English world literature

Borges,\bGarde\f\bof\bForki\fg\bPaths

Rev.\b4/27/2017F.\bFajardo-Acosta/p.\b1

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r\fproduc\fd, copi\fd, or distribut\fd to oth\frs in any m\fdium or format without th\f \fxplicit, writt\fn cons\fnt of th\f author.

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Jorg\f Luis Borg\fs’ “Th\f Gard\fn of Forking Paths” A L\fctur\fby

Fid\fl Fajardo-Acosta

Jorge \buis \forges, c. 1968-1969

The most distinctive characteristics of the Argentinian writer Jorge \buis \forges

(1899-1986) are his internationalism, universalism, and lucid understanding of the

common humanity underlying the evident and profound differences between the

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individuals, cultures, nations, and ethnicities of the world. Not surprisingly then, his

writing embraces with special interest mathematical abstractions and philosophical ideas,

putting them to the task of measuring, defining, and ascertaining the multidimensional

space within which the human existence unfolds. In the \forgesian universe, time plays a

very special role, one most unlike simple notions of a linear historical process with well

defined beginnings and ends. Instead, in the work of \forges, time is a living, fluid, and

endless process, highly flexible and ever responsive to human actions and choices,

always ready to proceed along alternative paths and eternally flowing unto itself, like a

magical river, a Möbius strip where nothing is ever left on the other side and where every

road invariably returns to its origins.

Möbius strip

Shaped by the experience of living and studying in Europe, learning its languages

and cultures just as Europeans tore each other apart in World War I, \forges developed a

unique insight into the absurdities of war and the tragic misunderstandings that lead

people into conflicts that, ironically, imply their own destruction. Informed by such

insights and internationalist spirit, \forges’ short story, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” is

a quintessential work of world literature. As defined by the German writer and thinker

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the inventor or the term Weltliteratur\b[World \biterature] ,

world literature is writing that uncovers the hidden ties that bind all humans, regardless of

nationality, language, or geography, and seeks to identify what is best in humanity and its

cultures, thus contributing to the construction of a higher and broader global culture that

incorporates and synthesizes those elements. In 1827, Goethe wrote:

I am more and more convinced that poetry is the universal possession of mankind,

revealing itself everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hundreds of men. . . .

We Germans are very likely to fall too easily into this pedantic conceit, when we

do not look beyond the narrow circle that surrounds us. I therefore like to look

about me in foreign nations, and advise everyone to do the same. National

literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand,

and everyone must strive to hasten its approach. \fut, while we thus value what is

foreign, we must not bind ourselves to some particular thing, and regard it as a

model. We must not give this value to the Chinese, or the Serbian, or Calderon, or

the Nibelungen; but, if we really want a pattern, we must always return to the

F.\bFajardo-Acosta/p.\b3

ancient Greeks, in whose works the beauty of mankind is constantly represented.

All the rest we must look at only historically; appropriating to ourselves what is

good, so far as it goes. 1

“No less great than Goethe,” the character of Stephen Albert—a \fritish scholar, former

missionary in China, and lover and connoisseur of Chinese culture—has a special place

in \forges' story, as he holds the secret of the interpretation of time and of the discoveries

of the ancestor of the spy who kills him. 2

Taking Goethe’s cue in the search for “what is

good” and also in looking to the Greeks, in this case the story of Oedipus, \forges’ tale

manages to make an important contribution to human reflection on fundamental

existential questions regarding matters of identity and destiny. In particular, the story is

concerned with the problem of the stranger, the Greek xe\fos, the foreign other who may

seem like a convenient stepping stone in the accomplishing of one’s missions, but who

could turn out to be someone whose identity is inextricably bound with one’s own.

Written in the early years of World War II (published in 1941), but set in the

context of the missions of secret operatives in World War I (1916, as per a typically

\forgesian pseudo-historical reference at the beginning of the story), the tale seeks to

confront and puzzle out the problems posed by the seeming inevitability and tragic

repetitiousness and monotony of human history. Making evident such interests, the story

begins with an allusion to the work of \fasil \biddell Hart (1895-1970), a \fritish infantry

captain decorated for heroism during World War I and who, after his retirement from the

army in 1927, went on to become a famous war historian and strategist who wrote about

both World War I and World War II. \biddell Hart is notable in particular for his

criticisms of the stupidity of \fritish and other generals during World War I—figures such

as General Douglas Haig, known as “the \futcher of the Somme”—and the terrible cost,

in human lives, of their incompetence. World War I in effect resulted in total casualties in

the order of 37-40 million and a death toll around 17-18 million, primarily due to the use

of mechanized weaponry and the stubborn adherence of military leaders to traditional

strategies not designed to deal with such weapons. One of \biddell Hart’s strategic

recommendations, drawing on his observations of that war, was his theory of the

advantages of an indirect approach:

In strategy the longest way round is often the shortest way there; a direct approach

to the object exhausts the attacker and hardens the resistance by compression,

whereas an indirect approach loosens the defender's hold by upsetting his balance.

(Strategy , 1929)3

\forges’ story opens with a particular allusion to the \fattle of Albert, an episode

of World War I that took place July 1-13, 1916 and that constituted the first stage of a

massive \fritish and French offensive against the Germans that eventually became the

1 Johann, Peter Eckermann, Co\fversatio\fs\bwith\bGoethe (1836). David Damrosch. What\bIs\bWorld\b

Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Mads Rosendhal Thomsen, Mappi\fg\bWorld\b

Literature : I\fter\fatio\fal\bCa\fo\fizatio\f\ba\fd\bTra\fs\fatio\fal\bLiteratures (New York: Continuum, 2008), p.

