Time Travel. A History

If time is a river, are we standing on the bank or bobbing along? “To say time passes more quickly, or that time flows, is to imagine something flowing,” wrote Wittgenstein.

We then extend the simile and talk about the direction of time. When people talk of the direction of time, precisely the analogy of a river is before them. Of course a river can change its direction of flow, but one has a feeling of giddiness when one talks of time being reversed.

That is the giddiness of the time traveler—like looking at an Escher staircase. Time passes. “The hours pass slowly.” “The hours pass quickly.” And without contradicting ourselves, we pass the time. We say these words, and we understand them perfectly.

Time is not a river. Where does that leave time travel?

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A MAN LIES supine on an iron cot in a locked room, pondering his own imminent death. Through the window he can see roofs and the sun, shaded by clouds. He is aware of the time: it is a “six o’clock sun.” His name may or may not be Yu Tsun. We gather that he is a German spy. He is in possession of the Secret. The Secret is a single word, a name, “the exact location of the British artillery park on the River Ancre.” But he has been discovered and marked for assassination. He turns out to be something of a philosopher.

It seemed incredible to me that that day without premonitions or symbols should be the one of my inexorable death….Then 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 is happening to me.

This is a fiction by Borges, “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan,” the title story of his first collection—eight stories, sixty pages—published in 1941 by the modernist journal Sur in Buenos Aires. Borges, who read The Time Machine with excitement when he was young, had published some poetry and some criticism. He was a prolific translator from English, French, and German, including Poe, Kafka, Whitman, and Woolf. To support himself he worked as an assistant at a small, down-at-the-heels branch library, cataloguing and cleaning the books.

Seven years later, “The Garden of Forking Paths” became Borges’s first story to appear in English translation. His American publisher was not a literary establishment or journal but Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, August 1948. He did appreciate mystery. Now his reputation is large, but he did not gain much fame in English-speaking countries until the sixties, when he shared the first Prix International with Samuel Beckett. By then he was an old man, and blind.

Ellery Queen (joint pseudonym for two cousins from Brooklyn) was happy to publish what could barely be called a detective story. It has no detective, but it does have a struggle among spies, a pursuit, a revolver chambering a single bullet, a confrontation, and a murder. There is not just a mystery but a philosophical mystery—so we are told. Yu Tsun is informed, “Philosophic controversy usurps a good part of the novel.” To what does the controversy pertain?

I know that of all problems, none disturbed him so much as the abysmal problem of time. Now then, the latter is the only problem that does not figure in the pages of the Garden…

The Garden of Forking Paths is an enormous riddle, or parable, whose theme is time; this recondite cause prohibits its mention.

The story folds in upon itself: The Garden of Forking Paths is a book inside a book. (And now inside a pulp magazine.) The Garden is a meandering novel by “the oblique Ts’ui Pên.” It is a book that is also a maze. It is a set of chaotic manuscripts, “an indeterminate heap of contradictory drafts.” It is a labyrinth of symbols. It is a labyrinth of time. It is infinite—but how can a book, or a maze, be infinite? The book says, “I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths.”

The paths fork in time, not in space.

The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts’ui Pên conceived it. In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time.