Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of the Forking Path
Introduction
This text is like a puzzle, but one for which there is no solution. If you find it hard to read, you are not alone.
For example, none of the texts in this story are conclusive:
- Yu’s deposition
- the fragment of the letter that allowed Albert to solve the riddle
- Hart’s history
- Tsui Peng’s fragmented novel
This is significant because the story itself is inconclusive. What then, might it be saying about history, about texts, and about meaning?
The genre of this story appears to be detective fiction but, not unlike Pirandello’s theater, the reader/audience becomes a character in the story. As readers we are expected to follow the convoluted time line to delineate a coherent series of plot events. In this way, our job resembles the job of a historian, trying to piece together a narrative with imperfect, unreliable texts and incomplete, biased or unreliable accounts. In addition, the story is dominated by linear time—Yu Tsun is fighting the clock to solve this mystery.
Unlike detective fiction, however, the audience participates not by trying to determine the perpetrator of the crime but by trying to discern the rationale for the mystery. We already know the outcome from the beginning.
Paragraph 1 is filled with data. Is any of it significant? For example:
- Torrential rain caused delay—albeit “an insignificant one”
- Was it insignificant? Is any of this data significant or insignificant?
Yu Tsun has called Runeberg’s apartment and Madden has answered, so he knows Runeberg is toast, but the author footnotes the details of Runeberg’s death. Why does Borges footnote part of the plot? Is he illustrating how the detective story (or the historian) accumulates data?
Why do we read the random details of the contents of his pockets? Some of these details matter; some don’t. Our job, like the historian’s, is to sift through and determine which ones matter.