PROLOGUE

Alors je rentrai dans la maison, et j'écrivis, Il est minuit. La pluie fouette les vitres. Il n'était pas minuit. Il ne pleuvait pas.

—Samuel Beckett, Molloy¹

I begin this essay about Jorge Luis Borges's “The Garden of Forking Paths,” appropriately enough, with a small confession. I am here engaged in a practice of which I generally disapprove: writing professionally on a text in whose language of composition I am illiterate. That a trivial discrepancy between two English translations of “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” started me down this path is a paltry excuse.² Yu Tsun, whose sworn confession constitutes all but the first paragraph of “The Garden of Forking Paths,” has this advice for the “soldiers and bandits” he sees inheriting the world: “Whosoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished, should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past” (F, 92–93). Typically, Yu places his emphasis squarely on the individual will (in this case, will masquerading as destiny), as if we deliberately chose both our atrocious enterprises and the means of pursuing them. I, on the contrary, seem to have been led by the world's most brilliant (and devious) librarian through certain half-lit stacks without regard to (if not precisely against) my will. I have watched this enterprise gradually come to appear less atrocious and less revocable. Like spying for foreign powers, the scholarly mission can take on a compulsive tinge.

I have something of a bibliographical detective story to tell, one that disrupts common assumptions about the nature of texts and their relations to the world they both constitute a part of and purport to document. The burden of my story is that, in reading “The Garden of Forking Paths,” we can become characters in another story that is incited and “scripted,” if not precisely written, by Borges. Reading this tale (and reading around it), we are encouraged simultaneously, disconcertingly, to replicate and to question Borges's story, the stories of spy narrator-murderer Yu Tsun and Sinologist-metaphysician-corpse Stephen Albert, and the story we inhabit and habitually, blithely, call “history.” As readers, we seek the source of a crime; as critic, I have sought the source of a citation.

Generically, “The Garden of Forking Paths” is multiply suggestive.³ As a spy thriller, it depends on the forward momentum toward a mysterious but univocal climax that such stories generally exploit; Yu Tsun's narrative emphasizes linear time pressure—a conscious deadline, a short headstart, the maddeningly implacable Richard Madden hot on the trail—with dozens of temporal markers. Borges, in his prologue to Ficciones, called it “a detective story; its readers,” he continued, “will assist at the execution, and all the preliminaries, of a crime, a crime whose purpose will not be unknown to them, but which they will not understand—it seems to me—until the last paragraph” (F, 15). This story partakes of the subsubgenre sometimes referred to as “metaphysical” or “analytic” detective stories. Readers of detective fiction, from metaphysical to pulp, may always be in some sense accomplices (to mystery, at least, if not to mayhem), but this story is unusual in its inversions of typical mystery form: the murder occurs at the end, we seek not perpetrator but rationale, and we “solve” the crime a couple of sentences after it takes place. Further, the reader-as-accomplice has a conflict of interest, since, as Stephen Rudy notes, the reader is also “the real ‘detective’ in the story.”⁴ Ironically, the character who “plays detective” (deciphering past actions and motives, solving the mystery of Yu's great-grandfather Ts'ui Pên's apparently unaccountable literary behavior) is the victim, Stephen Albert. But “The Garden of Forking Paths” bears in its opening paragraph the trappings of another genre that interprets, or “solves,” the past in a different way: it presents itself as a footnote to a history book, purporting to document a causal chain of specific, knowable, more or less explicable events. This is where my detective story will begin, in the bibliographical and pseudohistorical opening paragraph of Borges's story; or, more precisely, of two English translations thereof.

I

In still another, I utter these same words, but I am a mistake, a ghost.

—Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Labyrinths⁵

In yet another, I say these very same words, but am an error, a phantom.

—Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths” (F, 100)

Reading a memorable text in two translations can occasion a touch of the uncanny, like meeting a friend's close relatives. The conjunction of near congruence with nonidentity allows an unnerving intuition: déjà-lu. Even without verbatim recall, one senses that memory has shifted—broken into pieces and recombined—while one was looking the other way. Phrases, images, tonalities, narrative gestures, all stored in the same organ as recollections of childhood, can induce a dreamlike feeling of revisiting a familiar house whose furniture has been rearranged in some imponderable way, a feeling perhaps not unlike Yu Tsun's when he revisits his ancestor's “shapeless mass of contradictory rough drafts,” “translated” by Stephen Albert not only into English but into a work of philosophical genius (F, 96,100).

Reading a memorable text in two translations, one can also feel betrayed, not only by an unexamined faith in the efficacy or transparency of translation, but also by personal memory, private lectorial history. Even when translations appear compatible, their differences explicable, one can feel betrayed, as I do by that “Garden of Forking Paths” whose final sentence proclaims Yu's “innumerable contrition and weariness” (L, 29) rather than his “infinite penitence and sickness of the heart” (F, 101). The idea of enumerating contrition or weariness is certainly (in English) gauche, but offends me more than it ought to because it vies with a preferred phrase.⁶ The reader-in-translation is at the mercy of both authorial representations and an intermediary's interpretive representation. If translations differ not only in matters of taste (“contrition” versus “penitence”), but in the simplest, least disputable facts, one feels obliged to take sides, to get to the bottom of a presumably not bottomless mystery.

My Grove Evergreen edition of Ficciones contains a story called “The Garden of Forking Paths” (translated by Helen Temple and Ruthven Todd) that begins:

In his A History of the World War (page 212), Captain Liddell Hart reports that a planned offensive by thirteen British divisions, supported by fourteen hundred artillery pieces, against the German line at Serre-Montauban, scheduled for July 24, 1916, had to be postponed until the morning of the 29th. He comments that torrential rain caused this delay—which lacked any special significance.

(F, 89)

My New Directions edition of Labyrinths contains a similar story, also called “The Garden of Forking Paths” (translated by Donald A. Yates), that begins:

On page 22 of Liddell Hart's History of World War I you will read that an attack against the Serre-Montauban line by thirteen British divisions (supported by 1,400 artillery pieces), planned for the 24th of July, 1916, had to be postponed until the morning of the 29th. The torrential rains, Captain Liddell Hart comments, caused this delay, an insignificant one, to be sure.

