mixed initiatives

I think there’s a misunderstanding about Borges’ short story that is mirrored in some of the fundamental misunderstandings people have about interactive narrative (and emergent systems in general). The popular gloss I most frequently encounter when I ask someone what The Garden of Forking Paths is about is that people will say it is about branching. Similarly, when you ask someone about interactive stories, the first thing that comes to mind it a kind of Time Cave¹ branching structure, where branch leads on to branch.

These days, there’s much more awareness of other possible approaches to interactivity and emergence, but I think it’s worth reiterating that Borges’ point in 1941 was precisely that branching was merely the walls of the labyrinth. The novel in question is specifically described as contradictory; “he read with slow precision two versions of the same epic chapter. In the first, an army marches into battle across a lonely mountain; the horror of the rocks makes the men undervalue their lives and they gain an easy victory. In the second, the same army traverses a palace where a great festival is taking place; the resplendent battle seems to them a continuation of the celebration and they win the victory.” The point is explicitly that the branching is contradictory but both exist simultaneously in the same book; branching is one method of constructing the labyrinth but the hyperobject that the story volume² describes holds both branches to be true in a certain timeline and reconciles them to end with the same outcome.

The short story is obsessed with the idea of branching timelines, a kind of multiversal understanding of possible futures. But it hinges precisely on the question of considering all timelines to be part of the same story volume.

[…] This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist; in others I and not you; in others both of us. In the present one, which a favorable fate has granted me, you have arrived at my house; in another, while crossing the garden, you found me dead; in still another, I utter these words, but I am a mistake, a ghost.

“In every one,” I pronounced, not without a tremble to my voice, “I am grateful to you and revere you for your recreation of the garden of Ts’ui Pên.”

“Not in all,” he murmured with a smile. “Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy.”

This is making the argument that the branching is the thing of significance, yes? The endless, mutually incompatible futures. Except, wait: all of those times that he describes are, in this story, the same time. Or can be read as such, because in this timeline the protagonist is his enemy and his friend; he will be found dead soon; he has been presented as ghost-like oracle: “His face, within the vivid circle of the lamplight, was unquestionably that of an old man, but with something unalterable about it, even immortal.”

“…In the work of Ts’ui Pên, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings. Sometimes, the paths of this labyrinth converge: for example, you arrive at this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another, my friend.”

Earlier the protagonist sees himself as already dead, his course irrevocable, inevitable:

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to more atrocious undertakings; soon there will be no one but warriors and brigands; I give them this counsel: The author of an atrocious undertaking ought imagine that he has already accomplished it, out to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past. Thus I proceeded as my eyes of a man already dead registered the elapsing of the day, which was perhaps the last, and the diffusion of the night.

The narrator of “The Garden of Forking Paths” tries to convince himself that the eventual outcome is inevitable; the story leaves it ambiguous because it is precisely hinged on the question of how inevitable the outcome actually was. The protagonist is simultaneously both enemy and friend. The hyperobject contains both possibilities without contradiction, because branching is just one of the structural elements that makes up the labyrinth.

This, I think, applies to many of our attempts to grapple with generative systems, story volumes, and related emergent phenomenon. The fixed points and the ways that the hyperobject converges are often just as important as the divergence points where it branches. The emergent system is precisely the thing that can be observed from the outside, seeing all possible times simultaneously.