1
The Garden of the Forking Paths

• Jorge Luis Borges

Literary Criticism History (3) History and Time
2
Characters Plot

• Dr. Yu Tsun a Chinese, a German spy and a
  former professor of English
• ? goes to Stephen Albert, a sinologist who has
  created a garden identical to one created by Yu
  Tsun's ancestor, Ts'ui Pen, who also worked on a
  novel,The Garden of Forking Paths, for 13 years.
• ? pursued by Captain Richard Madden, an Irishman
  in service to the English
• ? despite the other possibilities he envisions,
  Yu kills Albert.

3
Gap, the inevitable and the Chinese Box
The torrential rains, Captain Liddell Hart
comments, caused this delay, an insignificant
one, to be sure.

Yus Statement The first two pages of the
document are missing

1. the discovery, capture, maybe even the death of
   two agents (Runeberg and himself) of the German
   Reich
2. The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to
   imagine that he has already accomplished it,
   ought to impose upon himself a future as
   irrevocable as the past

garden Novel (Fang vs. intruder)
garden Yu vs. Albert
3. Kill Albert to relay the site of the British
artillery park in Belgium.
4
The Labyrinthine

• Yu aware of multiple possibilities (e.g. 13 14)
• understands the maze world of the past and the
  future
• I imagined itthat lost maze inviolate and
  perfect at the secret crest of a mountain I
  imagined it erased by rice fields or beneath the
  water I imagined it infinite, no longer composed
  of octagonal kiosks and returning paths, but of
  rivers and provinces and kingdoms . . . I thought
  of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous
  spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past
  and the future and in some way involve the stars.
  The afternoon was intimate, infinite.

5
Time the irrevocable

• Yu Tsun Centuries of centuries and only in the
  present do things happen countless men in the
  air, on the face of the earth and the sea, and
  all that really is happening is happening to me.
• the future as the irrevocable (15)
• talks to Albert and let his irrevocable future
  wait (16).

6
Time the labyrinthine

• Ts'ui Pen, "I leave to the various futures (not
  to all) my garden of forking paths.
• -- Why does time forks? Where does forking
  happens?
• Albert time -- a "dizzying net of divergent,
  convergent, and parallel times. (16) ? multiple
  possibilities
• Yu feelsnot the swarming of the divergent,
  parallel and finally coalescent armies, but a
  more inaccessible, more intimate agitation that
  they in some manner prefigured(17)
• .

7
Forking Paths

• ones intended/chosen path and its possible
  diversion
• Albert killed, ? no killing
• Madden captures Yu Tsun, without understanding
  the meaning of Albert's death, ? with
  understanding
• History becomes unreal, insignificant. Yu
  Tsun experiences a great "contrition and
  weariness. ? real history?
• Multiple identity of Yu Tsun, Albert and Madden

8

Chinese Box and Multiple Choices