Albert got up. For several moments he stood with his back to me, opening a drawer of the black-and-gold writing cabinet. He turned and held out a squarish piece of paper that had once been crimson and was now pink and brittle. The script was the renowned calligraphy of Ts’ui Pên himself. Uncomprehending but with deep emotion, I read these words written with a tiny brush by a man of my own blood: “I leave to various futures (but not all) my garden of branching paths.” In silence, I handed back the page.
“Before unearthing this letter,” Albert went on, “I wondered how a book could be infinite. I came up with no other conclusion than that it would have to be a cyclical, or circular, volume—one whose last page was the same as its first, and with the potential to go round and round for ever. I recalled the night in the middle of the Thousand and One Nights, in which Queen Scheherazade—having distracted the scribe by a trick of magic—starts to recount the history of the Thousand and One Nights, thereby running the risk of coming back full circle to this same night and continuing forever more. I also imagined an archetypal, hereditary work handed down from father to son, wherein each new heir would add a chapter or, piously, rewrite a page of his forebears. These speculations engaged my mind, but none seemed even remotely relevant to Ts’ui Pên’s contradictory chapters. In my perplexity, I received from Oxford the manuscript you have just seen. One sentence caught my attention: ‘I leave to various futures (but not all) my garden of branching paths.’ Almost at once, light dawned. The garden of branching paths was the chaotic novel; the phrase ‘to various futures (but not all)’ conjured up an image of a branching in time, not in space. A re-reading of the book confirmed this theory. 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. Hence, his novel’s contradictions. Fang, let us say, has a secret. A stranger calls at his door; Fang decides to kill him. Naturally, there are several possible outcomes. Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, both can be spared, both can die, and so forth. In Ts’ui Pên’s novel, all of these happen, and each is a point of departure for other branchings off. Now and again, the paths of this labyrinth converge. For example, in one possible past you come to this house as an enemy, in another as a friend. If you can bear my incurable pronunciation, we shall read some pages.”
In the bright circle of lamplight, his face was clearly that of an old man, yet with something unconquerable and even immortal about it. Slowly, precisely, he read two forms of the same epic chapter. In the first, an army marches into battle across a bare mountain; dread of the rocks and the darkness makes the troops hold life cheap, and they easily win a victory. In the second, the same army storms a palace, which is in the midst of festivities; the resplendent battle seems to them an extension of the revelry, and they are victorious. I listened with seemly veneration to these old tales, which were perhaps less of a marvel than the fact that my blood had contrived them and that a man from a distant empire had restored them to me while I was engaged in a desperate assignment on an island in the West. I remember the concluding words, repeated at the end of each version like a secret watchword: “So battled the heroes, their stout hearts calm, their swords violent, each man resigned to kill and to die.”
From that moment, I felt around me and within my dark body an invisible, intangible swarming. Not that of diverging, parallel, and finally converging armies but a more inaccessible, more intimate turmoil, which these armies somehow foreshadowed.
“I do not think your illustrious ancestor toyed idly with different versions,” Stephen Albert went on. “I do not consider it likely that he would sacrifice thirteen years to the endless compilation of a rhetorical experiment. In your country, the novel is a lesser genre; at that time, it was a genre that was not respected. Ts’ui Pên was a novelist of genius, but he was also a man of letters who certainly did not look on himself as a mere novelist. The testimony of his contemporaries proclaims—and his life confirms—his metaphysical and mystical leanings. Philosophical argument usurps a good part of his novel. I know that of all quandaries, none so troubled or exercised him as the fathomless quandary of time. But, then, time is the only problem that does not appear in the pages of his Garden. He does not even use the word that means “time”. How do you explain this deliberate omission?”
I put forward several suggestions, all inadequate. We discussed them.
“In a riddle about chess,” Stephen Albert concluded, “what is the one forbidden word?”
I thought for a moment and replied, ‘The word “chess’.”
