Jorge Luis Borges

NOTES ON JORGE LUIS BORGES

"The Garden of Forking Paths"
  

Borges was Argentinian born, and spent much time in Europe.  He fared badly during the regime of Juan Peron since Borges was more closely allied with the Left than the Peronistas were willing to tolerate.  See page 2412: "In 1946 the Peron regime removed him from the librarian's post" and moved him over to the job of "chicken inspector."  Buck buck buck!!  But later on he fared much better.  In each life some chickens will cluck.  His amanuensis in later years, by the way, was Alberto Manguel, who wrote an interesting book called A History of Reading. 

Borges is the antithesis of a realist, though the present story reads clearly enough, and is rather like detective fiction: here's the official account, and here's the truth about how the info was obtained to bomb this little town.  He rejects the idea that art must copy life, must tie itself to a realistic representation of life in all its banality and ideological pushiness.  He's more of a philosophical artist, a postmodernist of sorts.  A realistic author like Jane Austen or Gustave Flaubert, after all, writes in the basic belief that life is intelligible and unified and that one can, therefore, represent it coherently and accurately, more or less in linear fashion, well-sketched and consistent characters, etc.  But maybe that's too tidy and excludes everything that doesn't add to the unity-and-coherence effect.  One ideological reason for this is that such an author may not really want things to change, though that's not entirely fair since you could say that first you have to recognize how things are in the first place.  Still, it's at least arguable that the realistic agenda ties one to or makes one complicit in the perpetuation of what is represented.  Borges as a man of the Left is interested in social and political change. 

Borges isn't describing one reality but many, but inventing new worlds upon worlds, promoting the free play of imagination.  That is a Surrealist thing to advocate in the name of change, and of course we often say that Borges inspired a great deal of Latin America's magical realism, itself a species of literary surrealism relying on the juxtaposition of alternate realities.  History, myth, any source of insight will be placed on the same level – a fact I believe the Norton editors refer to.  The productions of imagination are granted their own reality, probably because doing that encourages a brand of literature less tied to the way things supposedly "just are" and more allied with possibilities.

The story itself begins by referring to actual textbook history: "You will read that an attack … had to be postponed …"  But let Borges' narrator tell us what really happened.  This something that really happened sounds like it's scripted by the Freudian Unheimlich, the shock of recognition of something mysterious.  His own past is what causes this shock  -- his grandfather was writing a book about the constitution of time and eventuality.  He becomes a character in that book, at least by projection, as if the present had already been predicted.  Yu Tsun had no idea that he was going to find out about this secret of his ancestral past, but he finds out all the same.  He was in Staffordshire with Rudeberg and they are caught, pursued by the Irishman Madden, a detective who has been seeking them out.  Why has he done what he's done, acting as a spy?  "I wanted to prove to him that a yellow man could save his armies" (2415).  He possesses the name of the town that the Germans must bomb because it has an artillery park named Albert.  The only way to convey it is to kill a man named Stephen Albert since his last name matches.  Madden is looking for him, and Tsun knows he'll eventually be caught.  Can he get to Stephen Albert first?  That's the thing.  But Albert happens to be a sinologist.  Tsun can only get to the house by means of a maze, which is uncanny because that's what his grandfather's book was about.  Uncanny, and it all keeps coming back to the protagonists personally and to their own history, these great events of history.  See 2416 bottom.

What will we learn?  Well, we will learn why Tsun's grandfather wrote the book, why he made such a project of time.  The story's burden is to explain the alternate conception of reality and time that Tsun's grandfather had come up with.  It's Stephen Albert who enlightens Tsun about his own past.  I suppose both of them are living out one version of reality.  The grandfather had, after all, been killed by the hand of another, just as Stephen Albert will be.  As it turns out, the book and the labyrinth are the same thing, and Albert has figured it out: an entirely different way of dealing with temporality, with narrative.  The garden was the "chaotic novel" (2419).  Well, as Yogi Berra says, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."  In Borges-world, you can hardly do otherwise!  Or how about, "That place isn't popular anymore – everybody goes there"?  Many futures, infinite possibilities, and they all happen.  It's almost as if what the old man Pen' was on to was something like today's "string theory," which tries to bring together quantum mechanics and general relativity.