(L, 19)

The text that follows, both translations agree, will cast “unsuspected light” on this delay.

We note first, in both passages, the typically Borgesian urge to pin down a new explanation for something whose insignificance all versions of the story wryly stipulate. We may suppose the difference in titles (A History of the World War versus History of World War I) to be a function of Borges's translation of an English title into Spanish and its subsequent retranslation into the language where it started. The discrepancy in page references (212 versus 22) looks like a simple typographical error in one edition or the other. So far, so good; we scholars are all too familiar with the everyday perils of transcription and typesetting.⁷

We are also notorious, though, for being easily upset by details—however significant or trivial—that refuse to cohere, such as the asymmetry of these numeric palindromes. Were it not for this discrepancy, I might have shared John Sturrock's aggressively breezy attitude toward Borges's reference to Liddell Hart: “I have not checked this quotation because it does not matter in the least whether it is accurate.”⁸ Personally, I might positively favor inaccuracy; Borges, after all, has the uncanny ability (even in translation) to create the illusion that he invented not only Franz Kafka and Pierre Menard, but the very idea of the encyclopedia, or of the tiger. I would prefer, for instance, to be allowed the conviction that Borges invented “Liddell Hart” in homage to Lewis Carroll. Instead, knowing that actuality provided this name before Borges could conjure it up, I am forced to view this nominal bit of history as something like a “found poem,” a delicious morsel of linguistic nature that Borges dressed to advantage. Likewise, in a text concerned with the supposition that we inhabit not a universe but a multiverse, a polyverse, I feel obliged to seek a rationale for the appearance of two incompatible page numbers. Borges, most fantastical of writers, often chastens his readers' predilection for fantasy.

Dialing up mainframes or riffling through obsolete paper card catalogs to determine which translation got title and page reference right (and, by the by, since we know Borges was a tricky devil, what the historian “historically” wrote), we learn that Captain Basil Henry Liddell Hart produced no fewer than two histories of that World War generally designated, without fear of inaccuracy (without fear, that is, of discovering multiple, proliferating First World Wars), “I.” His titles, by emphasizing unitary, bedrock actuality, tend to belie their own multiplicity: The Real War, 1914–1918 appeared in 1930; A History of the World War, 1914–1918, a revised, expanded edition of The Real (the surreal, the ultrareal?), in 1934. We find in The Real War a paragraph on the insignificant delay of an attack against the Serre-Montauban line: “The bombardment began on June 24; the attack was intended for June 29, but was later postponed until July 1, owing to a momentary break in the weather … the assaulting troops, … after being keyed up for the effort, had to remain another forty-eight hours in cramped trenches under the exhausting noise of their own gunfire and the enemy's retaliation—conditions made worse by torrential rain which flooded the trenches.” This paragraph appears not on page 22, not on page 212, but on pages 233–34. A History of the World War includes an identical paragraph, postponed some eighty pages to 314–15.⁹

Critics who notice such discrepancies usually dismiss them as simple irony—“La référence est, en effet, très précise mais, en fait, inexacte”¹⁰—or typical Borgesian playfulness. But vigorous play can evoke serious vertigo, and those critics who attend to the Liddell Hart citation tend to show symptoms of the disorientation that labyrinths traditionally produce. Mary Lusky Friedman, who notes that the tale is presented “as a sort of corrective footnote to Liddell Hart's standard history,” requires a corrective footnote of her own. “The narrator of the story's first paragraph,” she writes, “recalls Germany's bombardment of a British artillery park during World War I and promises that what we are about to read will shed light on events surrounding the surprise attack.”¹¹ The narrator of the various first paragraphs I have read recalls no such thing; Friedman conflates the Allied offensive with the German attack that, according to Yu Tsun, postponed it. Gene Bell-Villada contends that “the report of a postponed British attack on Serre-Montauban … is mostly ‘Borgesian’ invention. Hart does allude to a battle in 1916 near Montauban, in which the same number of British divisions (thirteen) were involved, but there is no mention of a postponement; and the heavy rains took place in November, not July, as Borges indicates.”¹² Does the corresponding paragraph in Bell-Villada's copy of Liddell Hart mention the battle, then, but omit the two-day delay and the torrential rains?

Stephen Rudy's more meticulous reading remarks several discrepancies: that “the action on the Somme took place a month earlier than Borges quotes Liddell Hart, falsely, as having stated”; that “Borges refers in various places to Liddell Hart's book under [three different] titles”; that Liddell Hart published two versions of what Friedman calls the “standard history.” Finally, he notes that “the page references to Liddell Hart given in the two English translations differ: p. 22 according to Ficciones; p. 212 according to Labyrinths. Neither has anything to do with the Battle of the Somme,” he concludes, and leaves it at that (a later note, however, mentions “p. 315 of A History,” making it clear that Rudy tracked down the appropriate reference to the Somme).¹³ Thus, in the footnotes to his illuminating analysis of plot elements, Rudy points to virtually all the incongruities I have mentioned so far—without seeming to notice that they make “The Garden of Forking Paths” (taken as the sum of its printed versions) enact something similar to what Albert's theory of repetitive divergence describes. As if Borges's labyrinth allows no one safe passage, Rudy rechristens the London publisher “Faber and Facer,”¹⁴ though this error, like the delay of the British offensive, is “an insignificant one, to be sure.”

I would be surprised to learn that I have emerged unscathed, have not gotten some big or little thing wrong; part of Borges's game consists in misleading and confounding readers; with reference to the sometimes atrocious enterprise of criticism, he seems to have played this game with remarkable success. Professional readers, in this regard, are ironically more vulnerable than amateurs; like martial artists who exploit opponents' weight and momentum, Borges's story lets our own aggressive impulses toward textual mastery throw us off balance. The gremlins that afflict translators do not spare critics, and discussing “The Garden of Forking Paths,” like hooking a Persian rug, seems to require a flaw.

