Hypertext Fiction and "The Garden of Forking Paths"

    “The Garden of Forking Paths” immediately throws the reader into a layered historical space, with a Chinese man named Tsun living in England while working as a German imperial spy. The initial story begins as a tale-within-a-tale structure, the author explaining to us from the present this situated past where the Garden of Forking Paths occurs, and the remainder of the story takes place in this past. The language is dream-like and distant, the main character seeming to be in a trance as he goes to a man Albert’s house who he discovers to be a sinologist studying Tsun’s own ancestor, who was murdered after spending thirteen years writing/crafting a book/labyrinth. Albert tells Tsun that the book and the labyrinth are one in the same, and that that “The Garden of Forking Paths is an enormous riddle, or parable, whose theme is time” without ever saying the word ‘time’. 

    The entire story is fascinating as a work of ‘hypertext’ because of its structure of a tale-within-a-tale, and the conjuring of a distant, unfinished book-labyrinth which muddles the meaning of time, consequences, and actions, while the author’s ancestor murders the one person who has divulged the book-labyrinth's function. Also the final fact that Tsun has completed his mission as a German spy, communicating to his general through the newspaper story on his crime that British troops are in a town called Albert, Somme – a deep play on language and communication in a story already curiously focused on interpretation, and communication over space and time in different formats – certainly adds to the literal meaning of ‘hypertext’. 

    “The Garden of Forking Paths” was not what I imagined hypertext to be after reading the textbook chapter on hypertext fiction, but I do see how the textbook’s notes on proliferating texts, instantaneous and overwritten works, and elements unfolding in unusual temporal flows certainly constitutes “The Garden” as hypertext. One point I found especially fascinating from the textbook chapter on hypertext was the quality of adaptability and the extendable format of digital texts. Before standardized programming like HTML, adaptability was more difficult. But with the implementation of universal software, hypertext could be translated everywhere and accessed in multiple spaces of the internet and computers. This idea immediately coming from contemporary fiction focused on shifts of point of views, recycled and represented motifs, and manifestations of narrative voice created a world of hypertext where unique visions of humanity could be translated into digital form and written for multiple audiences. The textbook notes how the “subjective experience of human consciousness is messier” than just a linear simple storyline – hypertext was able to break that linear stream, much like “The Garden” attempts to do through its construction and themes. Digital hypertext allowed authorship of these modern themes in even more disconnected, fragmented, and “messy” illustration of humanity through simple, extendable, and transparent online formats.