11.

2 Translation Donald A. Yates.

3 \f. H. \biddell Hart, Strategy, 2nd

revised edition (New York: Meridian, 1991).

F.\bFajardo-Acosta/p.\b4

\fattle of the Somme (July 1-November 18, 1916), one of the bloodiest battles in human

history, resulting in over 1.5 million casualties, over a million dead. The first day of the

\fattle of Albert, in particular, became the most lethal day in \fritish military history, with

nearly 58,000 casualties, about 20,000 dead. The results of the \fattle of the Somme were

ultimately inconclusive, neither side being able to claim victory in that particular set of

engagements. Though its references to \biddell Hart are deliberately inaccurate, \forges, in

characteristic fashion, intended to employ fictions with an ambiguous relation to

historical accounts in order to highlight vital and very real aspects of the human

experience, in particular the human construction of reality and the ever present human

hand behind the unfolding and understanding of historical and other events. Interestingly,

\biddell Hart himself, in some ways like \forges, was no stranger to distortions and

deliberate attempts at reconstructing historical truths, in his case to enhance his own

reputation as a scholar. He was also rumored to have been sympathetic to the Germans,

perhaps even bearing some responsibility, in the days of World War II, for leaking of

information on the plans for D-Day (June 6, 1944), prior to the attack. After World War

II, \biddell Hart participated in the interrogation of captured German generals, like Heinz

Guderian, and published various works discussing their campaigns and strategies,

particularly the Blitzkrieg [lightning-war] characteristic of German warfare in World War

II. In recognition for his services to \fritain, he was knighted, in 1966, by Queen

Elizabeth II. Though this is ultimately speculative, \biddell Hart's character and roles

during and after the wars suggest he may have been an agent of \fritish intelligence,

perhaps a double-agent, transmitting information and misinformation back and forth

between the \fritish and the Germans.

Aftermath of the \fattle of Albert (July 1-13, 1916)

F.\bFajardo-Acosta/p.\b5

In “The Garden of Forking Paths,” \forges tells the story of Dr. Yu Tsun, a former

professor of English at a German university in China, who is a spy for the German Reich,

operating in England, during World War I. Yu Tsun's mission is conveying to \ferlin the

name of a town, Albert, where the \fritish are hiding their artillery. While in this

endeavor, Yu Tsun is pursued and eventually arrested by Captain Richard Madden—an

Irishman in the service of England. Prior to his arrest, Yu Tsun accomplishes his goal by

killing a man, randomly picked out of a phone book, with the same name as the town

where the artillery park is located—information which he knows will appear in the

newspaper headlines which his German chief avidly reads. Ironically, Yu Tsun's victim,

Dr. Stephen Albert, is a lover and connoisseur of Chinese culture and literature who

reconstructed the meaning of a seemingly incomprehensible novel, titled The\bGarde\f\bof\b

Forki\fg\bPaths , written by Yu Tsun's great-grandfather, Ts'ui Pên. Realizing the amazing

coincidence linking Albert and the work of his own ancestor, Yu Tsun converses with

Albert for a while, hearing with fascination about the secrets of Ts'ui Pên's novel, the

meaning of time, and the interpretation of the universe implicit in his work. As Richard

Madden is seen approaching the house of Stephen Albert, however, Yu Tsun shoots

Albert. At the end of the story, as he awaits execution and finishes the dictation of the

account of his experiences, Yu Tsun expresses his "innumerable contrition and

weariness."

Trenches at the \fattle of the Somme (July 1-November 18, 1916)

Immediately as the story opens, the matter of the relations between history and

fiction is engaged. The first statements are, in effect, a fictionalized and appropriately

indirect quotation of \biddell Hart's writings whose accuracy is questioned by the events

of the story:

On page 22 of \biddell Hart’s History\bof\bWorld\bWar\bI you will read that an

attack against the Serre-Montauban line by thirteen \fritish divisions (supported

by 1,400 artillery pieces), planned for the 24 th

of July, 1916, had to be postponed

F.\bFajardo-Acosta/p.\b6

until the morning of the 29 th

. The torrential rains, Captain \biddell Hart comments,

caused this delay, an insignificant one, to be sure.

The following statement, dictated, reread and signed by Dr. Yu Tsun, former

professor of English at the Hochschule at Tsingtao, throws an unsuspected light

over the whole affair. The first two pages of the document are missing.

These passages introduce, among other notions, the idea that \forges’ fiction, the story

itself, has as its main purpose the correcting of an inaccuracy in a historical record which

is also a fiction, as it was written by \forges and not by \biddell Hart. The net effect of

presenting fictions with the appearance of history, within other fictions that accurately

claim them to be false, is to blur the line between fiction and reality in such a way as to

make them virtually indistinguishable. Another key element of the passages is the

introduction of the idea of the role of natural forces, torrential rains, in the explanation of

a historical event, an idea which \forges’ story seeks to correct. As the story suggests,

however insignificant the delay in the attack of the \fritish, it was not caused by natural

forces but by human choices and actions. It was in fact his murder of Stephen Albert that

resulted in the revelation of the location of the \fritish artillery park to the Germans, the

Germans bombing the place, and the delay in the planned \fritish offensive. Most

important, from the standpoint of the story’s intentions, is the shifting of responsibilities

from blind forces of nature onto clearly defined human agents whose character, choices,

and attitudes toward human life and destiny have everything to do with the particular

paths that history takes.