The page of a particular volume on which a particular sequence of words appears ought not to mean a thing. Excepting a couple of Laurence Sterne's typographical quips, pagination is an accident of layout and leading, formatting and font. To seek numerological patterns in, say, The Faerie Queene, one examines verbal echoes, poetic subdivisions—stanzas, cantos, books—not edition-specific ordinals. The latter are dead twigs on the tree of causality, with no purpose more intriguing than idiotically predictable sequencing. If we found the word armadillo on all pages divisible by seventeen, but on no other pages, of some contemporary novel, we might think it worthy of cocktail chat, but not of Notes and Queries. In fact, we would never discern that pattern, because we would not be looking for it, or anything like it. We cast pariah page references out of syntax, marking them as untext with the stigmata of parentheses. Because they are as dumb and devoid of significance as they are necessary and useful, they are the last place we should expect to find any intimation of a cosmic labyrinth. By incorporating the inconsequential sequentiality that all books display—the very emblem of linear textuality—as a problematic feature of his story, Borges points obliquely to Liddell Hart's question about the weather, Yu Tsun's question at the instant of pulling the trigger, the question the best fiction always poses more complicatedly than it can answer: What weighs, what matters, what signifies?

II

No book is ever published without some variant in each copy. Scribes take a secret oath to omit, interpolate, vary.

—Jorge Luis Borges, “The Babylon Lottery” (F, 71)

Ignoring the discrepancy in dates (which echoes and reinforces the page-number puzzle but would entail a distracting bifurcation), we sally into musty stacks to determine which page of which work Borges's narrator actually cited.¹⁵ Our willingness to ignore certain “facts” (the dates) makes us resemble Yu after the commission of his crime: “What remains [that is, his arrest and condemnation to death—not to mention the upshot of a World War] is unreal and unimportant” (F, 101). Our obsession with precision, our library research, our conviction that one page in one book will give us what we need, make us more closely resemble Yu planning his crime, searching the telephone directory for “the name of the one person capable of passing on the information” (F, 91). Both American editions claim (F, 4; L, iv) to translate the same Spanish Ficciones—published in 1956 as volume 5 of Emecé's ten-volume Obras completas (1953–71)—in which “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” begins: “En la página 22 de la Historia de la Guerra Europea de Liddell Hart” (thus also Emecé's 1956 two-volume Obras completas).¹⁶ This might have been the end of the story: no mystery at all, but a garden-variety mistranscription by a compound culprit, the suggestively named translating team of Temple and Todd.

Borges rarely affords such easy egress. Nor, in this case, do his publishers, who counterintuitively managed eighteen years later to condense the still-growing “Complete Works” into one volume. Perhaps Emecé took to heart the suggestion in the brilliant final footnote of “The Library of Babel”: “Strictly speaking, one single volume should suffice: a single volume of ordinary format, printed in nine or ten type body, and consisting of an infinite number of infinitely thin pages” (F, 88; Anthony Kerrigan's translation). In any case, one needn't have Spanish to see that the narrator of “El jardín” in Obras completas, 1923–1972 (1974) turns over a new leaf to keep our story interesting: “En la página 242 de la Historia de la Guerra Europea de Liddell Hart” (thus also a 1980 Barcelona compilation of Borges's Prosa completa).¹⁷

Another country heard from, and mystery reinstated. Clearly, the Obras were no more completas in 1974 than in 1956, and not only because Borges would live another dozen years; a truly complete edition (even ignoring translations)—an Obras completas completa, if you will—would apparently include at least two (trivially different) “El jardín”'s. This new and thoroughly Argentine discrepancy shows, at least, that translation is not the source of the problem, but merely one of several sites where citations can proliferate. Compilation may be another; if so, we need to consult the incomplete works. In the original story, then—the one Borges wrote, the one we might wish, following Liddell Hart, to call the real story—what page is cited? This desire to know what something really was or first was—this fetishizing of the origin—is the futile wish for “history” an sich, the “actual” offensive, the “actual” delay, of which Liddell Hart's reports are, as it were, only later editions. Clever postmodern theories of representation notwithstanding, however, we seem to have a right to ask, in so simply numerical a case, what the blind librarian himself cited.

Working backward toward an elusive origin, I recall Borges's analysis in “Kafka and His Precursors” of the way that a prior past can be irreversibly redefined by subsequent developments in a more recent past. He is quite convincing on the slippery, intuitive issue of literary “influence”; but such an argument ought not to apply to something so finite and (unmeta)physical as a page number. Because no matter how much we enjoy playing Borgesian games, no one finally believes that the planet we live on follows their rules. No idealist's “proof” of immateriality makes anyone (even the idealist) sit less heavily, chew less thoroughly, or feel less rotten about being trapped in a cramped trench flooded by torrential rains. And so we can't stop short of first editions: lovers of fiction, we seek fact; like historians, we desire the original, crave the truth.

The truth: the first edition of El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (1942) and the first edition of Ficciones (1944) both cite page 252.¹⁸

This (historically) first page number is the sixth one on my list. Through what combination of errata, corrections, hypermetropia, and/or disinformation were these bifurcating, trifurcating, hexafurcating variants introduced? Is there in our libraries a book to reconcile or, at least, explain them? Perhaps a Spanish translation of Liddell Hart (of which Liddell Hart, we wonder in passing): the book Borges's narrator refers to, entitled Historia de la Guerra Europea. This History of the European (not the World, not the Real) War may provide the clue we bibliographical detectives crave. Such a volume could contain a paragraph describing an insignificant delay on page 212, 22, 233, 314, 242, or 252. More likely, it would add a seventh number to my list. And an eighth, a ninth: revised, expanded editions of this work might in their turn present incompatible paginations. But this path seems to be, as some forks must be, a cul-de-sac; I have tried, and failed, to ascertain evidence that Liddell Hart's work ever found a Spanish translator.¹⁹

