Commentary on the Garden

The idea for the site is not original; it is based on an article by Stuart Moulthrop (1991) that can be found in a book titled 'Hypermedia and Literary Studies' which is a collection of essays on electronic text edited by hypertext theorists Delany and Landow. In this article Moulthrop describes his own version of a possible hypertextual adaptation of the short story by Jorge Luis Borges ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’. This site was built to be a realisation of Moulthrop's idea, but in the end its aims and structure came to be different. On a basic technical difference with the original project the website is written in HTML and was intended for presentation on the World Wide Web. Moulthrop back in 1986 has used a hypertext programme called StorySpace to depict the vast web of connections that the story allows. In this form (HTML markup) and in this environment (Web) the Garden is a hyperfictional environment. The term hyperfiction has been used to describe the use of hypertext to construct a fictional narrative, and by now one can find hundreds of sites that deal with this on the web.

Borges and the particular story have long been recognised by current hypertext theorists to be a print precursor of hypertext. Borges has always been a favourite with the postmodernists and it was logical that people with a background in literary criticism and an interest in new technologies would see a connection in the Borgesian motive of the labyrinth and hyperlinking.

The form of the Garden is that of a detective story and at the centre of the narration is a book written by Chinese philosopher Ts’ui Pen. The main issue of the Garden is time and time is not ‘uniform and absolute’. Borges imagines ‘an infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent and parallel times’ (Borges, 1998). Stephen Albert the Sinologist, explains to his friend, the narrator Yu Tsun, that Ts’ui Pen’s two goals, to construct a labyrinth and write a book, merge into the published book based on his ‘chaotic manuscripts’. The book’s title is the ‘Garden of Forking Paths’ as well, and this makes the book the labyrinth, the Garden. The construction of this maze is explained by Albert:' In all fictions, each time a man meets diverse alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the work of the virtually impossible-to-disentangle Ts'ui Pen, the character chooses simultaneously all of them. He creates, thereby, ‘several futures,’ several times, which themselves proliferate and fork'.

In the abrupt end of the story Yu Tsun kills Stephen Albert and in this way as Borges points out 'the paths of the labyrinth converge'. The secondary issue of the identity of Yu Tsun as a spy for the Germans merges with the main one, Ts’ui Pen’s Garden. In this ending, as Albert predicts, Yu Tsun comes as an enemy; in another he would come as a friend.