"The Garden of Forking Paths" (original Spanish title: "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan") is a 1941

short story A short story is a piece of prose fiction. It can typically be read in a single sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a single effect or mood. The short story is one of the old ...

Argentine Argentines, Argentinians or Argentineans are people from Argentina. This connection may be residential, legal, historical, or cultural. For most Argentines, several (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of their ...

writer and poet

Jorge Luis Borges Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo ( ; ; 24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator regarded as a key figure in Spanish literature, Spanish-language and international literatur ...

. It is the title story in the collection ''El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan'' (1941), which was republished in its entirety in ''

Ficciones ' (in English: "Fictions") is a collection of short stories by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges, originally written and published in Spanish between 1941 and 1956. Thirteen stories from ''Ficciones'' were first published by New Direc ...

'' (''Fictions'') in 1944. It was the first of Borges's works to be translated into English by

Anthony Boucher William Anthony Parker White (August 21, 1911 – April 29, 1968), better known by his pen name Anthony Boucher (), was an American author, critic, and editor who wrote several classic mystery novels, short stories, science fiction, and radio dr ...

when it appeared in ''

Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine ''Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine'' is a bi-monthly American digest size fiction magazine specializing in crime fiction, particularly detective fiction, and mystery fiction. Launched in fall 1941 by Mercury Press, ''EQMM'' is named after the fic ...

'' in August 1948. In 1958 it was translated back into English by Donald A. Yates and published in Michigan Alumnus Quarterly Review, Spring 1958. In 1962 this translation was included in the book ''

Labyrinths In Greek mythology, the Labyrinth () is an elaborate, confusing structure designed and built by the legendary artificer Daedalus for King Minos of Crete at Knossos. Its function was to hold the Minotaur, the monster eventually killed by the h ...

'' ( New Directions). The story's theme has been said to foreshadow the

many-worlds interpretation The many-worlds interpretation (MWI) is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that asserts that the universal wavefunction is Philosophical realism, objectively real, and that there is no wave function collapse. This implies that all Possible ...

quantum mechanics Quantum mechanics is the fundamental physical Scientific theory, theory that describes the behavior of matter and of light; its unusual characteristics typically occur at and below the scale of atoms. Reprinted, Addison-Wesley, 1989, It is ...

. It may have been inspired by work of the philosopher and science fiction author

Olaf Stapledon William Olaf Stapledon (10 May 1886 – 6 September 1950) was an English philosopher and author of science fiction.Andy Sawyer, " illiamOlaf Stapledon (1886-1950)", in Bould, Mark, et al, eds. ''Fifty Key Figures in Science Fiction''. New York ...

. Borges's vision of "forking paths" has been cited as inspiration by numerous new media scholars, in particular within the field of

hypertext fiction Hypertext fiction is a genre of electronic literature characterized by the use of hypertext links that provide a new context for non-linearity in literature and reader interaction. The reader typically chooses links to move from one node of text to ...

.Wardrip-Fruin, Noah, and Nick Montfort, eds. ''The New Media Reader''. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. Other stories by Borges that explore the idea of infinite texts include "

The Library of Babel "The Library of Babel" () is a short story by Argentine author and librarian Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), conceiving of a universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible 410-page books of a certain format and character set. T ...

" and " The Book of Sand".

Plot summary

The narrator opens the story by noting a delay in a British attack on the Serre-Montauban line during

World War I World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...

, and states that the signed statement of Chinese professor Yu Tsun allows the events to be understood in a new way. The remainder of the story consists of this statement. Tsun is living in the United Kingdom during the war but acting as a spy for

Imperial Germany The German Empire (),; ; World Book, Inc. ''The World Book dictionary, Volume 1''. World Book, Inc., 2003. p. 572. States that Deutsches Reich translates as "German Realm" and was a former official name of Germany. also referred to as Imperia ...

, motivated not by a love of the latter country, but by a desire to prove to his chief that he is not racially inferior. He has discovered a crucial bit of information, the location of a new British artillery park. However, he also learns that a British intelligence officer of Irish ancestry, Richard Madden, has just killed another member of Tsun's spy ring and will surely catch Tsun within the day. Tsun forms a plan to transmit his information to Germany and flees on a train, narrowly escaping capture by Madden. Tsun arrives at the village of Ashgrove to seek a man named Stephen Albert. Thinking about labyrinths as he walks, he remembers one of his ancestors, a provincial governor named Ts'ui Pên. Ts'ui Pen had retired from civil service to construct "a novel that would be even more populous than the '' Hung Lu Meng'' and a labyrinth in which all men would become lost." However, he was apparently murdered before he could complete either task, leaving only incoherent drafts of the novel and no known labyrinth. On reaching Albert's house, Tsun is astonished to learn that Albert is a

Sinologist Sinology, also referred to as China studies, is a subfield of area studies or East Asian studies involved in social sciences and humanities research on China. It is an academic discipline that focuses on the study of the Chinese civilizatio ...

