came across a book as jumbled as all the others, but containing almost two pages of h.o.m.ogeneous lines.
He showed his find to a traveling decipherer, who told him that the lines were written in Portuguese; others said it was Yiddish. Within the century experts had determined what the language ac- tually was: a Samoyed-Lithuanian dialect ofGuarani,with inflections from cla.s.sical Arabic. The content was also determined: the rudiments of combi-natory a.n.a.lysis, ill.u.s.trated with examples of endlessly repeating variations. Those examples allowed a librarian of genius to discover the fundamental law of the Library.
This philosopher observed that all books, however dif- ferent from one another they might be, consist of identical elements: the s.p.a.ce, the period, the comma, and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also posited a fact which all travelers have since confirmed:In all the Library, there are no two identical books. From those incontrovertible prem- ises, the librarian deduced that the Library is "total"-perfect, complete, and whole-and that its bookshelves contain all possible combinations of the twenty-two orthographic symbols (a number which, though unimagin- ably vast, is not infinite)-that is, all that is able to be expressed, in every language.All -the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogs, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogs, a proof of the falsity of thetrue catalog, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book into every language, the interpolations of every book into all books, the treatise Bede could have written (but did not) on the mythology of the Saxon people, the lost books of Tacitus.
When it was announced that the Library contained all books, the first reaction was unbounded joy. All men felt themselves the possessors of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal problem, no world prob- lem, whose eloquent solution did not exist-somewhere in some hexagon. The universe was justified; the universe suddenly became congruent with the unlimited width and breadth of humankind"s hope. At that period there was much talk of The Vindications-books ofapologiaand prophecies that would vindicate for all time the actions of every person in the universe and that held wondrous arcana for men"s futures. Thousands of greedy indi- viduals abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed downstairs, up- stairs, spurred by the vain desire to find their Vindication. These pilgrims squabbled in the narrow corridors, muttered dark imprecations, strangled one another on the divine staircases, threw deceiving volumes down venti- lation shafts, were themselves hurled to their deaths by men of distant re-gions. Others went insane.... The Vindications do exist (I have seen two of them, which refer to persons in the future, persons perhaps not imaginary), but those who went in quest of them failed to recall that the chance of a man"s finding his own Vindication, or some perfidious version of his own, can be calculated to be zero.
At that same period there was also hope that the fundamental mysteries of mankind-the origin of the Library and of time-might be revealed. In all likelihood those profound mysteries can indeed be explained in words; if the language of the philosophers is not sufficient, then the multiform Library must surely have produced the extraordinary language that is re- quired, together with the words and grammar of that language. For fourcenturies, men have been scouring the hexagons.... There are official searchers, the "inquisitors." I have seen them about their tasks: they arrive exhausted at some hexagon, they talk about a staircase that nearly killed them-rungs were missing-they speak with the librarian about galleries and staircases, and, once in a while, they take up the nearest book and leaf through it, searching for disgraceful or dishonorable words. Clearly, no one expects to discover anything.
That unbridled hopefulness was succeeded, naturally enough, by a similarly disproportionate depression.
The certainty that some bookshelf in some hexagon contained precious books, yet that those precious books were forever out of reach, was almost unbearable. One blasphemous sect proposed that the searches be discontinued and that all men shuffle letters and symbols until those canonical books, through some improbable stroke of chance, had been constructed. The authorities were forced to issue strict orders. The sect disappeared, but in my childhood I have seen old men who for long periods would hide in the latrines with metal disks and a forbidden dice cup, feebly mimicking the divine disorder.
Others, going about it in the opposite way, thought the first thing to do was eliminate all worthless books.
