The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges

The short story The Garden of Forking Paths was written by Jorge Luis Borges. The author was born in Argentina in 1899 and a key figure in Spanish-language literature. Most of his works are rather short and were published in story collections. Reoccurring themes in his works are eternity, time, books, reality and illusion.
     The short story The Garden of Forking Paths was published first in 1941. However, the plot of the story is set in 1916. Doctor Yu Tsun, the main character, is a spy for the German Empire who lives in the United Kingdom during World War I. Tsun is pursued by an MI5 agent called Captain Richard Madden. In order to convey an important message to his German handlers he meets his old friend Doctor Stephen Albert. When walking to his house Tsun reflects on his great ancestor Ts'ui Pên. While his talk with Albert Tsun realizes that the unfinished notes that Ts'ui Pên left before his death are actually the intricate labyrinth that he wanted to create. These notes are his attempt to describe a world where all possible outcomes of an event occur simultaneously. Following this realization Tsun kills Albert in order to pass on his important message to his handlers.
     The vision of the “forking paths” that are described by Borges in his text has been cited as inspiration within the field of hypertext fiction. Further parallels can be drawn to the internet. In this new medium the user has unlimited choices by using links and hyperlinks as described in the text by the example of the story fragments that form a labyrinth. 

     To read the full short story follow this link.

J. Ost

Intertextuality by Christian Moraru

Christian Moraru composed an entry on “Intertextuality” for The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (2005) which gives an overview of the history of the concept as well as an overview of different approaches to the concept and their most prominent theorists.

     First of all, Moraru differentiates between four different approaches which can be divided further into two different categories. If a text A is incorporated in any way in a text B, A, the ‘pretext’, can be seen as the ‘intertext’ as it is the text that is worked into another text (1). Contrary, text B can be regarded as the intertext, as it is the text incorporating another, and, therefore, is the active agent in this intertextuality (2). A third approach regards both, text A and B, to be ‘intertextually bound’ to each other which makes both texts intertexts (3). The fourth and last approach mentioned by Moraru regards all texts as intertexts (4). Approaches 1-3 describe an “interplay of identifiable (Genette) or ‘traceable’ texts (Doležel)”, while the fourth approach indicates a universality of intertextuality in literature.

     The subsection “Bakhtin’s legacy: cultural and ideological analyses of narrative intertextuality” of the article takes reference to hypertext: “Once society, history, and culture are seen as ‘texts’, intertextuality becomes central to new Historicism, cultural studies and identity studies, post-colonial scholarship, debates around globalised ‘network society’, the Internet, and hypertext”.  Moraru adds to this aspect of intertextuality in the following subsection “Poststructualism and telling as retelling”. Here, he focuses on the aspects of interactivity, remodelling and referentiality. Oral literature, as in folktales or anecdotes, become a narrative labyrinth and ultimately a linguistic maze in the course of telling and retelling.

     Moraru’s oral literature resembles Jorge Luis Borges’s notion of an infinitive novel in his short story The Garden of Forking Paths. Both characterise hypertext as a kind of labyrinth or maze which poses the opposite of a linear text.

Moraru, Christian. “Intertextuality”. In: Routledge Encyclopaedia of Narrative Theory. Ed. Herman, Davis, Manfred Jahn, and Ryan. London New York: Routledge, 2005. Print.

S. Plum

The Decisions In Reading

A seemingly new aspect of digital literature is its interactivity – the possibility for the reader to be a deciding factor on the course of a story. However, there is a long tradition of interactivity in narration, namely in face-to-face storytelling, in live performances as well as in books that offer different options in continuing a story. Nevertheless, digital literature and the possibilities the Internet offers widen the scope of interactivity of the reader.

     Jorge Luis Borges picked up on the phenomenon that is interactivity in literature in his short story The Garden of Forking Paths. The narration deals with the concept of unlimited choices in a story line. The ‘labyrinth of words’ the novel of unlimited possibility poses appears as a riddle to the ones who try to make sense of it in the story. Borges’s idea of the unlimited novel, his ‘labyrinth’, is closely related to the Internet.

     The ‘labyrinth’ has become an established aspect of online reading. Search engines do not only provide the reader with texts but also with countless follow-up options or parallel reading opportunities. Knowledge is as accessible as never before; however, it has to be found in the maze of the internet. Borges unlimited novel is a printed version of an internet search.

     In an article the Yale University of Art picks up on this relation of the short story and the Internet. To read the full article follow this link.

S. Plum