There may be a relatively sensible explanation—of the sort that Captain Liddell Hart would favor—for this history of proliferative, hence indeterminate, citations, this bibliotechnical version of the Stephen Albert/Ts'ui Pên phenomenon, whereby simple facts become trembling constellations of possibilities. If so, life has only accidentally imitated art, giving our Boolean searches a suspiciously Borgesian plot. Whether accidentally or conspiratorially, though, what happens, in short, is this: “The Garden of Forking Paths” breaks the binding of any book that seeks to contain it, sending us through stacks that begin eerily to resemble the Library of Babel, full of possibly insignificant variants on indeterminately significant texts. Recalling the volume of The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia described in Borges's “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”—the single copy that differs from others in a single crucial detail—we may begin to wonder whether each volume we consult accurately represents the edition of which it is an example. I located one of my Spanish “originals,” for instance, in the collection of Wellesley College and received a photocopy of the other from Middlebury College; if I happened to live in Chicago and had examined midwestern copies instead, might this essay now be headed in a different direction?

Generally impervious to the charms of mysticism, I find the direction it has taken quite disconcerting. “The Garden of Forking Paths” makes me ask strange questions whose answers generate stranger ones. The story (taken, again, as the sum of its versions) presents not the familiar musical format of theme and variations but variants with a theme. Differences one would otherwise deem quite “insignificant” (in “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan,” in “The Garden of Forking Paths,” and in the histories to which they ostensibly refer) become thematically charged when one of the story's explicit themes is, precisely, that of proliferant variations.

Given Liddell Hart's oddly redundant publishing history and Borges's oddly nonredundant citations, we may view Stephen Albert's theory of forking time in a new light. Our libraries become themselves gardens of forking paths—in space, not time—labyrinths that problematize the unitary status of Liddell Hart, of Borges, and (of course) of the story itself. Like the fragment of a letter that affords Albert the clue he needs to decipher Ts'ui Pên's life, like Yu Tsun's fragmentary deposition that constitutes nearly all of this story, all texts and explanatory impulses begin to appear incomplete, elusive, teasing.²⁰ We rely implicitly on the idea that any text—Yu's deposition, Albert's scrap of a letter, Ts'ui Pên's chaotically fragmentary “novel,” Liddell Hart's history, our own scholarly article—has the capacity to cast light (“unsuspected” or otherwise) on its subject; here, in contrast, we find arresting intimations that texts offer only shadowy glimpses of mutating, more or less irrelevant, necessarily indefinitive possibilities (“a shapeless mass of contradictory rough drafts,” as Yu calls Ts'ui's manuscript). Between these opposing ideas an insoluble tension arises. It recreates in readers' experience the tension in the story's structure between the illusion of precise, linear, forward momentum in Yu's singleminded plot and the illusion of infinitely branching, looping movements (both experiential and narrative) in Albert's reading of Ts'ui Pên's theory of the universe. The unlikely publishing histories of a British military historian (“external to” this story) and an Argentine librarian (its creator) combine to reinforce a British Sinologist's notion of radical contingency.

But Borges's characteristically metaphysical undercutting of metaphysics ought to remind us that Albert's, like all other “theories of the universe,” is far more theoretical than universal. “The universe, the sum of all things,” Borges wrote in “A New Refutation of Time,” “is a collection no less ideal than that of all the horses Shakespeare dreamt of—one, many, none?—between 1592 and 1594. I add: if time is a mental process, how can thousands of men—or even two different men—share it?” (L, 223; James E. Irby's translation). He made the same point more bluntly in “The Analytic Language of John Wilkins”: “There is no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and conjectural. The reason is very simple: we do not know what the universe is.”²¹ Such idealist sentiments may place an extravagant theory like Albert's on the same plane as our everyday understandings, but only by throwing common sense into crisis, not by giving the extravagant theory a leg to stand on. Truly radical uncertainty leaves no stone undoubted, and its theorists may find themselves hobbling on toes stubbed against the actual.

Albert, whose name makes him a useful corpse in the same “accidental” way that Liddell Hart's name recalls the imponderable conundra of Carroll's Alice books, ironically facilitates his own death by proposing a theory in which personal responsibility is muted (even mooted) by multiple realities. Yu's pulling of the trigger is made easier, more likely, by the idea that this encounter has alternative, indeed innumerable, upshots. Yu's method for convincing himself of his own courage—“impos[ing] upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past” (F, 93)—suggests the linear inevitability of traditional notions of fate. But Albert's precisely opposite idea of a temporal labyrinth serves Yu's purpose even better by reducing every future, if not to revocability, then at least to inconsequentiality, to the status of one among many.

Yu never considers the mind-boggling ramifications of Albert's theory of ramification (I cite just one: that in “other branches of time,” Ts'ui Pên did no such thing as what Albert, in his unequivocally explanatory reading of a labyrinthine manuscript, claims he did). Nevertheless, Yu allows this theory to mitigate the horror of what he is about: the irrevocable murder of a man who is singular in two senses. Since the telephone directory contains but one Albert, this one must be killed in order to transmit a municipal name to Yu's hateful German Chief (some people will do anything for the sake of a pun). But of all human beings, Albert is precisely the one Yu is least inclined to kill: “An Englishman—a modest man—who, for me, is as great as Goethe” (F, 91). The entire story, in terms of plot, is built on this tension between Yu's goal-oriented mission and the notion of infinitely meandering possibilities. In terms of character, it is built on the tension between Yu's unequivocal adoption of his mission and the equivocations inevitably introduced by Albert's theory—which, by redeeming the honor of Yu's ancestor, makes Albert both a latterday version of Ts'ui and a personal hero for Yu. Whatever vacillations he feels, however, Yu relates to the wavering, multiplying “pullulation” (F, 100) he senses at the brink of the atrocious act, the “swarming sensation” (L, 28) that seems to confirm Albert's theory, and thus, paradoxically, to minimize moral equivocation.

