Bruce Sterling Slipstream 2 Slipstream was a literary term that needed to be coined, but the phenomenon doesn’t actually exist. Back in the 1980s, I noticed that there were a lot of books being written and published that had fantastic elements, or nonrealistic elements, or (and maybe this is the best term) antirealistic elements. They had none of the recognition symbols of genre science fiction or genre fantasy.             They didn’t play to the sf fan base. They were not at all associated with the Great John Campbellian Tradition. They had no puns in them. They weren’t aimed for a Hugo sweep or a Nebula. They were written by people who were outside of the genre and perhaps only vaguely aware of its traditions. But clearly the standard, literary, “realistic narrative” had soured on these people. So, the first step in studying this was to go out and do a little fieldwork. I asked friends of mine to help me compile a list of works that might fit under this circumstance. I vacuumed up everything on the literary landscape that was most loosely attached. Then I wrote a critical article about it, in which I presented the evidence. I said, “Look how much there is,” and “What are we to make of this?”            So, “slipstream” was a catchall term that I made up, along with my friend Richard Dorsett, who is a bibliophile and rare book collector, and who now lives in Boston where he is quite the literateur. So, I published the article in Science Fiction Eye, and the term did in fact see considerable use. But, in my opinion, slipstream has never come to real fruition, and perhaps it will never come to fruition.            I don’t think that slipstream is a “genre” yet, and it certainly has never become a publishing category, a marketing category.            If slipstream had done what I imagined it doing when I wrote that article, there would in fact be wire racks at the Borders and Barnes & Noble that said slipstream on them. You’d be able to go in there and buy these fantastic, antirealistic novels of a postmodern sensibility, and they would have their own awards, and their own little fanzines, and conventions where groups of writers would get together and say, “Well, I’m more antirealistic than you.” There would be a certain amount of solidarity within the genre; they would have a generic sensibility. But they clearly don’t. Trying to get slipstream writers together is like herding cats. I don’t think they have a temperament with which they can unite.             John Kessel is a very dear friend of mine, someone with whom I’ve had very fertile discussions. We’re both professional science fiction writers, with, yes, strong sidelines in academia and journalism, but nevertheless we’re primarily sf writers. He and I disagree violently on the most fundamental tenets of our genre, but we have a common ground in which we can at least agree on definitions and actually get somewhere with our disputes.             Slipstream has never managed to ac ...

1. Bruce Sterling
Slipstream 2
Slipstream was a literary term that needed to be coined, but the
phenomenon doesn’t actually exist. Back in the 1980s, I noticed
that there were a lot of books being written and published that
had fantastic elements, or nonrealistic elements, or (and maybe
this is the best term) antirealistic elements. They had none of
the recognition symbols of genre science fiction or genre
fantasy.
They didn’t play to the sf fan base. They were not at all
associated with the Great John Campbellian Tradition. They had
no puns in them. They weren’t aimed for a Hugo sweep or a
Nebula. They were written by people who were outside of the
genre and perhaps only vaguely aware of its traditions. But
clearly the standard, literary, “realistic narrative” had soured on
these people.
So, the first step in studying this was to go out and do a little
fieldwork. I asked friends of mine to help me compile a list of
works that might fit under this circumstance. I vacuumed up
everything on the literary landscape that was most loosely
attached. Then I wrote a critical article about it, in which I
presented the evidence. I said, “Look how much there is,” and
“What are we to make of this?”
So, “slipstream” was a catchall term that I made up, along with
my friend Richard Dorsett, who is a bibliophile and rare book
collector, and who now lives in Boston where he is quite the
literateur. So, I published the article in Science Fiction Eye, and
the term did in fact see considerable use. But, in my opinion,
slipstream has never come to real fruition, and perhaps it will
never come to fruition.
I don’t think that slipstream is a “genre” yet, and it certainly
has never become a publishing category, a marketing
category.
If slipstream had done what I imagined it doing when I wrote

2. that article, there would in fact be wire racks at the Borders and
Barnes & Noble that said slipstream on them. You’d be able to
go in there and buy these fantastic, antirealistic novels of a
postmodern sensibility, and they would have their own awards,
and their own little fanzines, and conventions where groups of
writers would get together and say, “Well, I’m more
antirealistic than you.” There would be a certain amount of
solidarity within the genre; they would have a generic
sensibility. But they clearly don’t. Trying to get slipstream
writers together is like herding cats. I don’t think they have a
temperament with which they can unite.
John Kessel is a very dear friend of mine, someone with whom
I’ve had very fertile discussions. We’re both professional
science fiction writers, with, yes, strong sidelines in academia
and journalism, but nevertheless we’re primarily sf writers. He
and I disagree violently on the most fundamental tenets of our
genre, but we have a common ground in which we can at least
agree on definitions and actually get somewhere with our
disputes.
Slipstream has never managed to achieve that. The closest it has
ever come to that….Well, there’s a mail-order bookseller named
Mark Ziesing, out of Shingletown, California. He has a very
well-known catalog and he is also a small-press publisher. This
guy is the closest thing to a slipstream retailer that the planet
has. He features slipstream-type books in his catalog and has a
rather well-developed core audience of people who are willing
to move from one such book to another.
That is the great strength of a marketing category. If you’re at
the science fiction rack and you look at the “S’s,” you’ll see
“Stephenson” and “Sturgeon,” and you might pick up one of my
books by accident, thinking that I’m Theodore or Neal. This is
of considerable commercial use to me. If you’re trying to buy a
slipstream book, though, there is no way to move from Pynchon
to John Calvin Batchelor to Gabriel García Márquez to Kathy
Acker to Robert Coover. They’re just not in a spot where it
would be suggested to you that they have a commonality or any

