The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Defeating Time

I recently rebuked Robert Coover for considering hypertext a modern literary invention (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Electronic technology may have given the genre a name but the idea and practice of hypertext has been around quite a while. I gave the example of the Bible as just such a text. And in his The Garden of the Forking Paths, Borges provides the conceptual rationale for hypertext 80 years ago. He also identifies its primary function: defeating time.

Like all hypertext, The Garden of Forking Paths is appropriately biblical. It has a beginning but presumes some sort of prior sentient existence; so really starts in medias res. And like the Bible, the story is about “A labyrinth of symbols,” whose interpretation is not given by the text. The book of Genesis has time as the first creation (the primordial separation of light and darkness). So quite understandably, Borges makes his “An invisible labyrinth of time.” And the labyrinth is, of course, a book.

The clear anticipation of the Multiverse, in which quantum effects continuously create alternative worlds is obvious:

“In all works of fiction, each time the writer is confronted with choices, he opts for one and discards the rest. In the inextricable Ts’ui Pên, he opts—at one and the same time—for all the alternatives. By so doing, he creates several futures, several times over, and in turn these proliferate and branch off.”

Sequentiality, therefore, takes on a new meaning. No longer does it imply merely ‘one thing after another.’ In Borges’s Garden, it means ‘everything after everything else,’ which is circular. On the one hand, there is no beginning since eventually all recurs. On the other, any point in the cycle can be considered a beginning, a place at which to jump on the carousel of existence: “... each is a point of departure for other branchings off. Now and again, the paths of this labyrinth converge.”

So the story in the story is “a vast riddle, or parable, about time.” Among other things, this conception resolves the paradox of eternity. If time is linear, it must have a beginning, and therefore by definition excludes eternity. The circularity of time in the Garden is authentic eternity, containing everything that could possibly happen within any slice of it. Good and evil are relativised not just to each other but to existence itself. They are both there and not there.

Thus the “unceasing remorse and weariness,” of the protagonist who feels intense pride as well as regret in his accomplishment. Not unlike Yahweh who decided that perhaps all was not that good in his creation just before initiating his exterminating Flood.

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