Yu, who calls himself “a timorous man” (F, 91), must welcome a theory that can mitigate his inexcusable act; but he sees in the image of “Albert and myself, secretive, busy, and multiform in other dimensions of time” (F, 100–101) a “tenuous nightmare” (L, 28), and this vision of multiplicity quickly yields to one indivisible fact: “In the black and yellow garden there was only a single man” (F, 101). The deposition returns at the story's climactic moment to the figure with which it began: the implacable Madden who takes Yu as his singular target, just as Yu has taken Albert. Of course, Yu's mission is more complex than Madden's. If, by killing Albert, he proves to his hated Chief “that a yellow man could [temporarily] save his armies” (F, 91), he also (permanently) destroys the source of his rehabilitated family honor. Albert stands in for Ts'ui by translating his humiliating work into an instance of familial, if not racial, pride; insofar as Albert regenerates and “embodies” Ts'ui, he not only makes a long-deceased ancestor killable, but authorizes, with a stroke of Ts'ui's own pen as it were, Yu's annihilation of his own great-grandfather.

Albert thus participates in a highly personal, hyper-Oedipal drama whereby Yu proves his “manhood” (and, he fancies, redeems his race) by eliminating his most formidable male ancestor.²² Borges's story does not entail, as Stephen Rudy asserts, a consistent “negation of the concept of ‘individuality,’” in “characters [who] act as ‘functions’ (much as they do in the folk tale),” by a thorough “suppression of the psychological element”²³; such a claim locates only one of the opposing forces that structure the story. The other is suggested by Bell-Villada: “Yu's narrative is held together by an underlying unity of tone and sentiment—a combination of fear, sadness, and guilt. Yu Tsun is neither the hard-boiled nor the coldly rational operative. Indeed, for a spy he is oddly sensitive and conscience-ridden.”²⁴ Yu's conscience is visible not only in the way he ends his confession, with an implied wish for absolution, but in his touching, if hopeless, attempt to mitigate his report of the crime: “I swear his death was instantaneous, as if he had been struck by lightning” (F, 101). To the extent that “instantaneous” suggests removal from the temporal realm of cause, effect, and personal responsibility, this sentence states a wish, not a fact; Albert is struck not by lightning, but by a bullet Yu inscribed with his name and “fired with the utmost care” into his back (F, 101). The astonishing detachment of Yu's act works its finest effect only in concert with our full belief in his “infinite penitence and sickness of the heart” (F, 101).

Borges's genially bewildering narrative experiments often lead critics to emphasize their more surprising, metaphysical extremes and understate the counterpoint of their more conventional, almost “realist,” aspects.²⁵ Thus, for instance, Rudy claims that “history, chronological time, has no place in Borges's universe,” that Borges “correct[s] Liddell Hart (ostensibly in the interests of historical truth), outdoing the very concept of cause and effect to the point that it turns on itself, and all notions of history, causal time, and truth are overthrown by the ‘unfathomable.’” Rudy's reading of “two parallel yet incompatible plots, one of a detective, the other of a metaphysical, nature” is both sensitive and insightful, but “The Garden of Forking Paths” presents only a single, relentlessly chronological plot, in the course of which one character propounds a theory of plot that, while perhaps problematizing the story we read, does not govern it.²⁶ Rudy's “metaphysical plot” exists only by implication, and then only if we (temporarily) accept Albert's theory as accurately describing not only Ts'ui Pên's fictional Garden of Forking Paths but also our world. Albert writes up a one-way ticket to a startling and seductive destination, but the story in which he appears sends us on a round trip. For the momentary sake of argument, we may entertain Albert's entertaining theory; but even before we emerge from the story to resume our extra-Borgesian lives, Yu Tsun's contrite coda restores something like our “usual” understandings of causality, psychology, and history. Only against the always implicit ground of such understandings, in fact, would the contrary theory appear so seductive. Even the once-crimson slip of paper that gives Albert his crucial clue to the meaning of Ts'ui Pên's work is “faded with the passage of time” (F, 97).

No single version of “The Garden of Forking Paths” bears any structural similarities whatsoever to Ts'ui's Garden of Forking Paths. Borges's plot does not pretend to enact infinity; it contains within it a discussion of infinity, but its shape relentlessly enforces temporal finitude. Even Ts'ui Pên's work makes only the most transparent pretence of enacting infinity, merely alluding indirectly to the idea—just as a couple of (re)quoted sentences can deftly establish the idea of Pierre Menard's (re)writing of the Quixote by gesturing toward it, not (re)presenting it. Albert claims that each character in The Garden of Forking Paths “chooses—simultaneously—all” imaginable alternatives, that “in the work of Ts'ui Pên, all possible outcomes occur” (L, 26). This is not true by a long, an infinite, shot. All the alternatives Albert cites from Ts'ui's work are perfectly conventional, drawn from a stagnant pool of plot components collected from epic, tragic, and detective traditions. They embrace armies marching into battle and murderers knocking at doors, but no broken shoelaces or mediocre stir-fries, no ingrown hairs or wrong numbers, nary a subepic inconsequentiality. In the “two versions of the same epic chapter” (F, 98) Albert reads to Yu, “all possible outcomes” comprise, with trenchant irony, winning a battle and winning it again. To judge from Albert's samples, this version of infinity is poor indeed, its complexity and novelty entirely conceptual, its notion of cause-and-effect far closer to Liddell Hart's than to Borges's.