3. relevance to one another. This damages them. At one point (or
so I understand), Forbidden Planet Books in London went out
and built a Slipstream rack. People just came in, looked at it:
“what in the hell is this?” I think they soon gave up on the
experiment.
But the reason I think it’s still interesting, and is still
compelling public attention years later, is that I think our
society has room for a new genre. A genre arises out of some
deeper social need; a genre is not some independent floating
construct. Genres gratify people, they gratify a particular
mindset. They gratify a cultural sensibility, and there is a
cultural sensibility that is present today that would like to have
a literature of its own and just can’t quite get it together to
create one. This would be a nonrealistic genre of a postmodern
sensibility. But since it doesn’t exist, I think slipstream is
probably best defined by talking about things that it
isn’t.
So, first of all, slipstream is not science fiction that is written to
high literary standards. John Kessel writes science fiction to
high literary standards. He is not a slipstream writer. He is a
science fiction writer who can punctuate properly. I really think
this is a vital and important distinction. The mere fact that you
understand grammar, that you can express yourself fluently, that
you have some awareness of the literary canon, does not make
you a slipstream writer. Because slipstream does not have the
intellectual tool-kit of science fiction. It is not extrapolative.
You’re not going to find slipstream interested in positing
something and methodically exploring its consequences and its
social and technological implications.
Slipstream is not futuristic. It’s not really interested in 2050,
2090, the Twenty-Seventh Century. It is not enamored of sense-
of-wonder. It does not make you wonder; it is not intended to
make you slack-jawed with astonishment. It’s not spectacular,
grotesque, or widescreen. In other words, slipstream doesn’t
have a science-fictional thematic. It doesn’t intend to blow your
mind by confronting you with super-objects. It is not going to

4. march a dragon across the stage; a giant kraken is not going to
rise up out of the river and level London. (Unless, perhaps, it’s
some ironic, knowing reference to a giant kraken leveling
London.)
Slipstream is not written with an engineer’s temperament. It’s
not interested in a gizmo and how it becomes more gizmo-like.
It’s hard to describe what an engineer’s temperament is, unless
you’ve spent a lot of time with engineers; but an engineer has a
hands-on relationship with the technological environment. This
is reflected very strongly in the classic hard-sf story, the
Analog story. Engineers are really interested in the transcendent
poetics of a device per se. A device, for an engineer, is a
romantic and inspiring thing; it demands a kind of immediate,
tactile engagement, where you are powerfully driven to get into
this thing, and to change its parameters, and experiment with it.
Engineers have a unique and very intense personal fascination
with gizmos qua gizmos. You’re not going to see that in
slipstream. So there will be no gadget stories, no puzzle-solving
stories, no twist endings, no technological instrumentalism.
We’re never going to ask: “What is this thing good for? How
can I make some money from it? How is this device going to
empower me?” You just don’t see that approach in a slipstream
story.
There are other forms of fantastic literature that slipstream also
is not. For instance, slipstream is not magic realism. García
Márquez was included in my original slipstream list, but I really
don’t think he’s a core slipstream writer. The South American
writers probably came the closest to creating an “antirealistic
genre which is not science fiction”; but in point of fact, magic
realism stalled. Because there is no arc of development there.
You can’t become “more magic” or “less magic,” or discuss
how exactly magic to become. Magic realism is a very intuitive,
left-handed thing; and, as with surrealism, in some ways the
imagination of magic realism is impoverished. You can’t build
on the tradition.
Nor is slipstream New Age writing. New Age stuff is very

5. fantastic, but that’s because it’s written by people who are
mentally dominated by superstition. New Age writing is all
about people who really do think that middle-aged housewives
in Ohio can channel Atlantean warlords. That’s very fantastic,
and nonrealistic, and antirealistic; it’s people who are asserting
that reality is not all we know; but unfortunately these people
are sort of, well, chumps. They’re dumb losers begging to be
robbed, begging to be taken advantage of. And people do take
advantage of them, and it’s bathetic, and therefore sort of sub-
literary. Slipstream is not New Age mystical writing. What
slipstream is—or ought to be … I don’t know.
It’s post-ideological, first of all. We’re now in a post-
ideological epoch. The twentieth century really is over, and the
kind of totalizing, world-solving, single, central, dominant
narrative really has been called into question to the point of
disintegration. The United States at the moment is having an
ontological civil war in the Clinton impeachment. Which
centers around blowjobs, oddly enough; but you know that’s it;
that’s the rallying cry. Are you willing to condone an act of
sexual deviance, or is this something that is so far beyond
human comprehension that it should cause the Republic to
collapse? That’s what’s going on, and a genuine contemporary
literature would be written from a perspective where this would
make sense. We don’t really have that being done; but I can
imagine it done.
So, it would have to be a literature with no central dogmas, that
was polyvalent and de-centered. It would not be about
alienation; it would be very much at home in the mess that we
have. It would be a native literature of our cultural
circumstances. I think it would probably be mostly about
subjectivity fragmentation, because that is the postmodernist
mindset. The modernist mindset is alienation. You’re looking at
Henry Ford’s machine system, and you can’t deal with it, and
you want to retreat to some interior creative space. But in a
postmodern stance you are so infiltrated by the various
shattering aspects of the postmodern condition that your own

6. core identity fragments. You become a kind of multi-tasking
personality: you’re handling this contingency and that
contingency, but there’s no real way to reach a single,
consistent, overarching, philosophical stance.
So, who the hell talks in opaque ways like this? Well, Cultural
Studies people talk like this. So I think that what we’re talking
about in slipstream is something that has some of the underlying
dynamics of science fiction as a genre, but instead of being
based, however remotely, in science, it’s probably based in
cultural studies. In other words, it’s “Cultural Studies Fiction.”
For instance, instead of paying respectful attention to Einstein
and Newton, we’re going to really take Lacan and Baudrillard
seriously.
If I had to pick two examples of classic slipstream writers—not
necessarily the best writers per se, but core examples of the
genre sensibility—they would be Mark Leyner and Kathy Acker.
Mark Leyner has such an intense hold on his material that he is
something of a sui generis writer. Leyner is a former ad
copywriter turned novelist, so his books read rather like Max
Headroom “blipverts.” There’s ad slogan, ad slogan, ad slogan;
there’s a lot of jumping back and forth; there’s no real character
buildup; and there’s eighty thousand words of the stuff. Leyner
books read like a drum and bass disco track. Like electronic pop
music, it’s very much yard goods; you can lay down tracks for
three minutes, five minutes, eight minutes; the DJ will just
continue to introduce new riffs, and new kinds of squeaks,
honks, and breakbeats. It’s all bits and pieces, but it’s cemented
by its attitude.
That’s also what Acker’s work was like. She would take bits
and pieces of stuff, just grab it, rip it off; she chewed up
Neuromancer in one of her better-known works. She’d
appropriate things, jam them together; the force that holds the
work together is not the plot, not the structure, not the
underlying philosophy, but just a sense that these people are in
tune with the realities of culture in an advanced way that other
people are not. It’s a sensibility. I think Mark Leyner is a very