They would invade the hexagons, show credentials that were not always false, leaf disgustedly through a volume, and condemn entire walls of books. It is to their hygienic, ascetic rage that we lay the senseless loss of millions of volumes. Their name is execrated to- day, but those who grieve over the "treasures"
destroyed in that frenzy over- look two widely acknowledged facts: One, that the Library is so huge that any reduction by human hands must be infinitesimal. And two, that each book is unique and irreplaceable, but (since the Library is total) there are always several hundred thousand imperfect facsimiles-books that differ by no more than a single letter, or a comma. Despite general opinion, I daresay that the consequences of the depredations committed by the Purifiers have been exaggerated by the horror those same fanatics inspired. They were spurred on by the holy zeal to reach-someday, through unrelenting effort-the books of the Crimson Hexagon-books smaller than natural books, books omnipotent, ill.u.s.trated, and magical.
We also have knowledge of another superst.i.tion from that period: be- lief in what was termed the Book-Man. On some shelf in some hexagon, it was argued, there must exist a book that is the cipher and perfect com- pendiumof all other books, and some librarian must have examined that book; this librarian is a.n.a.logous to a G.o.d. In the language of this zone there are still vestiges of the sect that worshiped that distant librarian. Many have gone in search of Him. For a hundred years, men beat every possible path- and every path in vain. How was one to locate the idolized secret hexagon that sheltered Him? Someone proposed searching by regression: To locate book A, first consult book B, which tells where book A can be found; to lo- cate book B, first consult book C, and so on, to infinity....
It is in ventures such as these that I have squandered and spent my years. I cannot think it unlikely that there is such a total book3
3.
I repeat: In order for a book to exist, it is sufficient that it bepossible. Only the impossible is excluded. For example, no book is also a staircase, though there are no doubt books that discuss and deny and prove that possibility, and others whose struc- ture corresponds to that of a staircase.
on some shelf in the universe. I pray to the unknown G.o.ds that some man-even a single man, tens of centuries ago-has perused and read that book. If the honor and wisdom and joy of such a reading are not to be my own, then let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my own place be in h.e.l.l. Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enor- mous Library may find its justification.
Infidels claim that the rule in the Library is not "sense," but "non-sense," and that "rationality" (evenhumble, pure coherence) is an almost miracu- lous exception. They speak, I know, of "the feverish Library, whose random volumes constantly threaten to transmogrify into others, so that they affirm all things, deny all things, and confound and confuse all things, like some mad and hallucinating deity." Those words, which not only proclaim disor- der but exemplify it as well, prove, as all can see, the infidels"
deplorable taste and desperate ignorance. For while the Library contains all verbal structures, all the variations allowed by the twenty-five orthographic symbols, it in- cludes not a single absolute piece of nonsense. It would be pointless to observe that the finest volume of all the many hexagons that I myself admin- ister is t.i.tledCombed Thunder, while another is t.i.tledThe Plaster Cramp, and another, Axaxaxasmio.Those phrases, at first apparently incoherent, are undoubtedly susceptible to cryptographic or allegorical "reading"; that read- ing, that justification of the words" order and existence, is itself verbal and,ex hypothesi, already contained somewhere in the Library. There is no com- bination of characters one can make-dhcmrlchtdj,for example-that the divine Library has not foreseen and that in one or more of its secret tongues does not hide a terrible significance. There is no syllable one can speak that is not filled with tenderness and terror, that is not, in one of those languages, the mighty name of a G.o.d. To speak is to commit tautologies. This pointless, verbose epistle already exists in one of the thirty volumes of the five bookshelves in one of the countless hexagons-as does its refutation. (A numbernofthe possible languages employ the same vocabulary; in some of them, thesymbol "library"
possesses the correct definition "everlasting, ubiquitous system of hexagonal galleries," while a library- the thing-is a loaf of bread or a pyramid or something else, and the six words that define it themselves have other definitions. You who read me-are you certain you understand my language?) Methodical composition distracts me from the present condition of humanity. The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal. I know districts in which the young people pros- trate themselves before books and like savages kiss their pages, though they cannot read a letter. Epidemics, heretical discords, pilgrimages that inevita- bly degenerate into brigandage have decimated the population. I believe I mentioned the suicides, which are more and more frequent every year. I am perhaps misled by old age and fear, but I suspect that the human species- theonly species- teeters at the verge of extinction, yet that the Library- enlightened, solitary, infinite, perfectly unmoving, armed with precious volumes, pointless, incorruptible, and secret-will endure.
