Just as Albert had to negotiate Ts’ui Pen’s ‘garden of forking paths’, Yu Tsun physically navigates Albert’s garden of forking paths, and now we, as readers, navigate Borges’ ‘Garden of Forking Paths’. This leads us to another question: is ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ itself a garden of forking paths? ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ contains, then, two ‘gardens of forking paths’: a literal one (the one found in the garden of Stephen Albert) and a figurative one (Ts’ui Pen’s novel). Indeed, the idea of Daedalus as a cunning craftsman but also an avatar the writer or novelist is one that James Joyce had already explored when he named the protagonist of his 1916 novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus.) (Although Borges wrote in Spanish, he was bilingual and knew English very well, so it’s worth reflecting that the Chinese name of his maze-building author, Pen, suggests both a writing implement and a cage or prison for restricting people: not unlike a labyrinth, then, when we go back to classical myth and Daedalus’ construction of the original Labyrinth. However, they turn out to be one and the same. So, to an almost metaphysical degree – ‘metaphysical’ in that it follows the idea underpinning metaphysical poetry of taking an extended metaphor and then running with it until it becomes practically absurd – ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ is an extended analogy between the maze and the novel, both of which, we are told early on, Ts’ui Pen wished to built or construct. As we read a detective story there will be other suspects whom we may believe to be guilty of the crime, only to discover that our suspicions were unfounded and another character is the guilty party. The best collection of Borges’ writings, Labyrinths (Penguin Modern Classics), is so named because the metaphor of the labyrinth recurs throughout so many of his works.Ī labyrinth is an apt metaphor for a detective story because both traditionally have only one correct ‘route’ through them, but surrounding this correct path (the way out of the labyrinth, the journey towards solving the crime or mystery) are many other tangents, red herrings, and false trails. The idea is to create an infinite narrative containing every narrative possibility.

In a way that echoes quantum theory and in particular, the concept of Schrödinger’s cat, characters are simultaneously dead and alive, having been killed off in one chapter only to turn up alive and kicking in the next. In a way that prefigures the modern-day ‘narrative’ of computer and video games, where multiple paths through the game are possible, Ts’ui Pen’s novel doesn’t so much reject linearity – such a complete rejection would be possible, when we are still required to read forwards, turning one page at a time – as build simultaneity, and multiple possible outcomes, into its linear structure.

The labyrinth borges