7. gifted and perceptive guy. I’m a big fan of his.
But in order for slipstream to really work, I suspect that
mainstream writing would have to lose all its hegemony. We
call things “mainstream” in science fiction; people who write
mainstream don’t call it “mainstream,” they merely assume that
they are the unquestioned center of the literary universe. But the
greatest enemy of slipstream is not science fiction, which
slipstream mostly ignores. Science fiction isn’t in any position
to do slipstream any harm. Sf can’t challenge slipstream for the
cultural territory that slipstream would most like to have.
Slipstream’s real enemy is mainstream lit, because that’s the
dominant narrative that they would most like to become, and
that’s what they’re unable to become, almost by definition.
Science fiction is increasingly stale and self-involved, and
unwilling to move into the cultural territory that slipstream
should be occupying. I don’t believe that science fiction is
likely to become more slipstream. It does seem to me that there
is a need for slipstream, and a possibility to invent a genre
along this line, but I don’t think the opportunity has ever been
successfully taken up.
One thing that is problematic for slipstream: being based in
quote, Theory, unquote, it has a very hard time taking creative
effort seriously. You can see this in certain pop-culture critics,
like (say) Steve Beard or Mark Dery, who are pop music people,
and culture studies people. Although you can see them straining
to become fiction writers, and you can sense a potential
literature behind the push there, they’re just not ever going to
become literateurs. They really want to be two steps back from
what’s going on. They want to be analytical; they want to
understand the structure of society on some higher, abstract
level. They’re not really interested in embodying culture, or
enlivening it, in the way that a major work of literature can. A
major work of literature can embody its period and bring it to
life, conjure it into being and give it a creative vitality that
critique does not have. Even the best critique can’t do that; it
can cut a corpse to pieces, but it can’t put the holy fire into the

8. cadaver on the slab.
So, if I were looking for an emergent slipstream literature, I
might look in pop-culture critique. It would probably be
European rather than American; many writers of slipstream are
from outside the US; they have less techno-enthusiasm than the
US does. It would be very intimate and subjective; it would
have to be about internal sensibilities. It would not be twentieth
century, which is, I think, slipstream’s greatest challenge. It
would not be of the fin-de-siècle. It would not be mainstream
writing with a polite whiff of rocket fuel. This is really fatal:
the muddled attempt to domesticate science fiction by robbing it
of its krakens. This practice is debilitating to all concerned, and
is a sad hopeless act.
Slipstream would be about new meanings and new feelings and
new structures of experience. It would not be better than the
writing that had gone on before; it would just be different,
because our culture is different. So: if slipstream were to really
work and succeed, I would think that it would have to be the
literary reflection of a new way to be alive. We don’t yet have
that. But I suspect that it will come.
Acknowledgment. This essay was first published, in a slightly
different form, in the Fall/Winter 1999 issue of Nova Express.
For this week I need Parts 4 &5 done along with a conclusion
and make sure to put the second line of the references in
hanging indent formation. Thanks in advance
Part 4
Identify key trends, assumptions, and risks in the context of
your final business model.
Develop the strategic objectives for your new division of the
existing business in a balanced scorecard format in the context

9. of key trends, assumptions, and risks. The strategic objectives
are measures of attaining your vision and mission. As you
develop them, consider the vision, mission, and values for your
business and the outcomes of your SWOTT analysis and supply
chain analysis.
Consider the following four quadrants of the balanced
scorecard when developing your strategic objectives:
· Shareholder Value or Financial Perspective, includes strategic
objectives in areas such as:
· Market share
· Revenues and costs
· Profitability
· Competitive position
· Customer Value Perspective, includes strategic objectives in
areas such as:
· Customer retention or turnover
· Customer satisfaction
· Customer value
· Process or Internal Operations Perspective, includes strategic
objectives in areas such as:
· Measure of process performance
· Productivity or productivity improvement
· Operations metrics
· Impact of change on the organization
· Learning and Growth (Employee) Perspective, includes
strategic objectives in areas such as:
· Employee satisfaction
· Employee turnover or retention
· Level of organizational capability
· Nature of organizational culture or climate
· Technological innovation
Develop at least three strategic objectives for each of the four
balanced scorecard areas identified (Financial, Customer,
Process, Learning and Growth). Your objectives should be
selected, in part, based on an evaluation of a number of
potential alternatives to the issues and/or opportunities

10. identified in the SWOTT Analysis paper and table you
completed in Week 3.
Base your solutions on a ranking of alternative solutions that
includes an identification of potential risks and mitigation
plans, and a stakeholder analysis that includes mitigation and
contingency strategies. You should also incorporate the ethical
implications of your solutions into your selection.
· For each strategic objective, develop a metric and target using
a balanced scorecard format. (For example, a strategic objective
in the shareholder or Financial Perspective is to increase market
share. A metric to actually measure this strategic objective
of market share increase is, "The percentage of increase in
market share." The target is the specific number to be achieved
in a particular time period. The target for the metric of
"Increase market share" could be "Increase market share by 2%
for each of the next 3 years" of an increase of 2% per year for 3
years.)
Outline a brief communication plan discussing how you will
communicate the company's strategic objectives that includes
the following:
· Define the purpose.
· Define the audience.
· Identify the channel(s) of communication and why you
selected that channel.
Write a 1,050- to 1,400-word strategic objectives summary.
Include your balanced scorecard and its impact on all
stakeholders, and the communication plan.
Format paper consistent with APA guidelines. No more than
15% of your work should be quoted and/or paraphrased
material.
Part 5
Resources: University of Phoenix Material: Business Model and
Strategic Planning Outline; Innovation Business Model, Vision,
Mission, Values; Supply and Value Chain; SWOTT Analysis;