I have just written the word "infinite." I have not included that adjective out of mere rhetorical habit; I hereby state that it is not illogical to think that the world is infinite. Those who believe it to have limits hypothesize that in some remote place or places the corridors and staircases and hexa- gons may, inconceivably, end-which is absurd. And yet those who picture the world as unlimited forget that the number of possible books isnot. I will be bold enough to suggest this solution to the ancient problem:The Li- brary is unlimited but periodic. If an eternal traveler should journey in any direction, he would find after untold centuries that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder-which, repeated, becomes order: the Order. My solitude is cheered by that elegant hope.
4.
Mar del Plata
4.
Letizia AlvarezdeToledo has observed that the vast Library is pointless; strictly speaking, all that is required isa single volume, of the common size, printed in nine- or ten-point type, that would consist of an infinite number of infinitely thin pages. (In the early seventeenth century,Cavalieristated that every solid body is the super- position of an infinite number of planes.) Using that silkenvademec.u.mwould not be easy: each apparent page would open into other similar pages; the inconceivable mid- dle page would have no "back."
The Garden of Forking Paths For Victoria Ocampo
On page 242 ofThe History of the World War,Liddell Harttells us that an Allied offensive against the Serre-Montauban line (to be mounted by thir- teen British divisions backed by one thousand four hundred artillery pieces) had been planned for July 24, 1916, but had to be put off until the morning of the twenty-ninth. Torrential rains (notes Capt.Liddell Hart)were the cause of that delay-a delay that entailed no great consequences, as it turns out. The statement which follows-dictated, reread, and signed by Dr. Yu Tsun, former professor of English in theHochschuleat Tsingtao- throws unexpectedlight on the case. The two first pages of the statement are missing.
... and I hung up the receiver. Immediately afterward, I recognised the voice that had answered in German. It was that of Capt. Richard Madden. Madden"s presence in Viktor Runeberg"s flat meant the end of our efforts and (though this seemed to me quite secondary, orshould have seemed) our lives as well. It meant thatRuneberghad been arrested, or murdered.
1.
a A bizarre and despicable supposition. The Prussian spy Hans Rabener, alias Vik- torRuneberg,had turned an automatic pistol on his arresting officer, Capt. Richard Madden. Madden, in self-defense, inflicted the wounds on Rabener that caused his subsequent death. [Ed. note.]
Be- fore the sun set on that day, I would face the same fate. Madden was im- placable-or rather, he was obliged to be implacable. An Irishman at the orders of the English, a man accused of a certain lack of zealousness, per- haps even treason, how could he fail to embrace and give thanks for this miraculous favour-the discovery, capture, perhaps death, of two agents of the German Empire? I went upstairs to my room; absurdly, I locked thedoor, and then I threw myself, on my back, onto my narrow iron bed.
Out- side the window were the usual rooftops and the overcast six o"clock sun. I found it incredible that this day, lacking all omens and premonitions, should be the day of my implacable death. Despite my deceased father, de- spite my having been a child in a symmetrical garden inHaiFeng-was I, now, about to die? Then I reflected that all things happen tooneself, and happen precisely, preciselynow. Century follows century, yet events occur onlyin the present; countless men in the air, on the land and sea, yet every- thing that truly happens, happensto me.... The almost unbearable memory of Madden"s horsey face demolished those mental ramblings. In the midst of my hatred and my terror (now I don"t mind talking about ter- ror-now that I have foiled Richard Madden, now that my neck hungers for the rope), it occurred to me that that brawling and undoubtedly happy war- rior did not suspect that I possessed the Secret-the name of the exact loca- tion of the new British artillery park on theAncre. Abird furrowed the grey sky, and I blindly translated it into an aeroplane, and that aeroplane into many (in the French sky), annihilating the artillery park with vertical bombs. If only my throat, before a bullet crushed it, could cry out that name so that it might be heard in Germany.... But my human voice was so terribly inadequate.
