The Garden of Forking Paths

"Ostensibly it’s set in the Second World War but as Borges always does, he creates this world of bizarre, really occult coincidences that are completely unbelievable, unless you’re in Borges’s world. It takes the form of a signed statement narrated by a Chinese spy living in Britain during the First World War. He has an ancestor, Ts’ui Pen, who worked for years on what was later called a completely pointless enterprise: to write a huge novel and create a labyrinth. The labyrinth was never found, and the novel was regarded as totally contradictory and meaningless ­– in one chapter the hero’s dead, in another he’s alive – so it appeared during his lifetime that this guy was a complete failure. The spy finds out that what Ts’ui Pen was trying to do wasn’t creating a labyrinth as a physical object: what he wanted to do was to create a book which embraced all possibilities that exist in time, and in which all possibilities were realised for the spy character. The spy is told: it’s not just in this guy’s literary imagination; we’re in just one of many worlds. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The reason why this story’s so fascinating is because it’s always said that it predates Everett’s many-worlds theory by about 15 years – it was written in 1941, and really Everett is advancing his theory in the mid 1950s, but it’s not until the 60s and 70s that it’s becoming discussed within the scientific mainstream. So you get this classic example – as you do with HG Wells – of someone who’s philosophically incredibly brilliant, as Borges obviously is, and manages to predate what is then classified as scientific theory simply by thinking about the universe in an interesting way. Really that was all that Everett was doing – because many-worlds theory is again about all the forkings that occur at a particular moment in time. Exactly, but Borges is showing that these quantum “truths” are in themselves just imaginative – they’re not really any closer to truth than Borges himself. Science – Michio Kaku and so on – didn’t start this debate: literature has been doing this for centuries, talking about parallel worlds. Don’t come in in the last decades of the 20th century and think you’ve invented it all."