The Garden of Forking Paths

The Garden of Forking Paths

Jorge Luis Borges's collection opens with a note explaining that its eight pieces need no elucidation, describing the final story as a detective tale whose crime's purpose becomes clear only in its last paragraph, and the others as fantasies, with "The Babylon Lottery" carrying some symbolism. "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" recounts how the narrator, aided by Bioy Casares, discovers references to an unknown country, Uqbar, in a pirated encyclopaedia, then later finds a volume of a First Encyclopedia of Tlön among the effects of the deceased engineer Herbert Ashe. Tlön proves to be an imagined planet whose idealist philosophy denies the reality of objects and space, governed by schools of thought such as the sophism of the nine copper coins and the doctrine of hrönir, duplicated objects born of forgetfulness or deliberate suggestion. A postscript reveals that Tlön was invented by a secret society begun in the seventeenth century and later funded by the American Ezra Buckley, who insisted the work make no pact with Jesus Christ; objects and volumes from Tlön begin infiltrating the real world, which gradually succumbs to it. A review-essay describes Mir Bahadur Ali's novel The Approach to al-Mu'tasim, in which a disillusioned Bombay law student, after a night of communal rioting, flees and eventually senses in a vile companion the reflected trace of someone better, launching a pilgrimage across India through a chain of ever-finer intermediaries toward the unseen title figure, ending as he parts a curtain to meet him; the narrator compares the book's two editions and its sources, including the Persian Parliament of Birds. "The Circular Ruins" tells of a gray stranger who comes to a ruined, fire-god's temple intending to dream a man into real existence. After early failures dreaming a phantom disciple-crowd, he painstakingly dreams a young man organ by organ, gains the fire god's aid, and sends his creation, ignorant of his own unreality, to another temple. Years later, hearing that a man walks through fire unburned there, the magician fears his son will discover his nature; when flames engulf his own temple and do not burn him, he realizes with humiliation that he too is merely another's dream. "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" catalogues the works, visible and hidden, of the fictional writer Menard, whose secret masterwork was not copying but re-creating, word for word, portions of Cervantes's Don Quixote by immersing himself in Menard's own twentieth-century perspective rather than becoming Cervantes; the narrator argues Menard's identical text is paradoxically richer than the original, and reflects on how this technique transforms the art of reading. "The Babylon Lottery" is narrated by a man who has held every fortune under a vast, secret Company-run lottery in Babylon, tracing its evolution from a simple game of prizes to one incorporating punishments, then compulsory universal participation, and finally an all-encompassing chance-driven order governing every event and detail of life, amid rumors that the Company itself may not exist. "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain" surveys the invented writer's books: the detective novel The God of the Labyrinth, whose apparent solution is meant to be doubted; the branching, retrogressive novel April March, structured as nine interlinked stories; the play The Secret Mirror, whose second act recasts the first through a different character's fantasy; and the collection Statements, of deliberately unfinished plots meant to provoke readers into inventing endings themselves. "The Library of Babel" describes a universe made of endless hexagonal galleries holding all possible books composed from twenty-five symbols, and the narrator recounts the history of ideas about it: the despair over mostly meaningless texts, the false hope of finding a personal "Vindication," the sect of Purifiers who destroyed books, the myth of a Man of the Book who has read the one perfect volume, and the narrator's closing conjecture that the Library is limitless and cyclical.

By Jorges Luis Borges · First published 1941 · Genre: Metafiction, Mystery, Philosophical Fiction · 8 chapters · 24,512 words

First lines

The eight pieces of this book do not require extraneous elucidation. The eighth piece, "The Garden of Forking Paths," is a detective story; its readers will assist at the execution, and all the preliminaries, of a crime, a crime whose purpose will not be unknown to them, but which they will not understand-it seems to me-until the last paragraph. The other pieces are fantasies. One of them, "The Babylon Lottery," is not entirely innocent of symbolism.

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Philosophical Fiction · Short Story Collection · Literary Experimentation · Time Travel · Parallel Universes · Futurism · Speculative Fiction · Metafiction · Self-Reference · Labyrinthine Narrative · Non-Linear Storytelling · Existentialism

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The Garden of Forking Paths is listed on Textopian as a novella by Jorges Luis Borges, dated 1941 CE.

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