In Jorge Luis Borges's The Garden of Forking Paths, before the reader learns
that the central issue in the story is going to be the metaphysics of
time, the protagonist offers two remarks about the perception of time
that don't seem very important when first read, but obviously are
important considering the theme of the story. The first is as follows:
"Then I reflected that everything happens to a man precisely,
precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do
things happen". The second is an advice he gives to anyone planning an
atrocious undertaking, that he "ought to imagine that he has already
accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable
as the past". The second comment suggests past and future history all
to be determined, and the passage of time as just moving
along a prefigured, existant, and unchangeable course, while the first
one suggests a conception in which only the present really exists,
while the past and the future exist only as recollection and
speculation respectively. In either case, the passage of time is
linear. These two comments of course, are in contrast to what
eventually is revealed to be the thesis of the lost labyrinthine
novel authored by the protagonist's ancestor, that time is not moving
down a line, but down a branching tree of possible eventualities, like
a person walking through a garden down a constantly forking path. In this way, time is both
prefigured (the tree of possibilities is prefigured), but constantly
happening (as at any moment one branch is gone down and others are not).
All so far is well and good, but what occured to me is that all of
this commentary is not necessarily about the metaphysics of time, nor
do I find it probable that it it is. It seems to me to have as much to
say about literary criticism, a favored subject for deconstruction
for Borges. The story responds to two contrasting views of reading texts
with a third. One view, authorial intent, holds that the intended
reading of a text is encoded in it, and that reading should
be an attempt at extracting that intent from the text -- that is, the
meaning of the text is predetermined. The second view, reader
response, is that the text itself holds no intrinsic meaning and that
a meaning is created anew each time the text is read in the
reader's mind. Thus, the meaning of the text is constantly being
created. The translation of the third conception of time to this arena
is therefore that a text inherently holds in it all possible meanings
that might be extracted from it, and then in reading it, a reader
chooses to follow one path over another and comes up with a
corresponding meaning. In fact, this analogy works particularly well
for Borges stories! A Borges story typically has a great depth of
layers it begs the reader to concider, and in peeling each one of
these layers in turn, the reader is forced to make some choice -- Is
Tlön a real place or a fabrication? Is even its existence as a
fabrication real, or is the narrator making that up as well, or is he
just lying about the intrusion of Tlön into the real world? Of
course, in making each decision, the reader relies on the text for
clues, and there are good reasons to read the text one way instead of
another. But as the reader delves to deeper and deeper layers, there
are less and less reasons, and the reader's decisions are basically
their own. In such a way, Borges stories can be thought to hold all
possible readings of themselves. Of course, this here reading I've been
expounding of The Garden of Forking Paths is one of many possible,
and it might be that I've arrived at it by taking all left turns. You
decide.