How was I to make it reach the Leader"s ear-the ear of that sick and hateful man who knew nothing ofRunebergand me save that we were in Staffordshire, and who was vainly awaiting word from us in his arid office in Berlin, poring infinitely through the newspapers? ...Jmust flee,I said aloud. I sat up noiselessly, in needless but perfect silence, as though Madden were already just outside my door.
Something-perhaps the mere show of proving that my resources were nonexistent-made me go through my pockets. I found what I knew I would find: the American watch, the nickel-plated chain and quadrangular coin, the key ring with the compromising and useless keys to Runeberg"s flat, the notebook, a letter I resolved to destroy at once (and never did), the false pa.s.sport, one crown, two shillings, and a few odd pence, the red-and-blue pencil, the handker- chief, the revolver with its single bullet. Absurdly, I picked it up and hefted it, to give myself courage. I vaguely reflected that a pistol shot can be heard at a considerable distance. In ten minutes, my plan was ripe. The telephone book gave me the name of the only person able to communicate the infor- mation: he lived in a suburb of Fenton, less than a half hour away by train. I am a coward. I can say that, now that I have carried out a plan whose dangerousness and daring no man will deny. I know that it was a terrible thing to do. I did not do it for Germany. What do I care for a barbaric country that has forced me to the ignominy of spying?
Furthermore, I know of a man of England-a modest man-who in my view is no less a genius than Goethe. I spoke with him for no more than an hour, but for one hour hewas Goethe-----No-I did it because I sensed that the Leader looked down on the people of my race-the countless ancestors whose blood flows through my veins. I wanted to prove to him that a yellow man could save his armies. And I had to escape from Madden. His hands, his voice, could beat upon my door at any moment. I silently dressed, said good-bye to myself in the mirror, made my way downstairs, looked up and down the quiet street, and set off. The train station was not far from my flat, but I thought it better to take a cab. I argued that I ran less chance of being recognised that way; the fact is, I felt I was visible and vulnerable-infinitely vulnerable-in the deserted street. I recall that I told the driver to stop a little ways from the main entrance to the station. I got down from the cabwith willed and al- most painful slowness. I would be going to the village of Ashgrove, but I bought a ticket for a station farther down the line. The train was to leave at eight-fifty, scant minutes away. I had to hurry; the next train would not be until nine-thirty. There was almost no one on the platform. I walked through the cars; I recall a few workmen, a woman dressed in mourning weeds, a young man fervently reading Tacitus"Annals, and a cheerful-looking wounded soldier. The train pulled out at last. A man I recognised ran, vainly, out to the end of the platform; it was Capt. Richard Madden. Shat- tered, trembling, I huddled on the other end of the seat, far from the feared window.
From that shattered state I pa.s.sed into a state of almost abject cheerful- ness. I told myself that my duel had begun, and that in dodging my adver- sary"s thrust-even by forty minutes, even thanks to the slightest smile from fate-the first round had gone to me. I argued that this small win pre- figured total victory. I argued that the win was not really even so small, since without the precious hour that the trains had given me, I"d be in gaol, or dead. I argued (no less sophistically) that my cowardly cheerfulness proved that I was a man capable of following this adventure through to its success- ful end. From that weakness I drew strength that was never to abandon me. I foresee that mankind will resign itself more and more fully every day to more and more horrendous undertakings; soon there will be nothing but warriors and brigands. I give them this piece of advice:He who is to perform a horrendous act should imagine to himself that it is already done, should im- pose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.