“Exactly,” said Albert. “The Garden of Branching Paths is a vast riddle, or parable, about time. This is the hidden reason that prevents Ts’ui Pên from using the word. To omit a particular word in all instances, to resort to clumsy metaphors and obvious circumlocutions, is probably the surest way of calling attention to it. This was the convoluted method that the oblique Ts’ui Pên chose in each meandering of his unrelenting novel. I have studied hundreds of manuscripts, I have corrected the mistakes introduced by careless copyists, I have deduced the plan behind that chaos, I have reestablished—I believe I have re-established—its original order, and I have translated the whole work. I can guarantee that he does not use the word “time” even once. The explanation is plain—The Garden of Branching Pathsis an incomplete but not false picture of the world as Ts’ui Pên perceived it. Unlike Newton or Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing and dizzying web of diverging and converging and parallel times. This mesh of times that merge, split apart, break, and for centuries are unaware of each other, embraces all possibilities. In most of these times, we do not exist; in some, you exist but not I; in others, I but not you; in still others, both of us. In our present time, granted me by a lucky chance, you have come to my house; in another, on making your way across the garden, you find me dead; in still another, I speak these same words, but I am a delusion, a ghost.”
“In all,” I said, not without a shudder, “I thank you and honour you for your re-creation of Ts’ui Pên’s garden.”
“Not in all,” he murmured, smiling. “Time keeps branching into countless futures. In one of them, I am your enemy.”
I felt again that swarming of which I have spoken. It seemed to me that the dank garden around the house was utterly saturated with invisible beings. These were Albert and myself, secret and busy and in numberless guises, in other dimensions of time. I lifted my gaze, and the tenuous nightmare fled. In the yellow and black garden, stood one man alone. But the man was strong as a statue, and he was coming towards me down the path. He was Captain Richard Madden.
“The future is already here,” I replied, “but I’m your friend. May I see the letter again?”
Albert got up. Tall, he opened the drawer of the writing cabinet, and for a moment his back was to me. I had drawn my revolver. I fired with great care; Albert collapsed instantly, without a groan. I swear his death was immediate, a thunderbolt.
The rest is unreal, meaningless. Madden burst in and seized me. I have been condemned to hang. Horrible to say, I won. I passed on to Berlin the secret name of the city to be attacked. Yesterday the Germans shelled it; I read this in the same newspapers that reported to all England the curious case of the learned Sinologist Stephen Albert, who had been murdered by a perfect stranger, one Yu Tsun. My commander solved the riddle. He knew that my dilemma was how—in the noise and confusion of war—to signal the name of the place to be targeted and that the only way I could find was to kill someone named Albert. My superior knows nothing—nor can anyone—of my unceasing remorse and weariness.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jorge Luis Borges was born on August 24, 1899, in Buenos Aires. In 1955, with the overthrow of Perón, he was
named Director of the Argentine National Library, and in the same year became professor of English and American literatures at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1961, he shared the International Publishers’ Prize with Samuel Beckett. He has made three trips to the United States—the latest, in 1969, to attend a conference devoted to his writings at the University of Oklahoma.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Norman Thomas di Giovanni was born in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1933, and was graduated from Antioch College in 1955. He met Borges in 1967 while the latter was at Harvard. In 1968, on Borges’ invitation, he went to live in Buenos Aires, where he works with the author in daily sessions. Together they are producing ten of Borges’ books in English versions. The first of these, The Book of Imaginary Beings, was published in 1969.
Notes
[←1]
The great South American literary journal edited in Buenos Aires by Victoria Ocampo.—Editor’s note.
[←2]
Haslam has also published A General History of Labyrinths.
[←3]
Bertrand Russell (The Analysis of Mind, 1921, p. 159) hypothesizes that the world was created a few minutes ago, together with a population that ‘remembers’ an unreal past.
[←4]
A century, in terms of the duodecimal system, is equivalent to a period of a hundred and forty-four years.
[←5]
At present, one of Tlön’s churches takes the platonic view that a given pain, a given greenish shade of yellow, a given temperature, a given sound, are the only reality. All men, in the dizzying moment of coitus, are the same man. All men who recite a line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.
[←6]
Buckley was a freethinker, a fatalist, and a defender of slavery.
[←7]
There remains, of course, the problem of the material of certain objects.
