Rebellion, hypertext, calculation – a garden of forking paths?

Borges, with his conscious manipulation of literary conventions and the nature of intertextual time, is in excellent historical company. In the New Media Reader we read of many similar events, processes and products in a historical period which hosts the beginnings of a wresting of power and control from the tyranny of Tradition and Accepted Practice. Borges’ lineage was certainly influenced by the 1939 publication of James Joyce’s controversial book Finnegan’s Wake (a tome full of “linguistic experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions, free dream associations, and abandonment of the conventions of plot and character construction”) and continued on after him in the form of Roland Barthes’ The Death of the Author and beyond.

Looking closely at Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths, there are numerous themes to be explored. I agree with my classmate Ethan Zink that one of the most relevant to the study of digital media is the concept of the non-traditional story. Ethan narrows his enquiry down to the excellent example of the Sims, a game which does not even have any form of ‘storyline’ to follow. Regarding books, then, a traditional story was one where there’s a plot/setting/characters and time is either linear or taking place in flash-backs – but either way, time is certainly fixed. Borges’ fiction is recursive, a story about a story relying on a massive word-play as the plot resolution (Spoiler: The name of the gentleman is the name of the town) and time is hinted at being omni-present. In the mind of the audience, we can imagine the different paths the characters might have taken; indeed, Borges opens for us a whole universe of possibilities in this one story alone. And who can stop there? If there are (what we now call) parallel worlds which branch at every intersecting choice, who can help but think of our other-selves in other dimensions?

Computers seem to be able to work into this other paradigm. They play chess by calculating a dozen, hundred, thousand moves ahead of the current move in the time it takes up to raise our hand from the buzzer. They calculate odds, trajectories, and speeds in the time it takes me to pull the trigger – the idea of a computer having a ‘disease of excessive oscillation’, as Wiener puts it, is hardly a problem now. Programmed with an algorithms, a computer will produce the most spectacular, colorful, surprising picture or 3d form the likes of which we‘ve never seen. With hypertext, interlinked roads of information leading everywhere exist all at once for the taking. In these sorts of ways, Borges’ fiction was generative to the ideas behind the capabilities the computer strives for.

I would like to leave it there, because that nicely ties up what the discussion asks us to do. However I feel that it is interesting to point out that in no way does either Borges’ work nor the computer do what Borges’ imagined. Borges’ fiction does NOT, in fact, have many paths – in the audiences imagination, maybe, but any form of media, even a very traditional one, can engender that (see fan fiction). The computer calculates very fast, it’s true, but speed is the only way it works any different that myself – I could calculate the many chess moves, it would just take me a long long time. This doesn’t mean that the computer is doing many different things instantaneously as it seems, though. The algorithms that the machine uses could be charted by hand and the same results would be generated – it’s math, and all the formulas can be calculated. Hypertext may be leading all different places but these links exist in space and we still experience hyperlinks IN TIME, by choosing one and then, a second later, choosing another. There is nothing like Borges’ vision of the labyrinth, of many things happening simultaneously. We humans do not live in such a world – the overwhelming speed and sheer calculating force of the computer tricks us into the illusion of omni-present calculations and worlds we cannot see nor comprehend. It is, in the end, just as the protagonist of Borges’ fiction says: “I reflected that everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now. Centuries and centuries and only in the present do thing happen.”

REFERENCE:

The Garden of Forking Paths

Literary and Electronic Hypertext: Borges, criticism, literary Reaserch, and the Computer

by Perla Sasson-Henryby Ned Davisonby Jorge Luis Borges

Borges 2.0: from Text to Virtual Worlds