That is what I did, while my eyes-the eyes of a man already dead-registered the flow of that dayperhaps to be my last, and the spreading of the night. The train ran sweetly, gently, through woods of ash trees. It stopped virtually in the middle of the countryside. No one called out the name of the station.
"Ashgrove?" I asked some boys on the platform. "Ashgrove," they said, nodding. I got off the train.
A lamp illuminated the platform, but the boys" faces remained within the area of shadow. "Are you going to Dr. Stephen Albert"s house?" one queried. Without waiting for an answer, another of them said: "The house is a far way, but you"ll not get lost if you follow that road there to the left, and turn left at every crossing." I tossed them a coin (my last), went down some stone steps, and started down the solitary road. It ran ever so slightly downhill and was of elemental dirt. Branches tangled overhead, and the low round moon seemed to walk along beside me.
For one instant, I feared that Richard Madden had somehow seen through my desperate plan, but I soon realized that that was impossible. The boy"s advice to turn always to the left reminded me that that was the common way of discovering the central lawn of a certain type of maze. I am something of a connoisseur of mazes: not for nothing am I the great-grandson of that Ts"ui Pen who was governor of Yunan province and who renounced all temporal power in order to write a novel containing more characters than theHungLuMengand construct a labyrinth in which all men would lose their way. Ts"ui Pen devoted thirteen years to those dis- parate labours, but the hand of a foreigner murdered him and his novel made no sense and no one ever found the labyrinth. It was under English trees that I meditated on that lost labyrinth: I pictured it perfect and invio- late on the secret summit of a mountain; I pictured its outlines blurred by rice paddies, or underwater; I pictured it as infinite-a labyrinth not of oc- tagonal pavillions and paths that turn back upon themselves, but of riversand provinces and kingdoms-----I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, amaze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars. Absorbed in those il- lusory imaginings, I forgot that I was a pursued man; I felt myself, for an in- definite while, the abstract perceiver of the world.
The vague, living countryside, the moon, the remains of the day did their work in me; so did the gently downward road, which forestalled all possibility of weariness. The evening was near, yet infinite.
The road dropped and forked as it cut through the now-formless meadows. A keen and vaguely syllabic song, blurred by leaves and distance, ram* anrl went on the gentle mists of breeze. I was struck by the thoughtthat a man may be the enemy of other men, the enemy of other men"s other moments, yet not be the enemy of a country-of fireflies, words, gardens, watercourses, zephyrs. It was amidst such thoughts that I came to a high rusty gate. Through the iron bars I made out a drive lined with poplars, and a gazebo of some kind. Suddenly, I realised two things-the first trivial, the second almost incredible: the music I had heard was coming from that gazebo, or pavillion, and the music was Chinese. That was why uncon- sciously I had fully given myself over to it. I do not recall whether there was a bell or whether I hadto clap my hands to make my arrival known.
The sputtering of the music continued, but from the rear of the inti- mate house, a lantern was making its way toward me-a lantern cross-hatched and sometimes blotted out altogether by the trees, a paper lantern the shape of a drum and the colour of the moon. It was carried by a tall man. I could not see his face because the light blinded me. He opened the gate and slowly spoke to me in my own language.
"I see that the compa.s.sionate Hsi P"eng has undertaken to remedy my solitude. You will no doubt wish to see the garden?"
I recognised the name of one of our consuls, but I could only discon-certedly repeat, "The garden?"
"The garden of forking paths."
Something stirred in my memory, and I spoke with incomprehensible a.s.surance.
"The garden of my ancestor Ts"ui Pen."
"Your ancestor? Your ill.u.s.trious ancestor? Please-come in."
