The Garden of Forking Paths

Over the summer, I went down a large number of rabbit holes, including, and one of them happened to be a series of video game playthroughs on Youtube. The video game was called Who’s Lila, and I knew nothing about the game other than the fact that the thumbnail image was pretty scary. I watched the entire series, probably around 6 hours worth of content, and I can safely say that was the scariest video game I have ever encountered. The story has the typical small-town-girl-goes-missing, but the trope goes crazy as the game progresses. But, this video game was actually based on a short story written in the 1940s. So time for a quick summary (Beware, spoilers ahead)!

This is a framed story that explains that a planned offensive by the British against the Germans during World War 2 had to be postponed due to “torrential rain”, and how a letter written by Dr. Yu Tsun shed light on why it happened. Then, the story launches into the actual letter by Dr. Yu (He is a character that appears in the video game). He explains how he is an agent of Germany and is at risk of being caught as a spy by Captain Madden of the British Army. He is terrified that his death is coming, but he has information on the British attack that he has to get to the Germans. So Dr. Yu comes up with a plan to deliver the information without getting caught by Madden. He looks for a name in the phone book and takes a train to the location, the house of Dr. Stephen Albert, a Sinologist. At his house, Dr. Yu has quite the interesting conversation about his ancestor, who was an emperor at China. The emperor gave up everything to write a book and create a labyrinth. However, Albert discovered that the labyrinth and the book were the same. The stories contained within were various paths of the labirynth, sometimes leading to the same places but other times to completely different endings. In addition to this, the labyrinth was of various paths in time, not space. Yu listens to the stories in the book and can feel the various paths of events folding around him, all thought out by his ancestor. He realizes that in one universe, he could have been Albert’s friend. But instead, he takes his gun and shoots Albert. After that Madden arrests him and he is condemned to execution. But the Germans stopped the attack on the British because the newspapers printed the story that Dr. Yu killed Albert. And Albert was the name of the city that was going to be attacked. In the end, Dr. Yu feels horrible about what he did, taking an innocent human life.

One thing I appreciate about the short story is the emotions it evokes with the imagery. When Yu gets on the train, he sees Madden almost about to get on as well. When Madden missed the train, this was his thought.

“From utter terror I passed into a state of almost abject happiness. I told myself that the duel had already started and that I had won the first encounter by besting my adversary in his first attack – even if it was only for forty minutes – by an accident of
fate.”

When I was reading it, I could feel the terror in Yu’s mind, afraid that he would get caught and that his life would come to an end. Such a long part of the short story was to establish the feeling that Yu was a doomed man, and it worked out spectacularly. The imagery of the story was also amazing, and I can’t stop thinking about it. This was how Dr. Yu imagined the labyrinth, or the Garden of Forking Paths:

I imagined it untouched and perfect on the secret summit of some mountain; I imagined it drowned under rice paddies or beneath the sea; I imagined it infinite, made not only of eight-sided pavilions and of twisting paths but also of rivers, provinces and kingdoms . . . I thought of a maze of mazes, of a sinuous, ever growing maze which would take in both past and future and would somehow involve the
stars.

This description is so vivid and beautiful that gives a sense of scale to this story. Even though it is about the hours before Yu’s life is ruined, that small span of time is stretched out into infinite quantities; Moments became lifetimes in the way this story was described.

In addition to the imagery, the concepts explored by Yu and Albert’s conversation is absolutely fascinating. The book written by Yu’s ancestor was very disjointed, more like a rough draft. In one case, the main character dies in the third chapter and is somehow alive in the fourth. This part is actually similar to the video game, where the main character dies in some endings and is alive again in other endings. This is why the book is like the labyrinth: It is a confusing maze made out of different paths where one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other. This becomes even more interesting when the concept of time is introduced.

“I leave to various future times, but not
to all, my garden of forking paths.”

This was written by the ancestor, and it suggests how the different paths are different events that unfold in time. Sort of like different timelines! Then, there was the question of why the Emperor wrote the book in the first place. This discussion was one of the most interesting out of the entire story, and you absolutely have to read it for yourself! Albert explains it best though:

“The Garden of Forking Paths is an enormous guessing game, or parable, in which the subject is time. The rules of the game forbid the use of the word itself.”

It makes sense that if you are going to define a concept, you can’t use the name of the concept itself to describe it. And ‘time’ is the one word that never appears in the book. It is honestly brilliant on the author’s point, where he makes this discussion between the characters so interesting.

“He believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times. This web of time – the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries – embraces every possibility.”

This language is absolutely amazing to read. I feel so drawn in by the words, entranced by the possibility of infinity, and that is why I love this short story so much. You can also tell that Yu is drawn in, because of how long this conversation is taking place. All the fear from Madden chasing him is gone. The universe around Yu is at a standstill while he explores the vastness of the Garden of Forking Paths. And this is why the ending is so fitting. It is very anticlimactic; Yu suddenly shoots Albert and the story concludes in an emotionless way. It is like we as readers are snapped out of the infinite possibilities, beauties, and horrors of the Garden and suddenly we are back to a cold reality. No longer are we in a cozy library talking to a passionate Sinologist, the summer air and Chinese music playing in the background. All the possible pulling, stretching realities snapped into one hopeless reality for Yu. Yep, it’s a pretty bleak story.

This story is absolutely amazing and thought provoking, and it is so interesting to see the connections to the video game. In the game, the name Yu is a pun, for ‘You’, the reader/player. It is meant to break the fourth wall, and I wonder if the short story did that purposefully as well. Also, a connection to another text that I just realized was that the Sandman comics explored a very similar idea. Destiny lives in something called the Garden of Forking Ways, which is basically the point of this entire short story. Maybe Gaiman was inspired by the Garden of Forking Paths as well. All in all, my explanations are not as good as the discussions in the actually short story, so you should go and read it! Yu won’t regret it.