11. Balanced Scorecard; Communication Plan
Write a 700- to 1,050-word section for your business model and
strategic plan in which you add your strategies and tactics to
implement and realize your objectives, measures, and targets.
Include marketing and information technology strategies and
tactics.
Develop at least three methods to monitor and control your
proposed strategic plan, being sure to analyze how the measures
will advance organizational goals financially and operationally.
Explain the ethical issues faced by the organization, summarize
the legal and regulatory issues faced by the organization, and
then summarize the organization's corporate social
responsibility.
Develop a 350-word page executive summary defining the new
division of existing business. Share your Vision, Mission, final
business model, value proposition and list your key
assumptions, risks, and change management issues. Quantify the
growth and profit opportunity and planned impact on various
stakeholders.
Note: Any investor should be eager to meet with you after
reading your executive summary.
Using the University of Phoenix Material: Business Model and
Strategic Planning Outline as a guide, combine Parts 1, 2, and 3
of your completed business model strategic plan with your Final
Business Plan Model assignment and Executive Summary. This
includes the Business Model, Vision, Mission, Values, SWOTT
Analysis, Supply Chain Analysis, Balanced Scorecard, and
Communication Plan from prior weeks. Your consolidated final
strategic plan should be 4,200 to 5,250 words in length.
Format paper consistent with APA guidelines. No more than
15% of your work should be quoted and/or paraphrased
material.
Study Questions for Two Stories by Jorge Luis Borges

12. The assigned stories by Borges were first published in Spanish
in the early 1940s; specific publication information appears in
the SQ entry for each story. The versions that you have were
published in 1964 in the collection Labyrinths and were
translated by one of the editors, James E. Irby or Donald A.
Yates. Borges was born in 1899 in Buenos Aires, Argentina and
died in 1986 in Geneva Switzerland. When he was around 39
years old, he suffered a head injury that left him unable to speak
and nearly killed him. As he recovered from this event, he
began one of his most fertile periods of literary production,
including the creation of the assigned stories. Beginning around
1920, his eyesight began to progressively fail due to a
hereditary condition, and he became completely blind by 1955,
when he continued to produce fiction and poetry, often eliding
the difference between the two literary forms by dictating his
work to his mother and to secretaries or friends. In the late
1930s and early 1940s, he collaborated with another
Argentinean author, Adolfo Bioy Casares, to produce a series of
detective stories under the pseudonym, H. Bustos Domecq.
Critics often claim that his work has a dreamlike quality
governed by Borges' own system of symbols that provoke in us
an intellectual exercise, while others associate the mythical or
legendary tone of some of his stories to magical realism. For
each story, consider the following issues:
1.
Who narrates the story? What kind of narrator is it?
2.
What is the setting of the story? What country, city, specific
location, time period, etc. How realistic is the setting?
3.

13. To what genre [SF, mystery, detection, fantasy, or even myth or
legend] does the story belong?
"Death and the Compass" [First published in Sur in 1942; First
English publication in New Mexico Quarterly in 1954]
1.
In what ways does this story both conform to our generic
expectations for a murder mystery and subvert those
expectations?
2.
How does the story's first paragraph enact a "proleptic" move, a
gesture that reveals some part of the mystery's resolution in
initial information provided to the reader by jumping to the
end?
3.
In what ways is Lonnrot a typical detective like Poe's C.
Auguste Dupin or Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes?
What deficiency causes him to fail?
4.
Are we able, like readers of most conventional mysteries, to
anticipate the next stages of the investigation through provided
clues?
5.
Who finally solves the case? Which character presents the
explanation of the solution to the series of murders and how
does this event subvert our generic expectations?

14. "The Garden of Forking Paths" [First published in Sur in 1941;
First English publication in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in
1948]
1.
How does the title of this story encapsulate its plot and even its
"meaning."?
2.
Who narrates the story? How would you define and characterize
this narrator? How many narrative voices are there?
3.
Who is Dr. Yu Tsun and what is his relation to the story's
conflict and plot?
4.
How would you characterize Dr. Stephen Albert and define his
role in the story?
A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings: A Tale For Children
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the
house that Pelayo had to cross his
drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the
newborn child had a temperature all night
and they thought it was due to the stench. The world had been

15. sad since Tuesday. Sea and sky were
a single ash-gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on
March nights glimmered like powdered
light, had become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish. The light
was so weak at noon that when Pelayo
was coming back to the house after throwing away the crabs, it
was hard for him to see what it was that
was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. He had to
go very close to see that it was an old
man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite
of his tremendous efforts, couldn't get up,
impeded by his enormous wings.
Frightened by that nightmare, Pelayo ran to get Elisenda, his
wife, who was putting compresses on
the sick child, and he took her to the rear of the courtyard. They
both looked at the fallen body with a
mute stupor. He was dressed like a ragpicker. There were only a
few faded hairs left on his bald skull and
very few teeth in his mouth, and his pitiful condition of a
drenched great-grandfather took away and sense
of grandeur he might have had. His huge buzzard wings, dirty
and half-plucked were forever entangled
in the mud. They looked at him so long and so closely that
Pelayo and Elisenda very soon overcame
their surprise and in the end found him familiar. Then they
dared speak to him, and he answered in an
incomprehensible dialect with a strong sailor's voice. That was
how they skipped over the inconvenience
of the wings and quite intelligently concluded that he was a
lonely castaway from some foreign ship
wrecked by the storm. And yet, they called in a neighbor woman
who knew everything about life and
death to see him, and all she needed was one look to show them
their mistake.