Casualties at the \fattle of the Somme (November 1916)

The story, in that sense, takes its inspiration from the Greek tale of Oedipus, the

man said to have been destined to kill his father and marry his mother, and who, in spite

of his best efforts to avoid such a fate, goes on to fulfill it. The story of Oedipus,

however, contrary to superficial appearances, turns out to be not about the inevitability of

a fate dictated by dark and inscrutable forces, but about the blind choices and problematic

character—rash, angry, stubborn, and proud—of a man who, standing at a crucial

F.\bFajardo-Acosta/p.\b7

crossroads, kills a stranger who then turns out to be his father. After the killing, not

knowing what he has done, Oedipus takes one of the roads before him and encounters the

Sphinx, a mythical monster that poses a riddle for Oedipus: What is the beast that walks

on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening? The clever Oedipus

answers the riddle correctly: a human being—a creature who crawls as a baby, walks on

two legs as an adult, and uses a cane in old age. The solving of the riddle of the Sphinx

leads to Oedipus becoming king of Thebes and marrying the queen, Jocasta, who,

unknown to him, is his mother. As in \forges’ idea of the “forking paths,” and the notion that “everything happens

to a man precisely, precisely now … only in the present do things happen,” the events in

Oedipus’s story emphasize the intensely charged significance of the crossroads, the

moment of choice and action which becomes tied to a path and a future destination

suffused with the sense of the inevitable. That inevitability however is only an illusion

generated by what happens/happened/will happen in the eternal present that is the

crossroads, with its multiple and infinite directions always open and responsive to the

specific choices and actions of humans.

The illusion of a predetermined fate concealing the reality of a destiny crafted out

of one’s own choices is alluded to in the seemingly uncanny knowledge that the boys, on

the platform of the train station at Ashgrove, appear to have regarding the destination of

Yu Tsun: “Are you going to Dr. Stephen Albert’s house?” \bike all events in human life,

the situation has a perfectly logical explanation, as everyone in Ashgrove knows of

Stephen Albert’s interest in Chinese culture and the fact that a Chinese visitor to the town

would most likely be looking for him. The boys also give Yu Tsun intriguing directions

to Albert’s house: “you won’t get lost if you take this road to the left and at every

crossroads turn again to your left.” Yu Tsun comments that “the instructions to turn

always to the left reminded me that such was the common procedure for discovering the

central point of certain labyrinths”—in this case alluding to the path of a violent history

which can be unmistakably followed by always monotonously making the same tragic

choice, as symbolized in this case by the left turn, the killing of the stranger.

The riddle of the Sphinx, like the story of \forges, hints at the human

responsibilities behind fate and destiny. The answer to the why of fate and the mysteries

of history is “human beings”—not the rain or bizarre supernatural forces. There is much

irony of course in the situation of an Oedipus, the master riddle solver who is, however,

unable to solve the puzzle of his own life. In the same way, Yu Tsu is very proud of his

ability to solve puzzles: “I have some understanding of labyrinths: not for nothing am I

the great grandson of that Ts’ui Pên who was governor of Yunnan.” When Stephen

Albert asks him, “In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only prohibited word?,”

Yu Tsun correctly replies, “the word chess.” That ability is also manifested in his clever

solution to the problem of transmitting the word “Albert” to his boss in Germany. \fut,

like Oedipus, Yu Tsun reaches the point, at the end of the story, when he realizes his

blindness and the terrible mistake of killing Albert, his inability to solve the much more

fundamental riddle of his own existence and fate.

F.\bFajardo-Acosta/p.\b8

Oedipus and the Sphinx, interior of an Attic vase (c. 470-430 \fC)

The riddle in both cases presents itself at the crossroads, the invisible but ever-

present point where the paths branch out in different directions. The crossroads in in fact

the place where character is tested, where personal identity is assumed, and where destiny

is shaped accordingly, just as the self comes face to face with the enigmatic stranger. In

the Greek tradition, the stranger ( xe\fos) is a sacred being with the potential to be anyone,

including a god in disguise testing the piety of those he encounters. Oedipus, in that

sense, faced at the crossroads the question of his own identity and destiny. Though he

answered correctly the riddle of the Sphinx, his answer at the crossroads was mistaken,

like that of Yu Tsun deciding to kill Stephen Albert.

When later Oedipus realizes what he has done and, in despair, blinds himself, he

acknowledges and makes visible the figurative blindness that earlier prevented him from

making better choices at the crossroads. It is also a blind prophet, Tiresias, who

enlightens Oedipus as to the mysteries of his identity and his failure to see that the

stranger was also his father, that his wife is also his mother, that his daughters are also his

sisters, and that his sons are also his brothers. That dizzying multiplicity of identities

suggests that the identity of the sacred stranger is always entangled with that of multiple

others who are most intimately tied to the self. The stranger in fact, even when randomly

picked out of a phone book, is necessarily and inevitably always one’s father, one’s

mother, one’s brother, one’s sister and even the very self who, knowingly or not, beholds

itself in the mirror as it gazes into the mystery of the other.

