Richard Madden's War: Borges, Joyce, and the Labyrinth of History

In the centenary commemoration of the Easter Rising in Dublin and of the Great War of 1914–18 being waged in Europe, a short story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges offers oblique yet intriguing illumination of 1916 as a year not only resonant with historical importance in the Irish context but also rich with complex ambiguity that ultimately aligns the story with James Joyce's Ulysses. Written in 1941, "The Garden of Forking Paths" is included in Borges's celebrated collection Ficciones. In fact, Borges uses the story's title as the subtitle for the gathering of the first eight stories in the book, despite his admission in the Foreword that, as "a detective story," it is actually anomalous within the collection: "its readers will witness the commission and all the preliminaries of a crime whose purpose they will not understand, I think, until the final paragraph. The other tales are fantasies."¹ The borrowing of the title is nonetheless apt, for as the image of "forking paths" suggests, the story is in part "about" divergences, and in its interrogation of the very nature of storytelling, the entire volume of Ficciones abounds in narrative divergences.

As a narrative unto itself, "The Garden of Forking Paths" abides by certain conventions of its genre that Borges essentially prescribed in a lecture titled "The Detective Story" presented at the University of Belgrano in Buenos Aires in 1978. One of those conventions explains, in part, why Borges—writing the story in Spanish in Buenos Aires—chose for his narrative a Chinese man, an Englishman, and an Irishman for characters and the British midlands for the setting. Reflecting on the legacy of Edgar Allan Poe as the writer who "invented" the detective story with "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" in 1841, Borges observes that Poe set his narratives in Paris instead of the more obvious New York to keep his readers focused on the story itself, to discourage them from "wondering whether events really took place in that way, whether the New York City police force was like that or is different." Asserting that the writer of detective fiction "needs a character who is distant," he elaborates: "To make these characters stranger, he has them live quite differently from the way men generally do."² Another convention, more overarching, describes the intrinsic nature of the detective story: "Poe did not want the detective genre to be a realist genre; he wanted it to be an intellectual genre, a fantastic genre, if you wish, but a fantastic genre of the intellect and not only of the imagination; a genre of both things, no doubt, but primarily of the intellect."³ Confounding its readers right to the end, just as he predicted, "The Garden of Forking Paths" is exemplary as an intellectual challenge whose unforeseeable yet utterly plausible dénouement not only satisfies the general reader but also gratifies the "special type of reader" who gravitates toward this genre—"the reader of detective fiction" who, Borges notes, was also "invented" by Poe.⁴

But, as he admits in his lecture, Borges goes beyond these conventions in his own writing: "I have on occasion attempted the detective genre, and I'm not very proud of what I have done. I have taken it to a symbolic level, which I am not sure is appropriate."⁵ In the case of "The Garden of Forking Paths," that symbolic dimension is what links the story to Ulysses. By the evidence of a review he wrote for the journal Proa in January of 1925, Borges had read Ulysses shortly after its first publication in 1922, and the novel remained a touchstone for him throughout his career.⁶ Indeed, by 1935—six years before he had inscribed his signature image of "forking paths" in the multicursal warp and weft of credulity-testing coincidence and congruence that make up the narrative tissue of his story—he had singled out Ulysses in an essay titled "Narrative Art and Magic" in which he expresses particular admiration for narratives involving "a rigorous scheme of attentions, echoes, and...