Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was fascinated by the future. Not in the manner of prognosticators, planners or science-fiction writers: the arts of futurology held little interest for him. Rather, for Borges, considering the future—the not-yet-real lying before us—brought to light the elusive nature of all reality.
What gripped Borges about the future was its multiplicity, that it is forever the domain of the possible. If the possible is real at all, then its reality is not single, but multiple, indeed infinite. The present is only that one thing that is unfolding now, and the past has narrowed down all that it might have been to what has actually happened. But if I ask what I will be doing tomorrow, or in a year, I am always able to imagine countless answers, and I cannot yet say that any of them are false. What if I miss my train? What if I fall in love or die? The future is where an “if” statement is not yet, as the grammarians say, “contrary to fact”.
If the possible is real at all, then its reality is not single, but multiple, indeed infinite.
But if this infinite array of possible futures is, from the vantage point of the present, still real, might it not then always be real? Do all the possibilities fall into non-existence once the present overtakes the future and pushes it into the past? After all, our ability, our drive to think in “if”-clauses is not restricted to the future. We wonder constantly about our alternative pasts, the other fates we might have had. Many languages even use overlapping verbal forms of the past to mark both the real and the unreal. (What if) I had missed that train? (What if) I had fallen in love or died?
In his famous ‘Garden of Forking Paths’, Borges proposes just such a model, albeit (as he loved to do) he offers it as a story nestled within another story. The narrator, Dr Yu Tsun, a Chinese spy for the Germans in World War I, has an ancestor, “Ts’ui Pen – Governor of his native province, learned in astronomy, in astrology and tireless in the interpretation of the canonical books, a chess player, a famous poet and a calligrapher. Yet he abandoned all to make a book and a labyrinth”. The labyrinth has been lost and the book survives as apparently nonsensical fragments. But it emerges that the book and the labyrinth are one and the same, and are the titular ‘Garden of Forking Paths’. The book-labyrinth attempts to describe a world where all possible realities are real at once:
“In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts’ui Pen, he chooses—simultaneously—all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times. This is the cause of the contradictions in the novel”.
The book and the labyrinth are one and the same.
All of this is framed within a markedly absurd primary narrative. Yu Tsun, who resides in England, needs to inform the Germans of the name of a town in France where they are to bomb a British arms depot. The town is called “Albert”. As Yu Tsun cannot communicate directly with his paymasters, he finds a man named Albert in the telephone book, and travels to his house to murder him. Yu Tsun’s plan—which succeeds—is for the Germans to learn of the murder via the British newspapers and so know which town to bomb. Before the murder, it is this Albert who explains to Yu Tsun the nature of Ts’ui Pen’s book-labyrinth, on which he is inexplicably an expert. The connection between the inner and outer stories is hard to pin down, but the dream-like absurdity of the latter is perhaps meant to illustrate how much is possible if every future is real.
In ‘The Library of Babel’, time is less prominent, but we find once again the reality of all possibilities. The library contains every book that could exist, within set limits: “each book contains four hundred ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, approximately eighty black letters” and “there are twenty-five orthographic symbols”. Even within these limits, the number of books, and therefore the library—or rather “the universe (which others call the Library)”—is infinite, and every possible thing that could be said is somewhere, in one of the books. All texts and stories and ideas, all sense and nonsense, that could exist actually do.
Elsewhere, from a different angle, Borges suggest that even the unitary and fixed past can be infinite. What if one remembered the entirety of the contents of one’s own past, like ‘Funes the Memorious’? What if one had an unlimited amount of past, rather than our threescore years and ten, like ‘The Immortal’? Would not even such single pasts require the entire library of Babel to be recorded.
The sober and the rigorous may object that Borges was conflating the realm of thought, which can indeed conjure up many forking paths, with the single nature of the real world. But the possibility of separating these two domains was precisely what Borges loved to question. He was drawn to Berkeley’s idealism, and dwelt on dreams, which are after all themselves real things in the world (‘The Circular Ruins’ tells of a man who dreams another man into existence, only to discover that he too was created by a dreamer). Above all, for Borges, writing itself, his own craft, was the instrument by which dreams became real things. ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’—the opening story in Ficciones, Borges’s best-known work—tells of a series of imaginary worlds whose objects start appearing in the real one. But of course all texts and stories are themselves just such objects.
Borges was an essayist, poet and storyteller, not a philosopher. It would be a mistake to ask whether he was making serious ontological claims. Indeed he was resolutely unserious, a lover of games, riddles and teasing asides: that is part of why he is such a pleasure to read. Borges’s literary project was not to provide answers, but to explore the marvel that we are creatures who must ask questions, and above all the question “what if?”.