16. "He's an angel," she told them. "He must have been coming for
the child, but the poor fellow is so old
that the rain knocked him down."
On the following day everyone knew that a flesh-and-blood
angel was held captive in Pelayo's house.
Against the judgment of the wise neighbor woman, for whom
angels in those times were the fugitive
survivors of a spiritual conspiracy, they did not have the heart
to club him to death. Pelayo watched over
him all afternoon from the kitchen, armed with his bailiff's club,
and before going to bed he dragged him
out of the mud and locked him up with the hens in the wire
chicken coop. In the middle of the night, when
the rain stopped, Pelayo and Elisenda were still killing crabs. A
short time afterward the child woke up
without a fever and with a desire to eat. Then they felt
magnanimous and decided to put the angel on a
raft with fresh water and provisions for three days and leave
him to his fate on the high seas. But when
they went out into the courtyard with the first light of dawn,
they found the whole neighborhood in front
of the chicken coop having fun with the angel, without the
slightest reverence, tossing him things to eat
through the openings in the wire as if weren't a supernatural
creature but a circus animal.
Father Gonzaga arrived before seven o'clock, alarmed at the
strange news. By that time
onlookers less frivolous than those at dawn had already arrived
and they were making all kinds of
conjectures concerning the captive's future. The simplest among
them thought that he should be named

17. mayor of the world. Others of sterner mind felt that he should
be promoted to the rank of five-star general
in order to win all wars. Some visionaries hoped that he could
be put to stud in order to implant the earth
a race of winged wise men who could take charge of the
universe. But Father Gonzaga, before becoming
a priest, had been a robust woodcutter. Standing by the wire, he
reviewed his catechism in an instant and
asked them to open the door so that he could take a close look
at that pitiful man who looked more like a
huge decrepit hen among the fascinated chickens. He was lying
in the corner drying his open wings in the
sunlight among the fruit peels and breakfast leftovers that the
early risers had thrown him. Alien to the
impertinences of the world, he only lifted his antiquarian eyes
and murmured something in his dialect
when Father Gonzaga went into the chicken coop and said good
morning to him in Latin. The parish
priest had his first suspicion of an imposter when he saw that he
did not understand the language of God
or know how to greet His ministers. Then he noticed that seen
close up he was much too human: he had
an unbearable smell of the outdoors, the back side of his wings
was strewn with parasites and his main
feathers had been mistreated by terrestrial winds, and nothing
about him measured up to the proud
dignity of angels. The he came out of the chicken coop and in a
brief sermon warned the curious against
the risks of being ingenuous. He reminded them that the devil
had the bad habit of making use of carnival
tricks in order to confuse the unwary. He argued that if wings
were not the essential element in
determining the different between a hawk and an airplane, they
were even less so in the recognition of
angels. Nevertheless, he promised to write a letter to his bishop
so that the latter would write his primate

18. so that the latter would write to the Supreme Pontiff in order to
get the final verdict from the highest courts.
His prudence fell on sterile hearts. The news of the captive
angel spread with such rapidity that
after a few hours the courtyard had the bustle of a marketplace
and they had to call in troops with fixed
bayonets to disperse the mob that was about to knock the house
down. Elisenda, her spine all twisted
from sweeping up so much marketplace trash, then got the idea
of fencing in the yard and charging five
cents admission to see the angel.
The curious came from far away. A traveling carnival arrived
with a flying acrobat who buzzed over
the crowd several times, but no one paid any attention to him
because his wings were not those of an
angel but, rather, those of a sidereal bat. The most unfortunate
invalids on earth came in search of health:
a poor woman who since childhood has been counting her
heartbeats and had run out of numbers; a
Portuguese man who couldn't sleep because the noise of the
stars disturbed him; a sleepwalker who got
up at night to undo the things he had done while awake; and
many others with less serious ailments. In
the midst of that shipwreck disorder that made the earth
tremble, Pelayo and Elisenda were happy with
fatigue, for in less than a week they had crammed their rooms
with money and the line of pilgrims waiting
their turn to enter still reached beyond the horizon.
The angel was the only one who took no part in his own act. He
spent his time trying to get
comfortable in his borrowed nest, befuddled by the hellish heat
of the oil lamps and sacramental candles
that had been placed along the wire. At first they tried to make

19. him eat some mothballs, which, according
to the wisdom of the wise neighbor woman, were the food
prescribed for angels. But he turned them
down, just as he turned down the papal lunches that the
pentinents brought him, and they never found
out whether it was because he was an angel or because he was
an old man that in the end ate nothing
but eggplant mush. His only supernatural virtue seemed to be
patience. Especially during the first days,
when the hens pecked at him, searching for the stellar parasites
that proliferated in his wings, and the
cripples pulled out feathers to touch their defective parts with,
and even the most merciful threw stones
at him, trying to get him to rise so they could see him standing.
The only time they succeeded in arousing
him was when they burned his side with an iron for branding
steers, for he had been motionless for so
many hours that they thought he was dead. He awoke with a
start, ranting in his hermetic language
and with tears in his eyes, and he flapped his wings a couple of
times, which brought on a whirlwind of
chicken dung and lunar dust and a gale of panic that did not
seem to be of this world. Although many
thought that his reaction had not been one of rage but of pain,
from then on they were careful not to
annoy him, because the majority understood that his passivity
was not that of a her taking his ease but
that of a cataclysm in repose.
Father Gonzaga held back the crowd's frivolity with formulas of
maidservant inspiration while awaiting
the arrival of a final judgment on the nature of the captive. But
the mail from Rome showed no sense of

