How can he send word in wartime, outside “regular” channels of communication, to the “sick and hateful” old man poring over newspapers all day, when he is out of resources and all but out of time? The answer flares up among his wandering (or forking) reflections, and in ten minutes he has perfected a plan. He must communicate to his Chief in Berlin the fact of the precise location of the British artillery park just constructed on the River Ancre. Yu Tsun has a job to do before–indeed, by way of–his surrender to the inevitable. German Reich agent Dr. Yu Tsun is in flight from the British spycatcher* Captain Richard Madden, who trails him by seconds, by forty minutes, an hour. “The Garden of Forking Paths” presents itself in brazen masquerade: as a spy story. But we have fallen too abruptly into the pit of the story where the secret of time lies buried, hidden, and we must return to the beginning to attempt a more legitimate, more leisurely, entry.

I quibble, “a ll but accessible,” because the revelation is chopped or snatched away before it can be totally disclosed or grasped–snatched or chopped off, not by jealous fate or fickle fortune, but by a narrative trick of amazing triviality: the revelation hinges on the coincidence of two names ( Albert, a name listed in the telephone book, and Albert, the name of a city in England), a turn of plot apparently unrelated to the mysteries of the universe. The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts’ui Pen conceived it” (28).

Thus Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths” sets up a literary labyrinth, each path of which forks into another labyrinth until we are lost in a labyrinth of labyrinths, at the center of which lies perhaps an ultimate, all-but-accessible truth: Yu Tsun’s ancestor’s novel’s depiction of the labyrinth of time–or, call it, the universe. We know that surfaces will repel approach, that we will have to circle again and again, plot an entry, hack our way through with our own equipment, haul ourselves out when and where we choose, and claim gains and losses for ourselves without acknowledgement from the story that we have arrived at a conclusion, the “end.” Of course we do not expect stories to be that sort of place now. A story is a place where we once expected to slip into the intimate, to be drawn swiftly but safely through troubled truths, to be tumbled about, roughed up a little, and returned in one piece to the rejuvenated quotidian.

The borges labyrinth