[←8]
In the course of this review, I have referred to the Mantiq ut-Tair (Parliament of Birds) by the Persian mystic Farid al-Din Abu Talib Mohammad ibn-Ibraham Attar, who was killed by the soldiers of Tului, one of Genghis Khan’s sons, during the sack of Nishapur. Perhaps it would be useful to summarize the poem. The distant king of birds, the Simurgh, drops one of his splendid feathers somewhere in the middle of China; on learning of this, the other birds, tired of their age-old anarchy, decide to seek him. They know that the king’s name means “thirty birds”; they know that his castle lies in the Kaf, the range of mountains that ring the earth. Setting out on the almost endless adventure, they cross seven valleys or seas, the next to last bearing the name Bewilderment, the last, the name Annihilation. Many of the pilgrims desert; the journey takes its toll among the rest. Thirty, made pure by their sufferings, reach the great peak of the Simurgh. At last they behold him; they realize that they are the Simurgh and that the Simurgh is each of them and all of them. (Plotinus [Enneads, V, 8, 4] also states a divine extension of the principle of identity: “All things in the intelligible heavens are in all places. Any one thing is all other things. The sun is all the stars, and each star is all the other stars and the sun.”) The Mantiq ut-Tair has been translated into French by Garcin de Tassy; parts of it into English by Edward FitzGerald. For this footnote, I have consulted the tenth volume of Burton’s Arabian Nights and Margaret Smith’s study The Persian Mystics: Attar (1932).
[←9]
Madame Henri Bachelier also lists a literal translation of Quevedo’s literal translation of St Francis of Sales’sIntroduction à la vie dévote. No trace of this work is to be found in Pierre Menard’s library. The ascription must have arisen from something our friend said in jest, which the lady misunderstood.
[←10]
I had a secondary purpose as well—to sketch a portrait of Pierre Menard. But dare I compete with the gilded pages that I am told the Baroness of Bacourt is preparing, or with Carolus Hourcade’s delicate, precise pencil?
[←11]
I remember his notebooks with their square-ruled pages, the heavy black deletions, the personal system of symbols he used for marginal emendations, and his minute handwriting. He liked to stroll through the outskirts of Nîmes at sunset, often taking along a notebook with which he would make a cheerful bonfire.
[←12]
So much for Herbert Quain’s learning; so much for the learning on page 215 of a book published in 1893. A speaker in Plato’s Statesman had long since described a similar regression—that of an earth-born race who, subjected to the power of a contrary rotation of the universe, went from old age to manhood, from manhood to boyhood, from boyhood to disappearance, or wasting away. Then there is Theopompus, who, in his Philippics, speaks of certain northern fruits that produce in those who eat them the same backward progression. More interesting is the idea of a reversal of Time, when we might remember the future and forget, or barely perceive, the past. Cf. the tenth canto of theInferno, lines 97-102, in which prophetic and presbyopic sight are compared.
[←13]
The original manuscript has neither numerals nor capital letters. Punctuation was limited to the comma and full stop. These two signs, the space, and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet were the twenty-five symbols found to be sufficient by the unknown author. [Editor’s Note.]
[←14]
Formerly, for every three hexagons, there was one man. Suicides and lung diseases have upset the ratio. There have been times when I travelled for nights along corridors and worn stairways without finding a single librarian. The memory of this fills me with inexpressible melancholy.
[←15]
Let me reiterate that for a book to exist it has only to be possible. The impossible alone is excluded. For example, no book is also a stairway, although there are certainly books that argue or deny or demonstrate the possibility and others whose structure resembles that of a stairway.
[←16]
Letizia Alvarez de Toledo has remarked that the vast Library is useless. In point of fact, a single ordinary-sized volume, printed in nine- or ten-point type and consisting of an infinite number of infinitely thin leaves, would be enough. (Early in the seventeenth century, Cavalieri noted that all solids are the superimposition of an infinite number of planes.) Handling such a silky vade-mecum would be awkward, for each apparent leaf would divide into others. The unimaginable middle leaf would have no reverse.
[←17]
An outrageous and despicable suggestion. The Prussian spy Hans Rabener, alias Viktor Runeberg, drew an automatic pistol on Captain Richard Madden, the bearer of an arrest warrant. In self-defence, Madden inflicted wounds from which Runeberg later died. [Editor’s Note.]
The Garden of Forking Paths Page 8
