A Critic at Large the Never-Ending Story

Can the multiverse keep expanding forever?

- By Stephanie Burt

In 1941, Jorge Luis Borges published “The Garden of Forking Paths,” a short story in which a spy travels to the home of an English scholar. There they discuss an odd book by the spy’s great-grandfather, Ts’ui Pên. Rather than follow a single plot, the book aims to explore countless storylines. “In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives he chooses one and eliminates the others,” the scholar says. “In the fiction of the almost inextricable Ts’ui Pên he chooses—simultaneously—all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork.”

Borges devoted most of his story to explaining the complicated idea that many different realities can coexist in a mazelike web of timelines. “This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time,” the scholar goes on. “We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us.” The story invites the reader to imagine what else, other than the world we know, might be possible. But the spy ultimately wonders whether, if everything that can happen does happen, any choice is really worth making.