20. urgency. They spent their time finding out in the prisoner had a
navel, if his dialect had any connection
with Aramaic, how many times he could fit on the head of a pin,
or whether he wasn't just a Norwegian
with wings. Those meager letters might have come and gone
until the end of time if a providential event
had not put and end to the priest's tribulations.
It so happened that during those days, among so many other
carnival attractions, there arrived in
the town the traveling show of the woman who had been
changed into a spider for having disobeyed her
parents. The admission to see her was not only less than the
admission to see the angel, but people were
permitted to ask her all manner of questions about her absurd
state and to examine her up and down so
that no one would ever doubt the truth of her horror. She was a
frightful tarantula the size of a ram and
with the head of a sad maiden. What was most heartrending,
however, was not her outlandish shape
but the sincere affliction with which she recounted the details of
her misfortune. While still practically
a child she had sneaked out of her parents' house to go to a
dance, and while she was coming back
through the woods after having danced all night without
permission, a fearful thunderclap rent the sky in
tow and through the crack came the lightning bolt of brimstone
that changed her into a spider. Her only
nourishment came from the meatballs that charitable souls chose
to toss into her mouth. A spectacle like
that, full of so much human truth and with such a fearful lesson,
was bound to defeat without even trying
that of a haughty angel who scarcely deigned to look at mortals.
Besides, the few miracles attributed
to the angel showed a certain mental disorder, like the blind
man who didn't recover his sight but grew

21. three new teeth, or the paralytic who didn't get to walk but
almost won the lottery, and the leper whose
sores sprouted sunflowers. Those consolation miracles, which
were more like mocking fun, had already
ruined the angel's reputation when the woman who had been
changed into a spider finally crushed him
completely. That was how Father Gonzaga was cured forever of
his insomnia and Pelayo's courtyard
went back to being as empty as during the time it had rained for
three days and crabs walked through the
bedrooms.
The owners of the house had no reason to lament. With the
money they saved they built a two-story
mansion with balconies and gardens and high netting so that
crabs wouldn't get in during the winter, and
with iron bars on the windows so that angels wouldn't get in.
Pelayo also set up a rabbit warren close to
town and have up his job as a bailiff for good, and Elisenda
bought some satin pumps with high heels and
many dresses of iridescent silk, the kind worn on Sunday by the
most desirable women in those times.
The chicken coop was the only thing that didn't receive any
attention. If they washed it down with creolin
and burned tears of myrrh inside it every so often, it was not in
homage to the angel but to drive away the
dungheap stench that still hung everywhere like a ghost and was
turning the new house into an old one.
At first, when the child learned to walk, they were careful that
he not get too close to the chicken coop.
But then they began to lose their fears and got used to the smell,
and before they child got his second
teeth he'd gone inside the chicken coop to play, where the wires

22. were falling apart. The angel was no less
standoffish with him than with the other mortals, but he
tolerated the most ingenious infamies with the
patience of a dog who had no illusions. They both came down
with the chicken pox at the same time. The
doctor who took care of the child couldn't resist the temptation
to listen to the angel's heart, and he found
so much whistling in the heart and so many sounds in his
kidneys that it seemed impossible for him to
be alive. What surprised him most, however, was the logic of
his wings. They seemed so natural on that
completely human organism that he couldn't understand why
other men didn't have them too.
When the child began school it had been some time since the
sun and rain had caused the collapse
of the chicken coop. The angel went dragging himself about
here and there like a stray dying man.
They would drive him out of the bedroom with a broom and a
moment later find him in the kitchen. He
seemed to be in so many places at the same time that they grew
to think that he'd be duplicated, that
he was reproducing himself all through the house, and the
exasperated and unhinged Elisenda shouted
that it was awful living in that hell full of angels. He could
scarcely eat and his antiquarian eyes had also
become so foggy that he went about bumping into posts. All he
had left were the bare cannulae of his
last feathers. Pelayo threw a blanket over him and extended him
the charity of letting him sleep in the
shed, and only then did they notice that he had a temperature at
night, and was delirious with the tongue
twisters of an old Norwegian. That was one of the few times
they became alarmed, for they thought he
was going to die and not even the wise neighbor woman had
been able to tell them what to do with dead

23. angels.
And yet he not only survived his worst winter, but seemed
improved with the first sunny days. He
remained motionless for several days in the farthest corner of
the courtyard, where no one would see
him, and at the beginning of December some large, stiff feathers
began to grow on his wings, the feathers
of a scarecrow, which looked more like another misfortune of
decreptitude. But he must have known the
reason for those changes, for he was quite careful that no one
should notice them, that no one should
hear the sea chanteys that he sometimes sang under the stars.
One morning Elisenda was cutting some
bunches of onions for lunch when a wind that seemed to come
from the high seas blew into the kitchen.
Then she went to the window and caught the angel in his first
attempts at flight. They were so clumsy that
his fingernails opened a furrow in the vegetable patch and he
was on the point of knocking the shed down
with the ungainly flapping that slipped on the light and couldn't
get a grip on the air. But he did manage to
gain altitude. Elisenda let out a sigh of relief, for herself and
for him, when she watched him pass over the
last houses, holding himself up in some way with the risky
flapping of a senile vulture. She kept watching
him even when she was through cutting the onions and she kept
on watching until it was no longer
possible for her to see him, because then he was no longer an
annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot
on the horizon of the sea.
1

24. The Garden of Forking Paths
Jorge Luis Borges, 1941
For Victor Ocampo
On page 22 of Liddell Hart's History of World War I you will
read that an
attack against the Serre-Montauban line by thirteen British
divisions
(supported by 1,400 artillery pieces), planned for the 24th of
July, 1916, had
to be postponed until the morning of the 29th. The torrential
rains, Captain
Liddell Hart comments, caused this delay, an insignificant one,
to be sure.
The following statement, dictated, reread and signed by Dr. Yu
Tsun,
former professor of English at the Hochschule at Tsingtao,
throws an
unsuspected light over the whole affair. The first two pages of
the document
are missing.
". . . and I hung up the receiver. Immediately afterwards, I
recognized the
voice that had answered in German. It was that of Captain
Richard Madden.
Madden's presence in Viktor Runeberg's apartment meant the
end of our
anxieties and--but this seemed, or should have seemed, very
secondary to me--
also the end of our lives. It meant that Runeberg had been

25. arrested or
murdered.1 Before the sun set on that day, I would encounter
the same fate.
Madden was implacable. Or rather, he was obliged to be so. An
Irishman at
the service of England, a man accused of laxity and perhaps of
treason, how
could he fail to seize and be thankful for such a miraculous
opportunity: the
discovery, capture, maybe even the death of two agents of the
German
Reich? I went up to my room; absurdly I locked the door and
threw myself
on my back on the narrow iron cot. Through the window I saw
the familiar
roofs and the cloud-shaded six o'clock sun. It seemed incredible
to me that
1 An hypothesis both hateful and odd. The Prussian spy Hans
Rabener, alias Viktor
Runeberg, attacked with drawn automatic the bearer of the
warrant for his arrest,
Captain Richard Madden. The latter, in self-defense, inflicted
the wound which
brought about Runeberg's death. (Editor's note.)
2
day without premonitions or symbols should be the one of my
inexorable
death. In spite of my dead father, in spite of having been a child
in a
symmetrical garden of Hai Feng, was I--now--going to die?
Then I reflected
that everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now.