Albert's speculations about the ways in which a book might approach infinity include mental gymnastics familiar from other Borges stories—circularity, infinite regress—but conclude with the idea of “a Platonic hereditary work, passed on from father to son, to which each individual would add a new chapter or correct, with pious care, the work of his elders” (F, 97). This concept of infinity-as-lineage is not even remotely labyrinthine; on the contrary, it is as unidirectional as Borges's plot (or Liddell Hart's, for that matter) and scarcely distinguishable from what the vernacular calls “family history.”²⁷

The broad counterpoint between singular and plural (or, if you will, between plot and theory) is echoed, on smaller scales, in many internal reflections duly noted by critics. But if Borges, like Ts'ui, struggles (or chafes, at least) against the linear and the finite, he does so in a medium that is incontrovertibly finite and unremittingly linear, both temporally and spatially. Only in such a medium can he work his particular brand of narrative magic (as, for instance, only an audience that implicitly owns the notion of a unified self is fit to hear the lovely, disconcerting ironies of the prose poem, “Borges and I”). In the case of “The Garden of Forking Paths,” however, Borges manages to break the mold of his medium and press into service the world outside the story. Albert's theory could be safely contained—as a fine and ephemeral fancy—within the very finite limits of Yu's deposition, if only our libraries did not teem with wrong page numbers, intimating an invasive, mutating Albert-virus that infects readers with Yu's “swarming sensation.” Liddell Hart's works, like his name, function in the manner of “found poems”; their iterativity plants a germ of the uncanny in the most unlikely spot.²⁸ The pullulating variants of the Borgesian text spread the contagion, so that we find outside the bounds of the story what we expect to have left between the closed covers of a single volume. Like “the victim within” a “strong labyrinth” in one critic's description, we “experience a bending of apparently straight lines, a perplexing of space, even while [we], in playing back, [attempt] to straighten them”;²⁹ and this perplexity is visited upon us in libraries, our bastions of order and precision, if not necessarily or exclusively of truth.

III

It seems probable that if we were never bewildered there would never be a story to tell about us; we should partake of the superior nature of the all-knowing immortals whose annals are dreadfully dull so long as flurried humans are not, for the positive relief of bored Olympians, mixed up with them.

—Henry James, preface to The Princess Casamassima³⁰

Finally, we in our libraries, like Yu in his prison cell, occupy an impossible, an untenable position. Regardless of theories of the universe, we live the lives we live, consult the volumes we have at our disposal, variants, discrepancies, fragmentarity and all; like Yu, faced with odd echoes and unexpected twists, we do what little we can. Yu has a thought, early in his journey to Ashgrove, that reverberates later as a counterweight to the Ts'ui Pên/Albert theory: “Then I reflected that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me” (F. 90). That Yu negates, even as he alludes to, the “countless men” suffering and dying in a war more real than anything Liddell Hart ever wrote is, I hope, chilling to us. What disturbs him at story's end is something quite different, however: his “now” in which “all things happen” comprises more than time; the “me” to whom “all that really happens happens” is constructed and defined by a horribly singular past, the story's ending insists. “What remains”—the attestable, publishable account of an event—“is unreal and unimportant” to Yu not in an absolute sense but by contrast to the subjective aftermath of an irrevocable action. His “infinite penitence and sickness of the heart,” which the Chief “does not know, for no one can” (F. 101), announce a different kind of infinity: selfsame, unvarying through time, “innumerable” because it represents the final victory of singular over plural. Liddell Hart's delay is “insignificant” not to a soldier trapped in a flooded trench but to the scholar whose magisterial view cannot afford to accommodate either the emotional bewilderment that comes to Yu as “sickness of the heart” or the intellectual bewilderment that can affect a critic like a fever of the brain. With the (unwitting, I presume) assistance of publishers and translators, Borges reinstates such bewilderment as the most genuine response to the nightmare of history.

The excruciatingly coincidental encounter of Yu Tsun and Stephen Albert underscores singularity in both senses. It emerges from an infinity of possible stories as the one worth telling, the one told; at the same time, this singular coincidence constitutes a merging of people and ideas, the opposite of a forking path. The story counterbalances the striking “theory” of bifurcation with the even more striking (and, for Yu, heartbreaking) “fact” of convergence. Let us stipulate, though no one believes it for a second, that time “actually” resembles the labyrinth Albert finds in Ts'ui's work; even so, for any given mortal, situated instantaneously at a given spot on a given branch, no labyrinth will exist. Borges said of his own “A New Refutation of Time”: “I believe in the argument logically, and I think that if you accept the premises, the argument may stand—though at the same time, alas, time also stands.”³¹ Language may win a battle, but time wins the war. In a fight to the death between time and a theory, it would be simply foolish to put one's money on the theory.³²

Within “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Yu stands in for time, killing the beautiful theory (or, at least, the theorist); in doing so, he collaborates with narrative's linear form. If Albert, Liddell Hart, farsighted copy editors, errant translators, and who knows what printer's devils have conspired to provide an intimation of the labyrinth, narrative form nevertheless enforces the irrevocable, heartbreakingly finite nature of life “as we know it.” We are left with the effect Borges described in reviewing Liddell Hart's meditation on war psychology and the dangers of military gigantism, Europe in Arms, for the 30 April 1937 issue of El hogar: “Goce desengañado, goce lúcido, goce pesimista.”³³ Disillusioned pleasure, lucid pleasure, pessimistic pleasure. One imagines this is exactly the sort of pleasure the historical Borges must have derived from concocting—in the midst of a war that would retroactively transform the Great War, the Real War, the war to end them all, into the first of a series—a story of repetition, divergence, and wishful escape from the inescapably vectored movement of time. Albert's hope that he might retreat from worldly (and World War) concerns into placid scholarly contemplation—as Ts'ui did in another place and time by retiring to the Pavilion of the Limpid Solitude—is unequivocally dashed: “The reality of the war conquers. It's sad, but it must be so.”³⁴ The “unsuspected light” Yu's narrative casts on history is dark indeed.

Notes

1. Samuel Beckett, Molloy (Paris, 1951), 239; “Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining” (Samuel Beckett, Molloy, trans. Patrick Bowles [New York, 1955], 241).

2. That a “former teacher of English at the Tsingtao Hochschule” would presumably have “dictated” a deposition to his British captors in English affords neither excuse nor solace; Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones, ed. Anthony Kerrigan, various translators (New York, 1961), 89. This volume will be cited in the text as F.

