That the governing structural principle of Jorge Luis Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths" is the analogy among fictional levels goes almost without saying. In the fashion of Chinese boxes, many parallels are established between the characters Yu Tsun, Stephen Albert, and Ts'ui Pên, forming a chain that modern psychoanalysis would call "intersubjective repetition." (p. 639)

What is less self-evident is that the analogies between the diegetic and the metadiegetic levels of narration function to collapse classical oppositions either by identifying them with each other or by rendering them interchangeable. Thus a message addressed to the public becomes esoteric, whereas an esoteric transmission appears in a public medium; the best form of revelation is omission, while the most effective method of concealment is exposure; the same speech act is both a success and a failure; speech itself (or writing) is shown to be an action, and action, in turn, becomes a form of speech (or writing); time is characterized both by the uniqueness of transitory moments and by the (time-negating) eternity of repetition; and these repetitions simultaneously disintegrate and define the self.

Both Ts'ui Pên and Yu Tsun are faced with the task of transmitting a message, and both do so through indirection. Pên's message is a philosophy of time and is addressed to "the various futures (not to all)" in the form of a book …, a public medium. Nevertheless, as Albert acutely perceives, it is Pên's belief that the most effective form of revelation is omission. (pp. 640-41)

Unlike Pên's novel, intended for the many and decoded by one, Tsun's secret information is meant for one person only. But because of the absence of normal communication channels, it is addressed to the many. The spy-narrator pointedly formulates his predicament by the use of oxymoron…. Crying out a secret, and doing so without being heard; both tasks seem paradoxical and infeasible. And yet, the solution devised by Yu Tsun is no less paradoxical than the problem with which it is intended to deal. It resolves the oxymoron by reasserting it. Tsun decides that the best way to transmit the secret is by crying it out, by making it appear in the newspapers. Whereas Ts'ui Pên believes that the most effective method of revelation is omission, Yu Tsun discovers, rather like the queen and the minister in [Edgar Allen] Poe's "The Purloined Letter," that the best form of concealment is exposure, or rather pseudoexposure, since the newspaper item, formally available to everyone, is here used as a code whose real import can be deciphered only by the appropriate person. For the sake of his message's double status, Tsun devises a speech act of referring or naming from which the crucial "utterance of R" is missing and, in the fashion of Pên's novel, replaced by "inept metaphors." Nothing is said about the British artillery park, but the murder of the sinologist who carries the same name as that park is a metaphoric disclosure of the secret to the initiated. A city is named by killing a man—an indirect speech act, successful from the viewpoint of the Chief, guilt-provoking for its ingenious and insincere performer.

It is not only the indirectness of Pên's and Tsun's speech acts and the inverse relations they entertain between concealment and revelation that make the two episodes mirror images of each other. The constituent elements of speech acts, speech and action, are also interestingly juxtaposed and equated in these episodes. On both occasions—the one diegetic the other metadiegetic, the one concerned with a book the other with a crime—speech and action are first presented as separate activities and are then equated with each other. At the metadiegetic level, we are told by Stephen Albert that the famous Ts'ui Pên renounced worldly power "in order to compose a book and a maze."… The "and" leads us, as it has led Pên's relatives and admirers, to believe that he had two projects in mind: the verbal act of writing and the physical act of constructing a labyrinth. This misleading impression is reinforced by memories of the spy-narrator, himself a descendant of Ts'ui Pên. His illustrious great-grandfather, he recalls, retired "to write a novel that might be even more populous than the Hung Lu Meng and to construct a labyrinth in which all men would become lost."… The "and" again acts as a leurre, further developed by the narrator's explanation that Ts'ui Pên devoted thirteen years "to these heterogeneous tasks."… No one discovered the labyrinth after Pên's death, and the book was found to be incomprehensible and self-contradictory. It fell to the British sinologist, Stephen Albert, to solve the mysteries of the loss of the maze and the incoherence of the novel by postulating an identity of the seemingly "heterogeneous tasks": "the book and the maze were one and the same thing."… To write, for Pên, is to construct a labyrinth: speech is action.

