How Is The Garden Of Forking Paths An Example Of Magical Realism

Borges, "The Garden of Forking Paths"

Symbolism/imagery: pick one or two symbols/images or symbol/image groups and discuss how they are important to understanding the larger story (or to understanding the character or the setting or the structure)? Try to pick the least obvious ones you can find. Surprise me!

The writing of double meanings and messages (and/or writings leading to the reception of messages, e.g., the name "Albert" with its double meanings of a murdered sinologist and a key military location, are symbolically important throughout Jorge Luis Borges' short story "The Garden of Forking Paths (1941) for example, knowing that, since "Viktor Runeberg" has been arrested or killed by the "tumultuous and doubles happy warrior [emphasis added]" Richard Madden (whose own name first appears on page 22 of Liddell Hart's history book; perhaps Madden also hails from Dublin?) Yu Tsun fumbles nervously through his pockets before deciding his next move. There, found what I knew I would find... The notebook, a letter which I resolved to destroy immediately (and which I did not destroy),... The red and blue pencil

Vaguely I thought that a pistol report can be heard at a great distance.

The telephone book listed the name of the only person capable of transmitting the message.

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paper NOW! All of these objects have compound functions, meanings, or both. "Notebook" consists of two words, "note" and 'book," and notebooks themselves may be used to write notes, but also books. Next comes a letter Yu Tsun decides to destroy, but then counter-decides to keep. He also finds a "red and blue pencil" designed for double use. The doomed man next muses "a pistol report can be heard at a great distance." That (as it turns out) has a double meaning: both the literal one of a pistol's noise and the veiled one of Stephen Albert's death being "heard of," i.e., reported, and symbolically understood by the Chief. The telephone book is doubly informative of Stephen Albert's (who has double first names) name and address.

2. Structure: pick one small thing you noticed about how the story is constructed and explain why you think it is interesting and why it is important.

TOPIC: Term Paper on Borges the Garden of Forking Paths Assignment

Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths" is an example of a frame narrative, that is, a narrative in which the story is "framed" (like a picture, not a criminal; although that definition should maybe be relaxed here) by supposedly factual, historically accurate narrative material taken from a supposedly authoritative, reliable, source outside the story itself (but that is as fictional as the story). Despite Borges' uniqueness and extreme quirkiness as a writer generally, frame narratives are old devices, dating from at least Chaucer's the Canterbury Tales and probably from long before that.

Borges' frame for this story is serious in tone and historically convincing, as is typical of narrative frames generally, if seldom of the stories they frame. Perhaps narrative frames encourage us, subtly, to not resist a usually far-fetched story itself (for example, Washington Irving's short story "Rip van Winkle," which features a henpecked husband who falls asleep for 20 years also has a frame).

Borges' frame for "The Garden of Forking Paths" is supposedly written by the enemy authorities, the British, whose first insistence, before ever actually letting the dead enemy agent Yu Tsun have his posthumous say, is that the "attack against the Serre-Montauban line by thirteen British divisions (supported by 1,400 artillery pieces), planned for the 24th of July, 1916, had to be postponed until the morning of the 29th," due to "torrential rains" (Borges). But that delay was "an insignificant one, to be sure." Further, of the statement supposedly dictated, reread and signed by Dr. Yu Tsun, when in British captivity before his death, the British "authoritative" voice of the frame states "The first two pages of the document are [somehow] missing." But the frame's reference to "an attack against the Serre-Montauban line" is factually; chronologically; and historically accurate. In fact, the BBC's online World War I archives, which I accessed through the internet, even describe this area, during Britain's actual attack on it, as German labyrinth of trenches"!

3. Magical realism: pick one moment. Why do you think the author cast that moment in that way? What does that moment of magical realism add to the story?

Personally, I do not consider Borges' short story "The Garden of Forking Paths" (1941) to be an especially good example of the Latin American-based literary genre magic realism, especially since it pre-dates by decades Gabriel Garcia-Marquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; 1970), which actually, at least in my opinion, contains the original (and still the best) essence of it. Characteristically in magic realism, though, magical or fantastical elements appear in a narrative setting that seems otherwise real. Latin America is both a deeply religious and a highly superstitious place, where seemingly coincidental or inexplicable (i.e., magical) occurrences seem to inflect everyday life. Magic realism as a genre therefore springs naturally from there.

True, Borges was Argentine; but his literary style is not. Further, the story is set in England, a place where the fantastical or the incredible scarcely abounds, unless one counts escapades of the royal family there. That said, the only example of possible magic realism I can see is Yu Tsun's philosophical statement:.".. I reflected that everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen; countless men in the air, on the face of the earth and the sea, and all that really is happening to me" ("The Garden of Forking Paths"). This arguably qualifies because magic realism often characteristically challenges (or altogether collapses) traditional concepts of time, space, and linearity, as with things that repeatedly happen to Garcia Marquez's Buendia family scions, generation after generation, but that, in the absence of memory, always seem new. For Borges here, though, this musing of Yu Tsun's foreshadows the later, centrally importance convergence of time and space inside Stephen Albert's modern-day imitation of what he considers to have been the idea of Ts'ui P. n's original labyrinth.

4. Realism: pick one moment. Why do you think the author cast that moment in that way? What does that moment of realism add to the story? Remember that an author always selects what to include and what to leave out no matter how "real" the writing appears.

Again, the most realistic moments of Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths" (1941) occur within the frame of the narrative rather than within the story itself. Borges casts the frame in this particular way for multiple reasons, but probably among the most important of these is that, factually speaking, victors of wars write the history of those wars; losers of wars do not have an equal voice, if they have any at all. Therefore, within the fictional "The Garden of Forking Paths" lies a key truth about human conflict through the ages and what we know of its various results. This is, that what the vanquished are allowed to say, depends entirely on what the victors do or do not want said or known.

For instance, and more specifically, also, to Borges' short story "The Garden of Forking paths," it is much more flattering to Britain, for a British historian (the one mentioned in the frame) to suggest for posterity that "torrential rains," not enemy intrepidness, actually caused a full five-day delay in the British attack on Serre-Montauban scheduled for July 24, 1914, but that did not occur until July 29, 1914. Similarly, within Borges' "Editor's note" denouncing (in an outraged tone) the supposed misinformation about the real circumstances of Viktor Runeberg's death at the hands of the Irishman (and likely double agent) Richard Madden, the now long-deceased Runeberg, whom the British authoritative voice within Borges' frame insists caused his own murder by not cooperating when Madden tried to arrest him, cannot any longer speak up on his own behalf in order to try to refute "official" history. The initial two pages of Yu Tsun's supposed "dictated, reread and signed" statement are also now supposedly missing. A condemned man so closely watched and well-guarded by his enemy captors could hardly have destroyed or otherwise disposed of them leading up to his hanging. The two pages are therefore omitted on purpose by the British, not so much for factual as for "official" reasons.

5. Setting: pick one small scene or part of a scene and discuss why the setting is important to our understanding of what is happening in that particular scene.

Within Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths" the setting of Yu Tsun's train ride to Ashgrove, one that will take him to Stephen Albert, and very shortly thereafter to Yu Tsun's own subsequent arrest and hanging, has a dark, lonely, gloomy setting of inevitable, fated doom. The train offers a lonely setting as well. Here Yu Tsun sees no one with whom he could even slightly relate.

Therefore Yu Tsun has only his own thoughts for company, plus the horrific… [END OF PREVIEW] . . . READ MORE