near Dr. Albert’s house a group
of children mysteriously knew where he needed to go, and without the guidance
of these characters, Tsun likely would not have made it to his ending point in
time to kill Dr. Albert. The children shared this valuable knowledge “to
various times, but not to all” (319); this perfectly aligned convergence of
pathways was key to Tsun’s journey and thus allowed for him to continue. Likewise,
Dr. Stephen Albert happened to possess a missing piece to the labyrinth of Ts’u
Pen’s “Forking Gardens”, which without this piece of knowledge, the chracters
would not have comprehended the solution to Ts’u Pen’s labyrinthine novel—time.
Having access to Tsun’s thoughts allows the reader to understand the significance
of this discovery. The significance being that Tsun was able to recognize his
specific branch in the web of time and how various versions of himself were
occurring simultaneously and that this branch of his time was his fate. This
recognition resulted in Tsun’s feelings of guilt, purpose, and ultimately,
infiniteness.
-Jason Trull
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