The literature we read for this week was some of the most interesting material we have read so far. Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths especially stood out to me as an extraordinarily interesting and prophetic story. The garden or labyrinth’s infinite number of turns and twists resembles the internet’s endless hypertext of links and connections. Ts’ui Pen’s labyrinth book freezes whoever enters in an uncomprehended present, much as the internet has the ability to absorb readers into its net, and keep them almost unconsciously clicking away.
Supposing the garden did not exist before the book was published, then Dr. Yu Tsun’s ancestor Ts’ui Pen entered it as soon as it was finished. This entrance is the origin; it is Dr. Yu Tsun’s inescapable problem. Once one has entered into a labyrinth, the way is lost. The past and the future are completely obscured, and the only possibility is the present, as Tsun reflects, “everything that happens to a man precisely, precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen” (30). There is wandering that obscures where one comes from and there is an impossibility of knowing the future that paralyzes Tsun. All he is aware of is his beginning and his ultimate end: “Runeberg had been arrested or murdered. Before the sun set on that day, I would encounter the same fate” (30).
The labyrinth was planned to be “strictly infinite” (33), which is paradoxical considering any infinity resists the limits and restriction imposed by any strictness at all. But as Ts’ui Pen planned the one “enormous riddle” to be only, that is strictly, pursuable through time, in infinite branches all too divergent to be limited by a single past.
While on the internet too time is divergent. There are constantly an infinite number of possibilities and options for each page and each log in. These times are not circular, relapsing in space head to tail, but divergent based on time. One can visit a website link from there to a contradictory website, and from there to a website on a whole new but related topic. It is like the infinite number of turns of the labyrinth. Getting sucked into the internet occurs in the same way. Time is wasted, it disappears, assignments are forgotten, and the only material that exists is that before ones eyes.
By presenting the present as manifold, yet inalterable Borges foretells the emergence of hypertext and hypertext based narrative such as Michael Joyce’s afternoon and Queneau’s Six Selections by the Oulipo. These texts utilize the structure of forking paths to textualize the infinite present.
Significantly, Tsun becomes less and less of a character driven by personal choices and his own will. He is a spy for the Germans, for whom he cares little, and seems very resigned to his own death. To his time Tsun is a tool, he s produced of his past, note his German Chief fears “the innumerable ancestors who merge within me” (31). Tsun is no more than one of the “various futures” (33) Ts’ui Pen’s labyrinth has produced.
Our blog itself can be considered a type of labyrinth. Based on tags and links, one can go through the content in a nearly infinite number of ways, and thus encounter many different ideas and interpretations of different texts. The blog is elastic in its presence because it exists in many forms at once. Thus Borges’ model of Ts’ui Pen’s labyrinth book has been transferred through two realms of representation. The first is the physical existence of a labyrinth which Ts’ui Pen transfers into the realm of representation within his book, and the second is our new model of the internet in which Ts’ui Pen’s labyrinth is digitized into the nature new media purveyed through the internet.