At the diegetic level, an analogous situation occurs. Two newspaper items which initially seem disparate prove in fact to be intimately related: the Germans' bombing of the city of Albert and the murder of the British sinologist by a stranger. No one but the "stranger"—the narrator—and the Chief in Berlin knew that the murder of Albert was the only way of imparting to Germany "the secret name of the city they must attack."… The bombing is a result of the killing, and the murder itself is an action which replaces impossible speech—impossible because of the war conditions and the imminent arrest of the spy-narrator. Thus whereas at the metadiegetic level speech is seen as action, here action is seen as speech; the two episodes reflect each other as if in inverted mirrors. (pp. 641-43)

A correlation emerges between this equation and the paradoxical treatment of another classical opposition, one that is prominent in the whole of Borges' work as well as in that of his fictional labyrinth producer: time versus timelessness. At first sight it may seem that language parallels timelessness, whereas action is time-bound. By its very nature a sign is reproducible, capable of being repeated by different people in different circumstances at different periods, hence time transcending and in a sense "eternal." On the other hand, action, and in particular a radical action like murder, is irreversible, irreproducible, and hence bound to the flux of time. But the story shows that just as speech and action can be identified with each other so can each of them manifest both the transitory and the eternal, and time itself must paradoxically be both negated and affirmed. For, to start with the language end of the equation, although it is true that a sign transcends time through repetition, it is also true that no repeated occurrence is identical with another, since the context in which the sign appears automatically changes it. This double nature of the sign is utilized by the narrator: it is precisely because the word "Albert" can be repeated in different circumstances that the narrator can refer uniquely to the object he intends (the city) through the one quality this object shares with another, that is, its name. But it is only because the referent of this name changes with the context that Tsun can disguise his reference and make it indicate one thing to the Chief and an entirely different thing to the ordinary newspaper reader. [Unlike language, action seems to be bound to the moment of its performance, hence transitory and irrevocable, and yet in this story it is also shown to be capable of "continuing indefinitely."] (pp. 643-44)

Perhaps the most striking way in which action can transcend time is by the coincidence or repetition of the same occurrence in different temporal dimensions and/or in the lives of different people. In an article which bears the appropriately paradoxical title "A New Refutation of Time," Borges describes such a duplication and comments: "Time, if we can intuitively grasp such an identity, is a delusion: the difference and inseparability of one moment belonging to its apparent past from another belonging to its apparent present is sufficient to disintegrate it." Thus the various analogies between Pên, Albert, and Tsun function to disintegrate time through mirroring and repetition.

These analogies also disintegrate the concept of self or identity. Consistent with the pattern which governs all opposites in the story, however, the self is both lost through an identification with the other and at the same time most authentically defined by it…. Albert becomes Ts'ui Pên through his devoted discovery of Pên's labyrinth, so much so that like Pên he is murdered by a stranger. In being killed by Tsun, Albert is revealed as a victim of the same device he so ingeniously unearthed in Pên's work, and Tsun, in turn, duplicates Albert by using the same technique in an inverted form. Significantly, Tsun is also the great grandson of Ts'ui Pên, and his thoughts before reaching Albert become, in retrospect, a divination of Pên's secret as formulated by the British sinologist…. The identification thus becomes three-fold, and the self is to some extent lost in the other.

Analogy among characters is not the only structural device which blurs the boundaries of the self. The very repetition of the act of narration, involving a chain of quotations, makes the story a perfect example of what [Roman] Jakobson calls "speech within speech" and divorces the various characters from their own discourse…. [Quotation] is a dominant narrative mode in this story, and quotation is the appropriation by one person of the speech of another. Since a person is to a large extent constituted by his discourse, such an appropriation implies, at least partly, an interpenetration of personalities. Thus both repetition through analogy and repetition through quotation threaten the absolute autonomy of the self.

Or do they? Is not a sinologist most truly a sinologist when he identifies himself with the object of his research? And is not a spy most truly a spy when he obliterates his own personality in an identification with another?… [Tsun] kills "a man from England—a modest man—who for [him] is no less great than Goethe,"… kills him and feels "innumerable contrition and weariness." He has indeed bidden farewell to himself in the mirror figuratively as well as literally, and in so doing he has become a successful spy. But the identification with Albert is not limited to a definition of the narrator's role as a spy. It also defines something essential to the real face in the mirror, something which is to a large extent responsible for his decision to associate himself with Berlin. "I didn't do it for Germany," he says, "I did it because I sensed that the Chief somehow feared people of my race—for the innumerable ancestors who merge within me. I wanted to prove to him that a yellow man could save his armies."… And it is precisely the culture of his ancestors that is "being restored to [him] by a man of a remote empire, in the course of a desperate adventure, on a Western isle."… The identification with Albert, it transpires, leads to an identification with Ts'ui Pên, and this return to his ancestors most intimately determines an essential aspect of Tsun's authentic personality.

Thus the same phenomenon of repetition which disintegrates the autonomy of the individual also defines it, and Borges is far from being unaware of this paradox [see the concluding paragraph of "A New Refutation of Time"]. (pp. 645-47)

The real "scandal" in this story, I suggest, is not merely the disintegration of classical notions but the simultaneous denial and affirmation of a given concept and the interchangeability of mutually opposed ones. The world thus created is one which constantly, vigorously, and ingeniously courts paradox. And what can one expect when an irresistible force flirts with an immovable object? (p. 647)