Similarly, Yu Tsun embarks on a misguided adventure that leads him to murder a

stranger who happens to be, seemingly by the most bizarre of coincidences, intimately

tied to his own identity and that of his ancestors. As he sets out on his journey to the

house of Stephen Albert, Yu Tsun tells us: “I bade farewell to myself in the mirror,” as if

unconsciously realizing that the main victim of this endeavor will ultimately be himself.

The various objects that Yu Tsun carries in his pockets and that he calls “my resources,”

F.\bFajardo-Acosta/p.\b9

are indications of both assets and liabilities, some of them perhaps capable of saving him,

others certain to destroy him: The American watch, the nickel chain and the square coin, the key ring with the

incriminating useless keys to Runeberg’s apartment, the notebook, a letter which I

resolved to destroy immediately (and which I did not destroy), [the false

passport,] a crown, two shillings and a few pence, the red and blue pencil, the

handkerchief, the revolver with one bullet. 4

Entangled as if by a chain (“the nickel chain”) in a tragedy involving the western

conception of time (“the American watch”), money (“the square coin, ... a crown, two

shillings and few pence”), and the misunderstanding of personal identity (“the false

passport”), some of Yu Tsun’s “resources” appear to be not only “useless” but also

“incriminating,” as in the case of the keys and a mysterious letter that reveal his guilt. His

main and most powerful asset, "the revolver with one bullet," suggests a game of Russian

roulette where the victim is just as likely to be the self as the other. And while “a pistol

report can be heard at a great distance,” the communication device that will carry the

word "Albert" all the way to Germany also suggests wide-ranging, though perhaps

unexpected, consequences of that single murder. En route to “the village of Ashgrove” (a name with ominous overtones of death),

Yu Tsun is exposed to various signals that appear to warn him of the error of what he is

about to do: “a woman dressed in mourning, a young boy who was reading with fervor

the A\f\fals of Tacitus, a wounded and happy soldier.” While the woman in mourning

clearly hints at the upcoming tragedy, the young boy is a promising image of possible

escape, as the text that he reads is a Roman historical document, extant only in fragments,

discussing the corruption and decadence of the Roman empire, a lesson in the errors of

the past largely ignored by modern western Europeans. The image of the “wounded and

happy soldier,” though seemingly paradoxical, strongly suggests the great blessing of

being able to escape from the hell of war, even if only because of injuries. None of those

signals, however, can throw him off the track of his self-destruction.

Yu Tsun’s adventure indeed is misguided and a kind of suicide that results in the

destruction of the man who discovered the secrets of the work of Yu Tsun’s ancestor,

Ts’ui Pên. The killing of Albert is indeed akin to the destruction of the memory and

legacy of Ts’ui Pên and of a host of invisible spirits tied to the lives of Albert and Yu

Tsun and that defined their beings and destinies, including the moment when their paths

converged. As he listens to Albert reading to him from the seemingly incoherent novel of

Ts’ui Pên, Yu Tsun tells us that “from that moment on, I felt about me and within my

dark body an invisible, intangible swarming.” Moments before killing Albert, he also

notes, “it seemed to me that the humid garden that surrounded the house was infinitely

saturated with invisible persons. Those persons were Albert and I, secret, busy and

multiform in other dimensions of time.” With every individual constituting in fact a

multiplicity of actual or possible beings (past ancestors but also present and future

people), the murder of a perfect stranger with a single bullet then turns into the murder of

4 The expression in the Spanish original, “el falso pasaporte” [“the false passport], is not rendered in the

English of the Yates translation.

F.\bFajardo-Acosta/p.\b10

hundreds, or thousands, or even millions of kindred beings, including the self and all its

possible identities. What \forges accomplishes by his seemingly whimsical fictions is then a

dramatization of the errors and consequences involved in very real events like World War

I and World War II, where the killing of a human being becomes a tragedy of gigantic

proportions, a wave of death and darkness that swallows up everyone, including the

killer, his family, and his entire race of people. In this context, it is interesting to consider

that World War I was triggered by the assassination of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand of

Austria-Hungary by a secret agent of the Serbian/Yugoslav intelligence which at that

time was trying to instigate a break with Austria-Hungary in the interests of Yugoslav

nationalism. The assassin, Gavrilo Princip, tried to kill himself after the attack and later

died in prison.

As a cause of a great human tragedy such as World War I, the issue of fanatical

rivalries, the obsession with the definition of a national/ethnic/racial identity in

opposition to other nations, races, and ethnicities, is of central importance to \forges.

Thus, his tale is characterized by situations intended to both highlight and call into

question the categories of national, ethnic, racial and other identities. It is in that sense

that \forges’ stresses the peculiarity of a Chinese man, Yu Tsun, working for the Germans

in \fritain and of a an Irishman, Richard Madden, serving the \fritish—both in the odd

position of eagerly supporting nations and races of people with a long history of acting as

their oppressors. Just as \fritish imperialism can be faulted for much suffering of the Irish

people since medieval times, the Germans were notorious for their aggressive stance

against the Chinese, especially during the reign of German Emperor Wilhelm II (r. 1888-

1918), when Germany sent its navy against China and forced the Chinese to grant

Germany the Jiaozhou \fay concession (1898-1914). The city of Tsingtao, where Yu

Tsun used to teach English at a German university, was the administrative center of that

German colonial concession. During World War I, China sent about 100,000 Chinese

laborers to help the Allies against Germany, in hopes of recovering the occupied territory.