The dew-drenched path meandered like the paths of my childhood. We came to a library of Western and Oriental books. I recognised, bound in yellow silk, several handwritten volumes of the Lost Encyclopedia compiled by the third emperor of the Luminous Dynasty but never printed. The disk on the gramophone revolved near a bronze phoenix. I also recall a vase offamilleroseand another, earlier by several hundred years, of that blue colour our artificers copied from the potters of ancient Persia----- Stephen Albert, with a smile, regarded me. He was, as I have said, quite tall, with sharp features, grey eyes, and a grey beard. There was something priestlike about him, somehow, but something sailorlike as well; later he told me he had been a missionary in Tientsin "before aspiring to be a Sinologist."
We sat down, I on a long low divan, he with his back to the window and a tall circular clock. I figured that my pursuer, Richard Madden, could not possibly arrive for at least an hour. My irrevocable decision could wait.
"An amazing life, Ts"ui Pen"s," Stephen Albert said. "Governor of the province in which he had been born, a man learned in astronomy, astrolo- gy, and the unwearying interpretation of canonical books, a chess player, a renowned poet andcalligraphier-he abandoned it all in order to compose a book and a labyrinth. He renounced the pleasures of oppression, justice, the populous marriage bed, banquets, and even erudition in order to se- quester himself for thirteen years in the Pavillion of Limpid Solitude. Upon his death, his heirs found nothing but chaotic ma.n.u.scripts. The family, as you perhaps are aware, were about to deliver them to the fire, but his counsellor-a Taoist or Buddhist monk-insisted upon publishing them."
"To this day," I replied, "we who are descended from Ts"ui Pen execrate that monk. It was senseless to publish those ma.n.u.scripts. The book is a contradictory jumble of irresolute drafts. I once examined it myself; in the third chapter the hero dies, yet in the fourth he is alive again. As for Ts"ui Pen"s other labor, his Labyrinth ..."
"Here is the Labyrinth," Albert said, gesturing towards a tall lacquered writing cabinet.
"An ivory labyrinth!" I exclaimed. "A very small sort of labyrinth ..."
"A labyrinth of symbols," he corrected me. "An invisible labyrinth of time. I, an English barbarian, have somehow been chosen to unveil the di- aphanous mystery. Now, more than a hundred years after the fact, the pre- cise details are irrecoverable, but it is not difficult to surmise what happened. Ts"ui Pen must at one point have remarked, "I shall retire to write a book," and at another point, "I shall retire to construct a labyrinth." Every- one pictured two projects; it occurred to no one that book and labyrinth were one and the same. The Pavillion of Limpid Solitude was erected in the centre of a garden that was, perhaps, most intricately laid out; that fact might well have suggested a physical labyrinth. Ts"ui Pen died; no one in all the wide lands that had been his could find the labyrinth. The novel"s confusion-confusedness, I mean, of course-suggested to me that it was that labyrinth. Two circ.u.mstances lent me the final solution of the problem-one, the curious legend that Ts"ui Pen had intended to con- struct a labyrinth which was truly infinite, and two, a fragment of a letter I discovered."
Albert stood. His back was turned to me for several moments; he opened a drawer in the black-and-gold writing cabinet. He turned back with a paper that had once been crimson but was now pink and delicate and rectangular. It was written in Ts"ui Pen"s renowned calligraphy. Eagerly yetuncomprehendingly Iread the words that a man of my own lineage hadwritten with painstaking brushstrokes:Ileave to several futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths. I wordlessly handed the paper back to Albert. He continued: "Before unearthing this letter, I had wondered how a book could be in- finite. The only way I could surmise was that it be a cyclical, or circular, vol- ume, a volume whose last page would be identical to the first, so that one might go on indefinitely. I also recalled that night at the centre of the1001 Nights, when the queen Scheherazade (through some magical distracted-ness on the part of the copyist) begins to retell, verbatim, the story of the looi Nights, with the risk of returning once again to the night on which she is telling it-and so on,ad infinitum. I also pictured to myself a platonic, hereditary sort of work, pa.s.sed down from father to son, in which each new individual would add a chapter or with reverent care correct his elders" pages. These imaginings amused and distracted me, but none of them seemed to correspond even remotely to Ts"ui Pen"s contradictory chapters. As I was floundering about in the mire of these perplexities, I was sent from Oxford the doc.u.ment you have just examined. I paused, as you may well imagine, at the sentence "I leave to several futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths."