26. Centuries of
centuries and only in the present do things happen; countless
men in the air,
on the face of the earth and the sea, and all that really is
happening is
happening to me . . . The almost intolerable recollection of
Madden's
horselike face banished these wanderings. In the midst of my
hatred and
terror (it means nothing to me now to speak of terror, now that I
have
mocked Richard Madden, now that my throat yearns for the
noose) it
occurred to me that tumultuous and doubles happy warrior did
not suspect
that I possessed the Secret. The name of the exact location of
the new British
artillery park on the River Ancre. A bird streaked across the
gray sky and
blindly I translated it into an airplane and that airplane into
many (against the
French sky) annihilating the artillery station with vertical
bombs. If only my
mouth, before a bullet shattered it, could cry out that secret
name so it could
be heard in Germany . . . My human voice was very weak. How
might I make
it carry to the ear of the Chief? To the ear of that sick and
hateful man who
knew nothing of Runeberg and me save that we were in
Staffordshire and
who was waiting in vain for our report in his arid office in
Berlin, endlessly
examining newspapers . . . I said out loud: I must see. I sat up
noiselessly, in a
useless perfection of silence, as if Madden were already lying in

27. wait for me.
Something--perhaps the mere vain ostentation of proving my
resources were
nil--made me look through my pockets. I found what I knew I
would find.
The American watch, the nickel chain and the square coin, the
key ring with
the incriminating useless keys to Runeberg's apartment, the
notebook, a letter
which I resolved to destroy immediately (and which I did not
destroy), a
crown, two shillings and a few pence, the red and blue pencil,
the
handkerchief, the revolver with one bullet. Absurdly, I took it
in my hand and
weighed it in order to inspire courage within myself. Vaguely I
thought that a
pistol report can be heard at a great distance. In ten minutes my
plan was
perfected. The telephone book listed the name of the only
person capable of
transmitting the message; he lived in a suburb of Fenton, less
than a half
hour's train ride away.
3
I am a cowardly man. I say it now, now that I have carried to its
end a
plan whose perilous nature no one can deny. I know its
execution was
terrible. I didn't do it for Germany, no. I care nothing for a
barbarous
country which imposed upon me the abjection of being a spy.

28. Besides, I
know of a man from England --a modest man--who for me is no
less great
than Goethe. I talked with him for scarcely an hour, but during
that hour he
was Goethe . . . I did it because I sensed that the Chief
somehow feared
people of my race--for the innumerable ancestors who merge
within me. I
wanted to prove to him that a yellow man could save his armies.
Besides, I
had to flee from Captain Madden. His hands and his voice could
call at my
door at any moment. I dressed silently, bade farewell to myself
in the mirror,
went downstairs, scrutinized the peaceful street and went out.
The station
was not far from my home, but I judged it wise to take a cab. I
argued that in
this way I ran less risk of being recognized; the fact is that in
the deserted
street I felt myself visible and vulnerable, infinitely so. I
remember that I told
the cab driver to stop a short distance before the main entrance.
I got out
with voluntary, almost painful slowness; I was going to the
village of
Ashgrove but I bought a ticket for a more distant station. The
train left
within a very few minutes, at eight-fifty. I hurried; the next one
would leave
at nine-thirty. There was hardly a soul on the platform. I went
through the
coaches; I remember a few farmers, a woman dressed in
mourning, a young
boy who was reading with fervor the Annals of Tacitus, a

29. wounded and
happy soldier. The coaches jerked forward at last. A man whom
I recognized
ran in vain to the end of the platform. It was Captain Richard
Madden.
Shattered, trembling, I shrank into the far corner of the seat,
away from the
dreaded window.
From this broken state I passed into an almost abject felicity. I
told
myself that the duel had already begun and that I had won the
first encounter
by frustrating, even if for forty minutes, even if by a stroke of
fate, the attack
of my adversary. I argued that this slightest of victories
foreshadowed a total
victory. I argued (no less fallaciously) that my cowardly felicity
proved that I
was a man capable of carrying out the adventure successfully.
From this
weakness I took strength that did not abandon me. I foresee that
man will
resign himself each day to more atrocious undertakings; soon
there will be no
4
one but warriors and brigands; I give them this counsel: The
author of an
atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already
accomplished it, ought to impose
upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past. Thus I
proceeded as my eyes of a
man already dead registered the elapsing of that day, which was
perhaps the

30. last, and the diffusion of the night. The train ran gently along,
amid ash trees.
It stopped, almost in the middle of the fields. No one announced
the name
of the station. "Ashgrove?" I asked a few lads on the platform.
"Ashgrove,"
they replied. I got off.
A lamp enlightened the platform but the faces of the boys were
in
shadow. One questioned me, "Are you going to Dr. Stephen
Albert's house?"
Without waiting for my answer, another said, "The house is a
long way from
here, but you won't get lost if you take this road to the left and
at every
crossroads turn again to your left." I tossed them a coin (my
last), descended
a few stone steps and started down the solitary road. It went
downhill, slowly.
It was of elemental earth; overhead the branches were tangled;
the low, full
moon seemed to accompany me.
For an instant, I thought that Richard Madden in some way had
penetrated my desperate plan. Very quickly, I understood that
was
impossible. The instructions to turn always to the left reminded
me that such
was the common procedure for discovering the central point of
certain
labyrinths. I have some understanding of labyrinths: not for
nothing am I the
great grandson of that Ts'ui Pên who was governor of Yunnan
and who
renounced worldly power in order to write a novel that might be