Such hopes, however, were disappointed, as the Allies transferred the German concession

to Japan, that controlled it till 1922. Interestingly, Yu Tsun himself reflects on the

question of why a Chinese man would want to work for the Germans, and of his doing a

terrible and cowardly deed for them, such as the killing of Albert. As it turns out, Chinese

nationalism and racial pride lurk beneath the seeming oddity of his service to Germany:

I didn’t do it for Germany, no. I care nothing for a barbarous country which

imposed upon me the abjection of being a spy ... 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.

Misguided loyalties, such as that of Yu Tsun to the Germans and of Captain Madden to

the \fritish, are indeed of the essence of the story, but, as it turns out, not in the narrow

sense of advising nationalism and solidarity with one’s own people against other nations,

but of criticizing the very notion of a national/ethnic/racial identity that suppresses a

more fundamental one related to the common humanity of the various agents involved in

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the tale. Yu Tsun's wounded racial and national pride is a reaction to, but also a mirror of

the racism and arrogance of the Germans and other Europeans toward the Chinese. A

postcolonial subject such as Yu Tsun finds himself then trapped in continued subjection

to his colonial masters, unable to shake off the yoke of their oppression because of his

assimilation and acceptance of their values. He too wants to feel racial and national pride,

and so he continues his slavery to racism and nationalism. As Yu Tsun discovers,

however, as he approaches Stephen Albert’s house and is surprised to hear Chinese

music, there is an undercurrent of hidden links between people of all nations and races

that transcends their surface differences and that flows, uninterrupted, from culture to

culture and from country to country. That discovery is embodied in the story not only in

the seemingly fortuitous circumstances that link Albert to Yu Tsun but in the very

essence of a natural world where political borders and national frontiers have no

significance: “a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not

of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets.” Indeed, with its suggestions of unbelievable coincidences—such as that of a man

picked out of a phone book turning out to be the solver of the riddle of the novel of Yu

Tsun’s great-grandfather Ts’ui Pên—the story seeks to confront and decipher the riddle

of the human identity and the destiny that become visible in the unfolding of history. The

story's implicit solution to that riddle is a challenge to the traditional linear conception of

historical time and the sense of a certain, tragic, and seemingly “natural” inevitability

associated with it, the sense that the series of violent confrontations described in history

books and which we identify with history itself are a product of a rather fixed “human

nature” which is violent and ruthless and hence doomed to stage and re-stage familiar

dramas. For all the celebration of progress that is generally associated with it, western

history is peculiarly pessimistic, assuming violent beginnings (the \fig \fang of 14 billion

years ago) and violent endings (the Armageddon/Ragnarok/Apocalypse of the future),

with significant points in between defined by military conflicts of increasing

destructiveness, the very problems that concerned T. S. Eliot and George Santayana:

\furial of the war dead, 1917

F.\bFajardo-Acosta/p.\b12

\fombing of cities during World War II (1945)

The challenge to that linear model of time takes the form of the work of Ts’ui Pên, Yu

Tsun’s ancestor and former governor of the Chinese province of Yunnan, who

“renounced worldly power in order to write a novel that might be even more populous

than the Hu\fg\bLu\bMe\fg and to construct a labyrinth in which all men would become

lost.” After Ts’ui Pên was murdered by a stranger (exactly as in the case of Albert), “his

heirs found nothing but chaotic manuscripts. His family … wished to condemn them to

the fire; but his executor—a Taoist or \fuddhist monk—insisted on their publication.” As

Stephen Albert discovers, the novel and the labyrinth are one and the same and, far from

senseless, constitute “an enormous riddle, or parable, whose theme is time.” In supremely

subtle and indirect fashion—much like the strategies suggested by \biddell Hart—“the

oblique Ts’ui Pên” set out to create, as Stephen Albert explains to Yu Tsun, a vast work

where the word “Time” is never mentioned and where the plot is characterized by infinite

possibilities branching out through alternative times, and by protagonists who choose not

just one, but multiple paths of action, in fact, all courses of action, so that the novel is

endless as it “embraces all possibilities of time.” The novel of Ts’ui Pên differs then from

traditional accounts of time and reality in the sense that it considers alternatives and

possibilities that are foreclosed and impossible within a frame of mind and action that

already foresees the future as a linear series of events:

In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he

chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pên, he chooses—

simultaneously—all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse

times which themselves also proliferate and fork.

Ts’ui Pên then grants himself the freedom to choose, and also lets his characters choose,

so that their destinies are completely open to an infinite number of possibilities, many of

which do not fall within the fateful line of western linear history and its catastrophic

endings. The two conceptions of time may be visualized, in terms of the metaphor of

single versus forking paths, as a world where all is predictable and predictably tragic (the

F.\bFajardo-Acosta/p.\b13

western vision of history) and a different one (Ts’ui Pên’s vision) where nothing is fixed

and everything depends on the particular choices that an individual makes at a particular

point in time, a fork in the road presenting multiple possibilities: The forking in time that enriches the perception of the world and its possibilities in such a

way is very much anchored to that critical moment of choice which is the crossroads.