Almost instantly, I saw it-the garden of forking paths was the chaotic novel; the phrase "several futures (not all)" suggested to me the image of a forking intime, rather than in s.p.a.ce. A full rereading of the book confirmed my theory. 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," severaltimes, which themselves proliferate and fork. That is the explanation for the novel"s contradictions. Fang, let us say, has a secret; a stranger knocks at his door; Fang decides to kill him. Naturally, there are various possible out- comes-Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, they can both live, they can both be killed, and so on. In Ts"ui Pen"s novel,all the outcomes in fact occur; each is the starting point for further bifurcations. Once in a while, the paths of that labyrinth converge: for example, you come to this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another my friend. If you can bear my incorrigible p.r.o.nunciation, we shall read a few pages."
His face, in the vivid circle of the lamp, was undoubtedly that of an old man, though with something indomitable and even immortal about it. He read with slow precision two versions of a single epic chapter. In the first, an army marches off to battle through a mountain wilderness; the horror ofthe rocks and darkness inspires in them a disdain for life, and they go on to an easy victory. In the second, the same army pa.s.ses through a palace in which a ball is being held; the brilliant battle seems to them a continuation of thefete,and they win it easily.
I listened with honourable veneration to those ancient fictions, which were themselves perhaps not as remarkable as the fact that a man of my blood had invented them and a man of a distant empire was restoring them to me on an island in the West in the course of a desperate mission. I recall the final words, repeated in each version like some secret commandment: "Thus the heroes fought, their admirable hearts calm, their swords violent, they themselves resigned to killing and to dying."
From that moment on, I felt all about me and within my obscure body an invisible, intangible pullulation- not that of the divergent, parallel, and finally coalescing armies, but an agitation more inaccessible, more inward than that, yet one those armies somehow prefigured. Albert went on: "I do not believe that your venerable ancestor played at idle variations. I cannot think it probable that he would sacrifice thirteen years to the infi- nite performance of a rhetorical exercise. In your country, the novel is a subordinate genre; at that time it was a genre beneath contempt. Ts"ui Pen was a novelist of genius, but he was also a man of letters, and surely would not have considered himself a mere novelist.
The testimony of his contem- poraries proclaims his metaphysical, mystical leanings-and his life is their fullest confirmation. Philosophical debate consumes a good part of his novel. I know that of all problems, none disturbed him, none gnawed at him like the unfathomable problem of time. How strange, then, that that problem should be theonly one that does not figure in the pages of hisGarden. He never even uses the word. How do you explain that wilful omission?"
I proposed several solutions-all unsatisfactory. We discussed them; fi- nally, Stephen Albert said: "In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only word that must not be used?"I thought for a moment.
"The word chess," " I replied.
"Exactly," Albert said. "TheGarden of Forking Paths is a huge riddle, or parable, whose subject is time; that secret purpose forbids Ts"ui Pen the merest mention of its name. Toalways omit one word, to employ awkward metaphors and obvious circ.u.mlocutions, is perhaps the most emphatic way of callingattention to that word. It is. at anv rate, the tortuous path chosenby the devious Ts"ui Pen at each and every one of the turnings of his inexhaustible novel. I have compared hundreds of ma.n.u.scripts, I have corrected the errors introduced through the negligence of copyists, I have reached a hypothesis for the plan of that chaos, I have reestablished, or believe I"ve reestablished, its fundamental order-I have translated the entire work; and I know that not once does the word "time" appear. The explanation is obvi - ous:The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as conceived by Ts"ui Pen. Unlike Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform and absolute time; he believed in an infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times. That fabric of times that approach one another, fork, are snipped off, or are simply unknown for centuries, containsall possibilities. In most of those times, we do not exist; in some, you exist but I do not; in others, I do and you do not; in others still, we both do. In this one, which the favouring hand of chance has dealt me, you have come to my home; in another, when you come through my garden you find me dead; in another, I say these same words, but I am an error, a ghost."