who is himself studying Ts'ui Pen's incomplete novel. Albert, himself thrilled to meet a descendant of Ts'ui Pen, explains that he believes Ts'ui Pen's novel and labyrinth were not distinct projects, but rather two descriptions of a single project. Albert had acquired a letter by Ts'ui Pen that included the statement, "I leave to several futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths." In Albert's interpretation, these forking paths would represent the various possible futures that could have resulted from each event of the novel, all of which Ts'ui Pen describes in separate chapters, rather than choosing a single outcome for each event. The novel's apparent multiple drafts of various chapters would be in fact a single work, in which the infinitely forking futures are described. The novel is thus "an enormous riddle, or parable, whose theme is time". Overwhelmed with emotion, Tsun states that by unlocking his ancestor's masterpiece, Albert has surely earned his gratitude in every divergent future. Albert replies with a smile that there is at least one timeline where Tsun is his enemy. At that moment, Tsun sees Madden running through the house's garden. He asks Albert to turn around on a pretext and shoots him fatally in the back. As Tsun awaits hanging in his cell, he explains that he successfully transmitted the message that the British artillery was in the town of

Albert, Somme Albert () is a Communes of France, commune in the Somme (department), Somme Department in France, department in Hauts-de-France in northern France. It is located about halfway between Amiens and Bapaume. History Albert was founded as a Roman ...

by killing a man of that name, and that his German chief understood the significance when he saw the murder in the newspapers. However, Tsun notes that the chief "does not know (no one can know) my innumerable contrition and weariness."

In modern culture

*In statistics, the

garden of forking paths fallacy The garden of forking paths is a problem in frequentist hypothesis testing through which researchers can unintentionally produce false positives for a tested hypothesis, through leaving themselves too many degrees of freedom. In contrast to fish ...

refers to how making a series of decisions along a large decision tree can lead to a higher false-positive rate in an experiment. Named by statistician

Andrew Gelman Andrew Eric Gelman (born February 11, 1965) is an American statistician who is Higgins Professor of Statistics and a professor of political science at Columbia University. Gelman attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a National M ...

, this concept references "The Garden of Forking Paths" to describe how scientists can make false discoveries when they do not pre-specify a data analysis plan and instead choose "one analysis for the particular data they saw." *In 1987,

Stuart Moulthrop Stuart Moulthrop (born 1957 in Baltimore, Maryland, United States) is an innovator of electronic literature and hypertext fiction, both as a theoretician and as a writer. He is author of the hypertext fiction works '' Victory Garden'' (1991), whic ...

created a hypertextual version of "The Garden of Forking Paths" titled ''

Victory Garden Victory gardens, also called war gardens or food gardens for defense, were vegetable, fruit, and herb gardens planted at private residences and public parks in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Germany during World War I a ...

''. *Parallels have been drawn between the concepts in the story and the

in physics by

Bryce DeWitt Bryce Seligman DeWitt (born Carl Bryce Seligman; January 8, 1923 – September 23, 2004) was an American theoretical physicist noted for his work in gravitation and quantum field theory. Personal life He was born Carl Bryce Seligman, but he ...

in his preface to "The Many World Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics".The Many World Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, N. Graham and B. DeWitt eds., Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1973. * Mark Z. Danielewski's novel ''

House of Leaves ''House of Leaves'' is the debut novel by American author Mark Z. Danielewski, published in March 2000 by Pantheon Books. A bestseller, it has been translated into a number of languages, and is followed by a companion piece, '' The Whalestoe ...

'' also had a great deal of influence from many of Borges' short stories, and the character Zampanò is somewhat of a Borges figure himself (his blindness, his obsession with infinity, his masterful writing that seems to loop back on itself but never in the same way...). "The Garden of Forking Paths" is specifically mentioned in footnote #167 of the novel.Borges: Influence and References: Mark Z. Danielewski. Retrieved March 15, 2007. Archived 2014-10-15 at the Wayback Machine *The

first-person shooter A first-person shooter (FPS) is a video game genre, video game centered on gun fighting and other weapon-based combat seen from a First person (video games), first-person perspective, with the player experiencing the action directly through t ...

video game

Ultrakill ''Ultrakill'' is an upcoming first-person shooter, first-person shooter game developed by Arsi "Hakita" Patala and published by New Blood Interactive. It was released on Steam (software), Steam through early access for Microsoft Windows on 3 Se ...

derives the title of a level from Borges' book. The game's "Garden of Forking Paths" contains a more literal interpretation of the title, with the player navigating a labyrinthine structure located within a science-fiction interpretation of

Dante's Inferno ''Inferno'' (; Italian for ' Hell') is the first part of Italian writer Dante Alighieri's 14th-century narrative poem '' The Divine Comedy'', followed by and . The ''Inferno'' describes the journey of a fictionalised version of Dante himsel ...

References

External links

Silvio Gaggi, "Hyperrealities and Hypertexts"

Lev Manovich, "New Media from Borges to HTML"

Nick Montfort introduction to "The Garden of Forking Paths" in "The New Media Reader."
{{DEFAULTSORT:Garden of Forking Paths, The Short stories by Jorge Luis Borges Postmodern literature 1941 short stories Metafictional works Short stories about parallel universes World War I short stories World War I espionage Argentine speculative fiction works

Plot summary

In modern culture

See also

References

External links