Tragic history then can only come about through the deliberate choice of violent action

and consequent tragedy, a straight line to hell, and the rejection of other alternatives. Yu

Tsun, who has committed himself to a terrible murder and its consequences, and is thus

anchored to the view of history where horrors are inevitable, observes:

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to more atrocious undertakings;

soon there will be no one but warriors and brigands; I give them this counsel: The

author\bof\ba\f\batrocious\bu\fdertaki\fg\bought\bto\bimagi\fe\bthat\bhe\bhas\balready\b

accomplished\bit,\bought\bto\bimpose\bupo\f\bhimself\ba\bfuture\bas\birrevocable\bas\bthe\bpast.

What is very remarkable about this statement is Yu Tsun’s sense of the imposition by the

self, on the self, of a path of terrible deeds, the choices and actions of murderers and

thieves, and no alternatives. Ironically, it requires a deliberate act of imagination to enter

into and become resigned to such a world. In other words, for it to come about, it is

necessary to choose\bit and pretend that it cannot be otherwise—a self-fulfilling prophecy

where the gate to a violent future identical to a violent past is opened by a violent act in

the present. Interestingly, the English word “fate” is derived from the \batin word fatum,

the past participle of the verb fari which means “to speak.” Thus “fate,” literally and

etymologically, means “that which has been spoken,” emphasizing a connection between

an understanding of the world embodied in words, an act of verbal imagination before the

fact, and its eventual fulfillment in deeds. If you say it, believe it, and repeat it to

yourself, it will happen just as you say. Related to that idea, Stephen Albert reads to Yu

Tsun two different versions of a chapter of the novel of Ts’ui Pên, in both of which an

army gains a victory. The last words in each version of the chapter are very much like a

mantra invoking the resigned state of mind and spirit of those committed to the life of

violence where the invariable action is killing and the inevitable result is dying: “ Thus\b

fought\bthe\bheroes,\btra\fquil\btheir\badmirable\bhearts,\bviole\ft\btheir\bswords,\bresig\fed\bto\bkill\b

a\fd\bto\bdie. ”

F.\bFajardo-Acosta/p.\b14

For about an hour, as he converses with Stephen Albert about the fascinating

topics of Ts’ui Pên’s novel, Yu Tsun enters into a world which is entirely unlike the

tragic universe that he normally inhabits, the world of war, of mass killing, and of

ruthless agents willing to commit the most heinous acts in order to accomplish their

similarly ruthless objectives. Even before he speaks to Albert, as he approaches his home

and thinks of the work of Ts’ui Pên, Yu Tsun has a vision of the magical garden which

his ancestor sought to oppose to the “real” world of war and evil:

\feneath English trees I meditated on that lost maze: I imagined it 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. Absorbed in these

illusory images, I forgot my destiny of one pursued. I felt myself to be, for an

unknown period of time, an abstract perceiver of the world. The vague, living

countryside, the moon, the remains of the day worked on me, as well as the slope

of the road which eliminated any possibility of weariness. The afternoon was

intimate, infinite. The road descended and forked among the now confused

meadows. A high-pitched, almost syllabic music approached and receded in the

shifting of the wind, dimmed by leaves and distance. I thought that a man can be

an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of

fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets. Thus I arrived before a tall,

rusty gate.

Yu Tsun’s reverie allows him a vision of a natural world of peace and beauty where the

enmities between countries lose their significance and where, accordingly, he too steps

outside of his tragic destiny, entering into a path that brings him before the very gates of a

kind of paradise, a "garden" made possible by a meditation including three acts of

imagination: “… I imagined it inviolate …; I imagined it erased …; I imagined it

infinite.” Inspired by the work of Ts’ui Pên and the words of Albert, Yu Tsun gets to

experience not the terrible isolation of the man about to kill and to die but a moment of

communion with Albert and with “the innumerable ancestors who merge within me,”

“the invisible, intangible swarming” of kin spirits, the “humid garden … infinitely

saturated with invisible persons.” Tragically for Yu Tsun, even those visions, like those

in the train, are insufficient to dissuade him from his foolish purpose. So he finally kills

Albert, but only to deeply regret it, as suggested in the expression of “innumerable

contrition and weariness” (“innumerable contrición y cansancio”), also his last written

words. The fact of repentance and contrition, exhaustion and despair, which are not

countable, expressed as something “innumerable,” is suggestive of both the

overwhelming regret and confusion experienced by Yu Tsun—the keen awareness of his

his terrible error, the missing of his life’s mark. The word "innumerable" further

dramatizes his awareness of having murdered, along with Stephen Albert, the entire line

of his ancestors and his race—a sense of his personal responsibility in the deaths of

millions, as entailed by his participation in the war.

F.\bFajardo-Acosta/p.\b15

Just as the novel of Ts’ui Pên is a riddle with a specific meaning, Time, the short

story of \forges is also a riddle, the meaning of which can be found by means of the same

strategies that lead to Albert’s answering of the riddle of Ts’ui Pên. The question is: what

is a concept that is not mentioned in the story and that in effect may constitute the precise

opposite of what the story seems to be saying and advocating? The story is evidently and

explicitly concerned with alternatives, divergence, multiplicity, variety, and differences—

in opposition to the isolated line of monologic thought embodied in linear time. A

surprise awaits, however, those who choose to enter the garden of forking paths. Indeed,

hidden deep within the inmost essence of the realm of infinite difference and paths that

forever branch in different directions is a transcendental vision expressing its truth

silently, a concept so sacred (like the name of God in certain religions) that it may not be

spoken and can only be hinted at in the most indirect of ways. The truth of the garden, in

this case, can only be seen in the mind by conceptually and visually imagining the reality

toward which the endless proliferation of paths gradually converges: As the number of alternative paths is allowed to increase, however, intriguing effects take

place, especially as certain paths intersect others, creating crossroads of increasing

complexity. Divergence and difference, allowed to flourish without restraint, create

connections where initially there was only separation:

