Borge’s fictions frequently unfold through complex emerging and forking possibilities, which take various forms of labyrinths, geometrical figures to dreams, puzzles and bifurcating paths. These patterns of forking and intersecting possibilities instantiate a characteristically Borgesian design of temporality, which tends to unfold through tension between possibility and actuality, purposely blurring the boundaries between possible actualities and actual possibilities. This design is perhaps most famously figured as the web or network of times from “The Garden of Forking Paths.” A well known excerpt from this story is probably the best and most succinct way of illustrating the workings of this temporal maze:
“Precisely, said Albert. “The Garden of Forking Paths is an enormous riddle, or parable whose theme is time; this recondite cause prohibits its mention. To omit a word always, to resort to inept metaphors and obvious periphrases, is perhaps the most emphatic way of stressing it. That is the tortuous method preferred, in each of the meanderings of his indefatigable novel, by the oblique Ts’ui pen…”
