The Garden of Forking Paths” is another story from Ficciones, 1935-1944.
In this story, Dr. Yu Tsun, a Chinese professor of English, working in England as a spy for the Germans during World War I, has been captured and now narrates his story.
Yu Tsun has discovered that the spy ring in which he operates has been infiltrated by the enemy. He cannot communicate directly with the Germans, so has no conventional way of getting his information to them (such as the telephone). While he is on the run from a man named Richard Madden, Yu travels to the home of a man he does not know. He plucked the man’s name from the phone book, because it was the same as the crucial item of information he has discovered (the name of the town that is the location of a British artillery park in France).
As he journeys to the man’s home, Yu reflects upon his grandfather, who withdrew from public life in order to write a novel and to construct a labyrinth. Arriving at his destination, the home of Stephen Albert (a scholar of all things Chinese), Yu is surprised to discover that this stranger seems to have been expecting him. Albert takes Yu for a walk around the ‘garden of forking paths’ outside the house.
When they go inside the house, Albert tells Yu all about Yu’s grandfather, whose life Albert is something of an expert in thanks to his study of Chinese culture. He tells Yu that his grandfather, Ts’ui Pen, never managed to finish the novel he planned to write, but when he died he left behind a draft containing all of the various possible plot lines and discarded ideas. Albert has only read the draft because it was saved for posterity and then published, with Ts’ui Pen leaving a note declaring that he leaves the draft for ‘several futures’, and referring to the abandoned novel as ‘the garden of forking paths’. From this clue, Albert realized that the novel was the labyrinth Ts’ui Pen had sought to construct: the novel and the labyrinth were, in fact, one and the same.
So, although the novel appeared like an abandoned draft with lots of considered and rejected plot developments, this was deliberate: rather than have a protagonist choose one path and reject the others, he wanted to explore the idea of a protagonist being able to choose all possible ways forward, simultaneously. It is thus a novel in which every possible course of action plays out.
No sooner has Yu learnt – and struggled to digest – this revelation than Richard Madden, the man who is on his trail, appears, and Yu realises the game is up. He shoots and kills Albert, knowing that news of the man’s murder, and Yu’s involvement in it, will reach the Germans, who will realise that Yu is communicating to them the location of the artillery park: the town of Albert, in France. Yu ends his narrative by confirming that, because the town of Albert has just been bombed, he knows the Germans got his ‘message’.
Adapted from Interesting Literature site
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