3. Here is a skeletal version of Borges's plot: Yu Tsun, a Chinese spy for the Germans in England during World War I, has been found out. Before he is captured or killed, he must somehow transmit to his chief in Berlin the secret location of a new British artillery park: the city of Albert. He will do so by murdering a stranger named Stephen Albert; his chief, poring over newspapers for word of his minions' activities, will find the name Yu Tsun linked with the name Albert and solve the riddle. Before he can kill Albert, Yu discovers that the latter, once a missionary in China, has devoted his energies to solving another riddle: that of Yu's great-grandfather, Ts'ui Pên, who “gave up temporal power to write a novel … and to create a maze in which all men would lose themselves. … His novel had no sense to it and nobody ever found his labyrinth” (F, 93). Albert has concluded that book and maze are one and the same, that Ts'ui's novel, The Garden of Forking Paths, portrays a temporal labyrinth: “Your ancestor,” Albert tells Yu, “did not think of time as absolute and uniform. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times. This web of time—the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries—embraces every possibility” (F, 100). The former missionary is now proselytizing to redeem the metaphysical theory and reputation of Yu's ancestor, who died in disgrace under suspicion of lunacy; Albert proclaims Ts'ui's Garden of Forking Paths not a senseless jumble but a work of genius. Yu murders Albert anyway, is arrested, and dictates, under a sentence of death, the deposition that we read.

4. Stephen Rudy, “The Garden of and in Borges' ‘Garden of Forking Paths,’” in Andrej Kodjak, Michael J. Connolly, and Krystyna Pomorska, eds., The Structural Analysis of Narrative Texts: Conference Papers (Columbus, Ohio, 1980), 142 n. 15. Rudy goes on to differ with Borges about the story's secret, saying that the reader-detective “should be able to anticipate the ‘solution’ offered in the last paragraph” (142 n. 15). Borges, I think, gauges the prescience of his typical reader more accurately.

5. Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, various translators (New York, 1964), 28. This volume will be cited in the text as L.

6. Borges's word is “innumerable,” quite rightly linked to the “innumerables futuros” Albert sees in Ts'ui Pên's work by Donald L. Shaw, Borges: Ficciones (London, 1976), 44.

7. In a 1971 seminar at Columbia University, Norman di Giovanni, who collaborated with Borges on numerous translations, quoted two versions of the sentence about torrential rain as his “whole textbook on translation.” He severely critiqued Yates's version in Labyrinths: “It should be obvious that the elements of the … sentence are put together all wrong” (Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Daniel Halpern, and Frank MacShane, eds., Borges on Writing [New York, 1973], 134, 135). Borges, who was at his elbow, did not disagree. The alternative Giovanni praised, however, was not Temple and Todd's; in any case, his critique concerned effective English syntax rather than accuracy.

8. John Sturrock, Paper Tigers: The Ideal Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges (Oxford, 1977), 191.

9. B. H. Liddell Hart, The Real War, 1914–1918 (Boston, 1930), 233–34; B. H. Liddell Hart, A History of the World War, 1914–1918 (London, 1934), 314–15.

10. Michel Berveiller, Le cosmopolitisme de Jorge Luis Borges (Paris, 1973), 281 n. 113; “The reference is, in effect, very precise but, in fact, inexact” (my translation).

11. Mary Lusky Friedman, The Emperor's Kites: A Morphology of Borges' Tales (Durham, N.C., 1987), 17.

12. Gene H. Bell-Villada, Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to His Mind and Art (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981), 93.

13. Rudy, “The Garden,” 133, 141 n. 6, 141 n. 8.

14. Ibid., 141 n. 6.

15. For a discussion of the story's historicity that makes much of the discrepancy in dates between Borges and Liddell Hart, see Daniel Balderston, Out of Context: Historical Reference and the Representation of Reality in Borges (Durham, N.C., 1993), 39–55.

16. Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones, vol. 5 of Obras completas (1953–71), 10 vols. (Buenos Aires, 1956), 97; Jorge Luis Borges, Obras completas, 2 vols. (Buenos Aires, 1956), 2:97.

17. Jorge Luis Borges, Obras completas, 1923–1972 (Buenos Aires, 1974), 472; Jorge Luis Borges, Prosa completa (Barcelona, 1980), 1:396.

18. Jorge Luis Borges, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (Buenos Aires, 1942), 107; Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones (Buenos Aires, 1944), 109. Balderston reveals that the first British edition of The Real War (as opposed to the first American edition cited in my note 9) contains the passage in question on page 252; Out of Context, 151 n. 5. It appears, then, that once upon a prelapsarian time, page numbers in “El jardín” and in one version of The Real War corresponded neatly. But seeds of discrepancy, already sown in Liddell Hart's multiple editions of history, eventually sprouted to full-blown inconsistency in various versions of Borges's “Garden.”

19. “Borges: … I've done most of my reading in English” (Giovanni et al., Borges on Writing, 137). But see James Irby's footnote to a similar statement: “Bien que Borges soit systématiquement anglophile et surtout saxophile il énoncerait un jugement très différent selon la nationalité de son interlocuteur: à un Italien il parlerait de Dante; à un Français de Hugo, Baudelaire ou Toulet. C'est là un trait essentiel de son comportement social” [Although Borges is systematically an Anglophile and above all a Saxophile, he would pronounce a very different judgment depending on the nationality of his interlocutor: to an Italian he would speak of Dante; to a Frenchman of Hugo, Baudelaire or Toulet. That is an essential trait of his social deportment]; James E. Irby, “Entretiens avec James E. Irby,” in Dominique de Roux and Jean de Milleret, eds., Jorge Luis Borges, L'Herne, no. 4 (1964; reprint, Paris, 1981), 388–403, at 401 (my translation).

20. Friedman, Emperor's Kites, notes that “the compromising letter Yu pulls from his pocket, a letter whose contents the reader never learns, has a double in the exquisitely penned fragment of a letter, key to interpreting Ts'ui Pên's chaotic novel, that Albert will later take from a lacquered drawer” (19). Yu's never-explained letter, “which I decided to destroy at once (and which I did not destroy)” (F, 91), is unusual among the texts in this story in not being described explicitly as a fragment; but it is the ultimate fragment in the sense that one can make absolutely nothing of it.

21. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Analytic Language of John Wilkins,” in Other Inquisitions, 1937–1952, trans. Ruth L. C. Simms (Austin, Texas, 1964), 104.

