Bodying Forth the Impossible: Metamorphosis, Mortality and Aesthetics in the
Works of Jorge Luis Borges

Heather Dubnick

continued . . .

"The Garden of Forking Paths" tells two stories, each extending language beyond its limits through embodiment. Both stories are framed by a pseudo-historical introduction relating that the text contained within was "dictated, read over, and then signed by Dr. Yu Tsun," and in which "[t]he first two pages are missing" (Ficciones 99). The first story concerns Yu Tsun's espionage. He must deliver a secret message across a continent without actually speaking the words:

. . . I possessed the Secret—the name of the exact site of the new British artillery park on the Ancre. A bird streaked across the misty sky and, absently, I turned it into an airplane and then that airplane into many in the skies of France, shattering the artillery park under a rain of bombs. If only my mouth, before it should be silenced by a bullet, could shout this name in such a way that it could be heard in Germany. . . . My voice, my human voice, was weak. How could it reach the ear of the Chief. . . . Vaguely I thought that a pistol shot can be heard for a great distance. . . . The telephone directory gave me the name of the one person capable of passing on the information. . . . (91)

Yu Tsun's plan involves killing a man—Stephen Albert—whose last name matches the name of the site to be bombed. The murder of Stephen Albert both foretells and prescribes the bombing—both mirrors and initiates it, reflecting an unconventional view of temporality and causality not unlike the moment of confrontation between narrator and reader in "The Aleph." The murder and the bombing are intimately, nominally, and in a sense corporeally linked—yet spatially and temporally distant. The murder is also a naming, the naming is also a bombing (and presumably the murder of more people), and the sum of the three acts is an act of espionage. In this sense, Yu Tsun takes to an extreme the idea of performative language.

As in "The Aleph," the mise-en-abîme structure in "The Garden of Forking Paths" emerges on various levels. Again, Borges doubles the title, so that the name of the story is mirrored in the name of novel (and labyrinth) at its core. In addition, the world that Yu Tsun moves through as he approaches Albert is itself a forking path. Yu Tsun encounters children along the way who advise him that "'[t]he house is a good distance away, but you won't get lost if you take the road to the left, and bear to the left at every crossroad'" (93). This advice always to "bear . . . left" reminds Yu Tsun "that such was the common formula for finding the central courtyard of certain labyrinths." He continues:

I know something about labyrinths. Not for nothing am I the great-grandson of that Ts'ui Pên who . . . gave up temporal power to write a novel with more characters than there are in the Hung Lu Meng, and to create a maze in which all men would lose themselves. . . . (93)

While pondering labyrinths and imagining the true form of the maze created by Ts'ui Pen, Yu Tsun loses his way in his own mental labyrinth:

. . . I meditated on this lost and perhaps mythical labyrinth: I imagined it untouched and perfect on the secret summit of some mountain; I imagined it drowned under rice paddies or beneath the sea; I imagined it infinite, made not only of eight-sided pavilions and of twisting paths but also of rivers, provinces and kingdoms. . . . I thought of a maze of mazes, of a sinuous, ever growing maze which would take in both past and future and would somehow involve the stars.

Lost in these imaginary illusions I forgot my destiny—that of the hunted. For an undetermined period of time I felt myself cut off from the world, an abstract spectator. . . . The evening was at once intimate and infinite. . . . The road kept descending and branching off, through meadows misty in the twilight. (93-4)

In this final line, the labyrinths that Yu Tsun envisions suddenly take shape in the physical world around him. This is the first hint that Yu Tsun will experience within his own narrative the confusion of the objective and the subjective that disquiets Borges in "Partial Enchantments of the Quixote." Ts'ui Pên's labyrinth and his novel turn out to be one and the same, a riddle for time. As in "The Aleph," contained and container are reversed, so that Yu Tsun's actions come to appear as part of his ancestor's novel; Yu Tsun is not only a descendant of Ts'ui Pên, but possibly a character in his novel. Yu Tsun himself becomes lost in somewhere between reality and fiction as the boundary between them loses integrity and definition.

Yu Tsun's conspiratorial manipulations of language and naming invert the blueprint of the novel written by his ancestor, Ts'ui Pên. Both men signify obliquely, rather than directly naming their object. By murdering Stephen Albert, Yu Tsun delivers to the enemy the name of the site to be bombed; Ts'ui Pên, by omitting all mention of the word "time," hints that time itself is the theme of his novel. Yu Tsun exploits the ambiguities of language and displaces the name—specifically, the name "Albert." Ts'ui Pên, on the other hand, omits the name of the concept at the heart of his novel, and through this very omission, suggests it, as Albert explains to Yu Tsun,

The Garden of Forking Paths is an enormous guessing game, or parable, in which the subject is time. The rules of the game forbid the use of the word itself. To eliminate a word completely, to refer to it by means of inept phrases and obvious paraphrases, is perhaps the best way of drawing attention to it. . . . (99-100)

The legend of Ts'ui Pên's dual creation—which in fact turns out to be singular—bears a great deal of similarity to the Emperor Shih Huang Ti's book-burning and wall-building in "The Wall and the Books." In fact, Albert says, Ts'ui Pên's survivors found his "mess of manuscripts" after his death, and "wanted to consign them to the fire" (96). In both cases, the conjunction of these acts—one affecting the textual realm, the other affecting the physical realm—constitutes an attempt to bridge reality and representation, thereby erasing the distinctions between what exists in time, here and now, and what exists in texts—be they historical or fictional (or both). Ts'ui Pên's labyrinthine novel as a parable for time is the ultimate aesthetic act, an "alephic" act, so to speak, that attempts to be all-encompassing, to emerge out of its binding and wrap itself around the reality that contains it. In describing this impossible task, Borges indirectly achieves the aesthetic act, that "imminence of a revelation that does not take place" (A Personal Anthology 92). The aesthetic act succeeds through its very failure; the message is understood although it cannot be stated outright or transcribed.

Albert explains the true nature of Ts'ui Pên's enterprise, much as Borges tries to illuminates Shih Huang Ti's actions—by explaining that, at least in motivation, the acts were one and the same:

'At one time, Ts'ui Pên must have said, 'I am going into seclusion to write a book,' and at another, 'I am retiring to construct a maze.' Everyone assumed these were separate activities. No one realized that the book and the labyrinth were one and the same. . . . The novel's confusion suggested that it was the labyrinth.' (Ficciones 96)

Albert gives Yu Tsun a letter, in which Ts'ui Pên has written "'I leave to various future times, but not to all, my garden of forking paths' " (97). Albert explains that he had imagined Ts'ui Pên's labyrinthine novel to be infinite in the cyclical sense, an infinite regression comparable to The Thousand and One Nights, in which "Scheherezade, through a magical mistake on the part of her copyist, started to tell the story of The Thousand and One Nights, with the risk of again arriving at the night upon which she will relate it, and thus on to infinity" (97). Albert imagines as well "'a Platonic hereditary work, passed on from father to son, in which each individual would add a new chapter or correct, with pious care, the work of his elders" (97). [9] The phrase "various futures" illuminates Albert's misinterpretation, suggesting that Ts'ui Pên's novel might be labyrinthine in a temporal, rather than a spatial sense, following not one, but infinite, branching lines.

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