"In all," I said, not without a tremble, "I am grateful for, and I venerate, your re-creation of the garden of Ts"ui Pen."
"Not in all," he whispered with a smile. "Time forks, perpetually, into countless futures. In one of them, I am your enemy."
I felt again that pullulation I have mentioned. I sensed that the dew-drenched garden that surrounded the house was saturated, infinitely, with invisible persons. Those persons were Albert and myself-secret, busily at work, multiform-in other dimensions of time. I raised my eyes and the gossamer nightmare faded. In the yellow-and-black garden there was but a single man-but that man was as mighty as a statue, and that man was coming down the path, and he was Capt. Richard Madden.
"The future is with us," I replied, "but I am your friend. May I look at the letter again?"
Albert rose once again. He stood tall as he opened the drawer of the tall writing cabinet; he turned his back to me for a moment. I had c.o.c.ked the revolver. With utmost care, I fired. Albert fell without a groan, without a sound, on the instant. I swear that he died instantly-one clap of thunder.
The rest is unreal, insignificant. Madden burst into the room and ar- rested me. I have been sentenced to hang. I have most abhorrently tri- umphed: I have communicated to Berlin the secret name of the city to be attacked. Yesterday it was bombed-I read about it in the same newspapers that posed to all of England the enigma of the murder of the eminentSinologist Stephen Albert by a stranger, Yu Tsun. The Leader solved the rid- dle. He knew that my problem was how to report (over the deafening noise of the war) the name of the city named Albert, and that the only way I could find was murdering a person of that name. He does not know (no one can know) my endless contrition, and my weariness.
ARTIFICES.
(1944).
Foreword.
Although less clumsily executed, the stories in this volume are no different from those in the volume that precedes it. Two of them, perhaps, merit some com- ment: "Death and the Compa.s.s" and"Funes,His Memory." The second is one long metaphor for insomnia. The first, in spite of the Germanic or Scandina - vian names in it, takes place in a Buenos Aires of dreams: the twisting"rue deToulon" is thePaseo deJulio; "Triste-le-Roy" is the hotel where Herbert Ashe re- ceived, yet probably did not read, the eleventhvolume of an imaginary encyclo- pedia. After this fiction was written, I thought it might be worthwhile to expand the time and s.p.a.ce the story covers: the revenge might be bequeathed to others, the periods of time might be calculated in years, perhaps in centuries; the first letter of the Name might be uttered in Iceland, the second in Mexico, the third in Hindustan. Is there any need for me to say that there are saints among the Hasidim, and that the sacrifice of four lives in order to obtain the four letters that the Name demands is a fantasy dictated by the shape of my story?
Postscript, 1956.1 have added three stories to this volume: "The South," "The Cult of the Phoenix," and "The End." Aside from one character, Recabarren, whose immobility and pa.s.sivity serve as contrast, nothing (or almost noth- ing) in the brief course of that last story is of my invention-everything in it is implicit in a famous book, though I have been the first to perceive it, or at least to declare openly that I have. In the allegory of the Phoenix, I set myself the problem of suggesting a common act-the Secret- hesitatingly, gradually, and yet, in the end, unequivocally; I am not sure to what extent I have succeeded.
Of "The South," which may be my best story, I shall tell the reader only that it is possible to read it both as a forthright narration of novelistic events and in quite another way, as well.
Schopenhauer, de Quincey, Stevenson, Mauthner, Shaw, Chesterton,LeonBloy-this is the heterogeneous list of the writers I am continually rereading. In the Christological fantasy t.i.tled "Three Versions of Judas," I think I can perceive the remote influence of the last of these.
J.L.B.
Buenos Aires, August 29,1944/1956