22. Borges, who would undoubtedly dislike my Freudian lingo, nevertheless saw Albert as a parent-figure for Yu: “Il est plus pathétique que Yu Tsun tue un homme ayant su comprendre l'énigme de son propre ancêtre, un homme devenant ainsi presque son parent” [It is more moving that Yu Tsun kill a man who has solved the riddle of his own ancestor, a man who thus becomes almost his parent]; Irby, “Entretiens,” 394 (my translation).

23. Rudy, “The Garden,” 137, 138.

24. Bell-Villada, Borges and His Fiction, 96.

25. Balderston, who believes that Borges's historical references push this story “much closer to the realistic than to the fantastic variety of narrative,” expresses surprise at “how often Stephen Albert's theory of parallel universes has been taken as an explanation of the text”; “critics [who] speak of games with time,” he argues, “repeat … Stephen Albert's position in the story, deprived of its dialectical punch”; Out of Context, 51, 6, 40.

26. Rudy, “The Garden,” 133, 134, 135.

27. This progressive work, ever subject to revision and expansion but infinite only in the very limited sense of remaining unfinished, is not only more commonplace but infinitely more practicable than the others that Borges and Albert enjoy daydreaming about. The single all-encompassing volume posited at the conclusion of “The Library of Babel” would simplify reference protocols but, by the same token, render citation useless; the distress of a scholar attempting to verify a quotation from “p. ∞” could properly be characterized as boundless.

28. Borges listed Liddell Hart's work (at least) twice among the most reread and annotated books in his library; his transmigrational phrasing adumbrates a problematic of uncanny repetition and incompatible variation by now familiar to my reader. His review of Liddell Hart's Europe in Arms begins: “Revisando mi biblioteca, veo con admiración que las obras que más he releído y abrumado de notas manuscritas son el Diccionario de la Filosofía de Mauthner, El mundo como voluntad y representación de Schopenhauer, y la Historia de la guerra mundial de B. H. Liddell Hart”; Jorge Luis Borges, Textos cautivos: Ensayos y reseñas en “El hogar,” ed. Enrique Sacerio-Garí and Emir Rodríguez Monegal (Barcelona, 1986), 125. His review of Edward Kasner and James Newman's Mathematics and the Imagination begins: “Revisando la biblioteca, veo con admiración que las obras que más he releído y abrumado de notas manuscritas son el Diccionario de la Filosofía de Mauthner, la Historia biográfica de la filosofía de Lewes, la Historia de la guerra de 1914–1918 de Liddell Hart, la Vida de Samuel Johnson de Boswell y la psicología de Gustav Spiller: The Mind of Man, 1902”; Borges, Obras completas, 1923–1972, 276. The former review appeared in El hogar (30 April 1937); the latter first appeared in Sur (October 1940) and was collected with other “Notas” in a 1957 revision of the 1932 Discusión; see Roux and Milleret, Jorge Luis Borges, 448; Horacio Jorge Becco, Jorge Luis Borges: Bibliografía total, 1923–1973 (Buenos Aires, 1973), 49. Both reviews foresee the addition of the volume under review to their respective lists.

29. Robert Rawdon Wilson, “Godgames and Labyrinths: The Logic of Entrapment,” Mosaic 15, no. 4 (December 1982): 18.

30. Henry James, The Princess Casamassima (New York, 1991), xxxi.

31. Giovanni et al., Borges on Writing, 63. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, arguing that “the same phenomenon of repetition which disintegrates the autonomy of the individual also defines it,” quotes, from the text of “A New Refutation of Time,” a longer and more beautiful but tonally similar passage, which concludes, with piercing resignation: “The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges”; “Doubles and Counterparts: ‘The Garden of Forking Paths,’” in Harold Bloom, ed., Jorge Luis Borges (New York, 1986), 192.

32. The romantic dichotomy between concrete human constructions (gilded monuments, hard copy) and their intellectual or aesthetic counterparts (powerful rhymes, theories of the universe) is deconstructed by the recognition that the latter are transmissible only by concrete means: mortal tongues (like Albert's, forever silenced), physical texts (like Yu's, its opening pages irretrievably lost), diskettes and drives (like mine, subject to surges and crashes). The nature of language as continually mediating between abstraction and concretion collapses the pretty notion that writing (a sonnet, a military history, a short story, an e-mail flame) is less susceptible to sluttish time's besmearments, less inherently finite, than any material medium (a stone tablet, a bound volume, a snippet of paper faded from crimson to sickly pink, a fiber-optic cable). These days, when information seems to depend less on dimensionality (what would Borges have made of the Internet and World Wide Web?), access relies more than ever on hardware. I may have more memory than I'll ever use, but I can no longer work in the absence of a grounded outlet. All the world's knowledge in CD-ROM format becomes a mere source of frustration when the system goes down. Our only route to the “virtual” is by way of the actual: the material and temporal. (Even thoughts we keep to ourselves depend for processing, storage, and retrieval on hard-wired nervous systems.)

33. Borges, Textos cautivos, 125.

34. This is my translation of the final two sentences of Borges's response when asked why, after discovering in Albert a soulmate (“frère spirituel”), Yu pursues his murderous plan anyway [La réalité de la guerre vaine. C'est triste, mais cela doit être ainsi]; Borges quoted in Irby, “Entretiens,” 394, 395. Donald L. Shaw quotes the answer to this question in Spanish; the sentences I have quoted read: “La realidad de la guerra vence. Es triste, pero tiene que ser así”; Jorge Luis Borges: Ficciones (Barcelona, 1986), 116. The entire Spanish interview may be found in James E. Irby, Napoleón Murat, and Carlos Peralta, Encuentro con Borges (Buenos Aires, 1968). Borges seems to have meant that “cela doit être ainsi” for aesthetic reasons: “Pour que l'effet soit bouleversant, pathétique”; Irby, “Entretiens,” 394. I would say that his decision to show Albert and Yu both destroyed by the brutal reality of war makes the story not only more surprising and moving, but also truer.