Further following the logic of free branching/forking/divergence, the effect that becomes

visible is that which Yu Tsun alludes to when approaching the home of Albert and

speaking of his imagination of the garden of Ts’ui Pên as “erased by rice fields or

beneath water,” characterized by a profound sense of intimacy in the experience of the

infinite, much like a “road [that] descended and forked among the now confused

F.\bFajardo-Acosta/p.\b16

meadows.” Comparable to the effect of an impressionist painting, the forking begins to

produce the sense of erasure, merging, blurring and confusion of differences: Taken to its logical conclusion, the garden of forking paths, if its variety is truly infinite,

must ultimately yield a vision of blinding luminosity, like the sun, or like the face of

Stephen Albert rendered blinding by the light of the lamp he carries—a symbol of the

wisdom he has learned from Ts’ui Pên and evidencing the Oedipus-like blindness of Yu

Tsun:

From the rear of the house within a lantern approached: a lantern that the trees

sometimes striped and sometimes eclipsed, a paper lantern that had the form of a

drum and the color of the moon. A tall man bore it. I didn’t see his face for the

light blinded me.

In many ways, though he is unable to understand it at that point, Yu Tsun is indeed

confronted with the vision of a stranger who is a god in disguise: “his face, within the

F.\bFajardo-Acosta/p.\b17

vivid circle of the lamplight, was unquestionably that of an old man, but with something

unalterable about it, even immortal.” As Stephen Albert appears then, the garden evolves

into the vision of a truth both human and divine:

does that face look familiar?

The paradoxes of an infinitely divergent and simultaneously convergent universe

where time is anything but linear or uniform are not confined to the quirky ideas of

imaginary Chinese writers of choose-your-own-adventure novels. They also happen to be

central to the postulates of modern physics, particularly Albert Einstein's theory of

relativity (yes, Stephen Albert is meant to be an allusion to the German scientist). As

Einstein suggested, time is a variable phenomenon that very much depends on the

position of the observer and on a variety of forces such as gravity and acceleration.

Gravity, for example, has the property of bending/warping space-time. Time moves more

slowly within strong gravitational fields. Time also slows down under conditions of high

speed. Einstein's "thought experiments" involving trains and observers who are either

stationary or in movement aboard them are echoed in the story's train journey of Yu Tsun

which allows him to gain an hour over his rival Richard Madden, who is left standing on

the platform at the train station. The strange behavior of space-time under the influence

of gravity and acceleration is further connected to questions regarding the origins and

future of the universe. The \fig \fang theory hypothesizes that the universe originated in a

singularity, a very small "object," of infinite density that, prior to the \fig \fang, contained

all the matter and energy, and all the space-time, of the universe. After the \fig \fang that

singularity began expanding and, after a period of about 14 billion years, brought the

universe into the state and form in which we observe it today. Whether the universe will

continue expanding forever, remain stationary, or re-collapse into a singularity are

standing questions whose answer depends on parameters such as the total density of all

matter in the universe.

F.\bFajardo-Acosta/p.\b18

M. C. Escher, Relativity (1953)

The future and nature of the universe were matters that interested \forges.

According to the views in the novel of Ts’ui Pên, all three outcomes—the eternal

expansion, stasis, or the implosion of the universe into a singularity—are entirely

possible, and even necessary, i.e. there are some futures, not all, in which they actually

occur. In that sense, the universe that we know is only one of the possible universes, or,

rather, multiverses, existing in different dimensions, that constitute the totality of

existence:

Computer simulation of a multiverse where each ray is a representation of an evolving universe. Image credit: Andrei \binde, Discover Magazine (2008)

F.\bFajardo-Acosta/p.\b19

As Albert explains to Yu Tsun: The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the

universe as Ts’ui Pên conceived it. In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your

ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite

series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel

times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or

were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time.

In one of the future universes then, everything comes back together, as it used to be at the

beginning. \fut regardless of any given outcome, everything in the universe is part of the

original entity from which it originated. The unified universe that evolves and returns to

its original state has sometimes been represented in terms of the riddle of the Sphinx, as

in this illustration from Claude \fragdon's A\bPrimer\bof\bHigher\bSpace\b(1913), a work that

\forges might have known:

Ironically then, concealed within \forges' story of multiplicity and endless

variation lies the concept of the unity of all beings and things, the idea of God as the

omnipresent reality that embraces all possibilities. A paradox like that of the supposed

impossibility of the squaring of the circle, as suggested perhaps by the “square coin” in

Yu Tsun’s pocket, the story proposes that things are not what they seem to be and that

they often conceal the reality of their opposites, even if they seem impossible, such as the

idea that the other might just represent the self. Interestingly in this respect, though most

\fritish coins were round, the \fritish East India Company manufactured certain square

coins for use in \fritish colonial possessions in India, such as those issued during the reign

of King George VI (r. 1936-1952):

F.\bFajardo-Acosta/p.\b20 \fritish East India coin, 1942

Also very interesting is the fact that certain traditional Chinese coins were round but had

a square hole in the center. Though only implicitly and indirectly evoked by the story,

such coins can further illustrate the paradoxes and conceptual reversals—circles and

squares, unity and diversity, difference and identity, multiplicity and oneness—that are

the concern of the story. These intriguing Chinese coins further lack the human face in a

typical western coin, and even, through their empty centers, seem to put into question the

value of money. Square windows into a circular world of unsuspected mysteries and

hidden values, the Chinese coins, which exist in the story only as a hidden counterpart to

the \fritish colonial money, invite us to consider what may lie at the very heart of identity

and value, individual and universal:

Chinese coin, 1

century A. D.

Within that manner of thinking, what meets the eye may very well conceal its opposite,

so that to harm another could result in harm to the self, and all of life, because, at least

according to the logic of this story, everything is connected and part of the spirit of the

God who presides over the garden—ideas that are very much in keeping with Eastern

religious philosophies (hence the notion that a Taoist or \fuddhist monk rescued Ts’ui

Pên’s manuscripts from destruction) and also resonate in Judeo-Christian notions of

being repaid with the same coin one offers, “an eye for an eye” and “do unto others.” The

murder of Stephen Albert by Yu Tsun—much like the similar murder of Ts’ui Pên by a

stranger, or a soldier killing an enemy soldier— is ultimately a sort of deicide, the killing

of the god in human form (like the crucifixion of Christ), a god that represents the very

F.\bFajardo-Acosta/p.\b21

self and the future of the blind and foolish murderer incapable of seeing himself reflected

upon the mirror shining the truth of all living beings. The hidden truth of the garden of

forking paths, the solution to the riddle of \forges’ story, which completes the riddle of

Ts’ui Pên, is then the idea that “All is One,” the seeming paradox suggesting that infinite

difference converges to unity, and that every living being walks an interconnected web of

roads that go and return to the starting point, a labyrinth where it is impossible to escape

the consequences of one’s own actions toward others. Accordingly, two sides of the same

coin, the stranger that one murders on the way becomes the shadow of one’s own death

waiting at the end of the road; whereas the stranger that one blesses becomes in turn the

blessing and salvation awaiting in the course of the twists and turns of life’s journey. Predicated on the notion that human choice is the single most important

determinant of the quality of human life and history, \forges' story strongly suggests that,

if we do not live in a Garden of Eden, i.e. a paradise of peace, love, beauty and truth, it is

because we choose not to, because our own limited assumptions about human nature and

life prevent us from envisioning alternatives better than the violent world that we make

real through our own beliefs and misguided actions. Though the story of Yu Tsun is

clearly tragic, \forges’ story leans in postmodern directions characterized by a certain

degree of optimism about the possibilities of the human existence. Yu Tsun himself

undergoes a kind of redemptive transformation as he becomes, in the telling of his story,

as he awaits execution, a storyteller and writer of sorts, similar in some respects to his

ancestor Ts’ui Pên, whose unfinished work and legacy he continues, though always with

the caveat that not everyone will be able to understand its value: “ I\bleave\bto\bthe\bvarious\b

futures\b(\fot\bto\ball)\bmy\bgarde\f\bof\bforki\fg\bpaths .” The fact that “the first two pages are

missing” from the statement that Yu Tsun’s dictates as he awaits his own death remind us

also of the unfinished nature of the task of fully understanding the human tragedy and

invite readers, in turn, to seek the missing elements and push forward in the enriching of

the infinite novel started by Ts’ui Pên. In this case, the “Pên” (\forges wrote in Spanish

but knew English very well) is an allusion to the tool of the writer and its association with

the creation of imaginative alternatives, just as the notebook and “the red and blue

pencil” in Yu Tsun’s pocket, the only resources truly capable of revealing his options and

alternatives.

M. C. Escher, Drawi\fg\bHa\fds , 1948

F.\bFajardo-Acosta/p.\b22

Though once he is in prison, he can no longer use the writing implements, Yu Tsun

dictates his statement, his confession and final act of self-examination, thus becoming the

storyteller and finally coming to understand his true identity and the mistake of the killing

of Albert. The seemingly useless keys and the incriminating letter he had in his pocket at

the start of the adventure take on significance then as indications of the locked door that

had to be opened so as to reveal his identity and responsibility in the crimes of war—the

dictated and signed confession prefigured in the letter which earlier on he had “resolved

to destroy immediately,” but which he did not destroy. Texts of many kinds then—

history books, letters, novels, dictated oral narratives, signed documents, ancient

manuscripts, the short story itself—are treated in \forges’ work as the symbolic ground

where the secrets of the human existence are hidden and where they can eventually be

found by attentive and inquisitive readers like Stephen Albert. From among the various

secrets unlocked by \forges, it may be said that the most compelling is the idea that, after

all, we get to write our own stories and choose our own destinies from among the infinite

possibilities available to those who have the courage and imagination to deviate from the

usual road and enter, instead, into the garden of forking paths.

De Es Schwertberger, Multiverse (2009)

Rev.\b27\bApril,\b2017\b

F.\bFajardo-Acosta/p.\b23

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r\fproduc\fd, copi\fd, or distribut\fd to oth\frs in any m\fdium or format without th\f \fxplicit, writt\fn cons\fnt of th\f author.

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