31. even more
populous than the Hung Lu Meng and to construct a labyrinth in
which all
men would become lost. Thirteen years he dedicated to these
heterogeneous
tasks, but the hand of a stranger murdered him--and his novel
was incoherent
and no one found the labyrinth. Beneath English trees I
meditated on that
lost maze: I imagined it inviolate and perfect at the secret crest
of a mountain;
I imagined it erased by rice fields or beneath the water; I
imagined it infinite,
no longer composed of octagonal kiosks and returning paths, but
of rivers
and provinces and kingdoms . . . I thought of a labyrinth of
labyrinths, of one
sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and
the future
and in some way involve the stars. Absorbed in these illusory
images, I forgot
my destiny of one pursued. I felt myself to be, for an unknown
period of
5
time, an abstract perceiver of the world. The vague, living
countryside, the
moon, the remains of the day worked on me, as well as the slope
of the road
which eliminated any possibility of weariness. The afternoon
was intimate,
infinite. The road descended and forked among the now
confused meadows.

32. A high-pitched, almost syllabic music approached and receded
in the shifting
of the wind, dimmed by leaves and distance. I thought that a
man can be an
enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a
country: not
of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets. Thus I
arrived before a
tall, rusty gate. Between the iron bars I made out a poplar grove
and a
pavilion. I understood suddenly two things, the first trivial, the
second almost
unbelievable: the music came from the pavilion, and the music
was Chinese.
For precisely that reason I had openly accepted it without
paying it any heed.
I do not remember whether there was a bell or whether I
knocked with my
hand. The sparkling of the music continued.
From the rear of the house within a lantern approached: a
lantern that
the trees sometimes striped and sometimes eclipsed, a paper
lantern that had
the form of a drum and the color of the moon. A tall man bore
it. I didn't see
his face for the light blinded me. He opened the door and said
slowly, in my
own language: "I see that the pious Hsi P'eng persists in
correcting my
solitude. You no doubt wish to see the garden?"
I recognized the name of one of our consuls and I replied,
disconcerted,
"The garden?"

33. "The garden of forking paths."
Something stirred in my memory and I uttered with
incomprehensible
certainty, "The garden of my ancestor Ts'ui Pên."
"Your ancestor? Your illustrious ancestor? Come in."
The damp path zigzagged like those of my childhood. We came
to a
library of Eastern and Western books. I recognized bound in
yellow silk
several volumes of the Lost Encyclopedia, edited by the Third
Emperor of
the Luminous Dynasty but never printed. The record on the
phonograph
revolved next to a bronze phoenix. I also recall a famille rose
vase and another,
many centuries older, of that shade of blue which our craftsmen
copied from
the potters of Persia . . .
6
Stephen Albert observed me with a smile. He was, as I have
said, very
tall, sharp-featured, with gray eyes and a gray beard. He told me
that he had
been a missionary in Tientsin "before aspiring to become a
Sinologist."
We sat down--I on a long, low divan, he with his back to the
window and
a tall circular clock. I calculated that my pursuer, Richard
Madden, could not
arrive for at least an hour. My irrevocable determination could

34. wait.
"An astounding fate, that of Ts'ui Pên," Stephen Albert said.
"Governor of
his native province, learned in astronomy, in astrology and in
the tireless
interpretation of the canonical books, chess player, famous poet
and
calligrapher--he abandoned an this in order to compose a book
and a maze.
He renounced the pleasures of both tyranny and justice, of his
populous
couch, of his banquets and even of erudition--all to close
himself up for
thirteen years in the Pavilion of the Limpid Solitude. When he
died, his heirs
found nothing save chaotic manuscripts. His family, as you may
be aware,
wished to condemn them to the fire; but his executor--a Taoist
or Buddhist
monk--insisted on their publication."
'We descendants of Ts'ui Pên," I replied, "continue to curse that
monk.
Their publication was senseless. The book is an indeterminate
heap of
contradictory drafts. I examined it once: in the third chapter the
hero dies, in
the fourth he is alive. As for the other undertaking of Ts'ui Pên,
his
labyrinth . . ."
"Here is Ts'ui Pên's labyrinth," he said, indicating a tall
lacquered desk.
"An ivory labyrinth!" I exclaimed. "A minimum labyrinth."

35. "A labyrinth of symbols," he corrected. "An invisible labyrinth
of time.
To me, a barbarous Englishman, has been entrusted the
revelation of this
diaphanous mystery. After more than a hundred years, the
details are
irretrievable; but it is not hard to conjecture what happened.
Ts'ui Pe must
have said once: I am withdrawing to write a book. And another
time: I am withdrawing
to construct a labyrinth. Every one imagined two works; to no
one did it occur
that the book and the maze were one and the same thing. The
Pavilion of the
Limpid Solitude stood in the center of a garden that was perhaps
intricate;
that circumstance could have suggested to the heirs a physical
labyrinth. Ts'ui
7
Pên died; no one in the vast territories that were his came upon
the labyrinth;
the confusion of the novel suggested to me that it was the maze.
Two
circumstances gave me the correct solution of the problem. One:
the curious
legend that Ts'ui Pên had planned to create a labyrinth which
would be
strictly infinite. The other: a fragment of a letter I discovered."
Albert rose. He turned his back on me for a moment; he opened
a

36. drawer of the black and gold desk. He faced me and in his hands
he held a
sheet of paper that had once been crimson, but was now pink
and tenuous
and cross-sectioned. The fame of Ts'ui Pên as a calligrapher had
been justly
won. I read, uncomprehendingly and with fervor, these words
written with a
minute brush by a man of my blood: I leave to the various
futures (not to all) my
garden of forking paths. Wordlessly, I returned the sheet. Albert
continued:
"Before unearthing this letter, I had questioned myself about the
ways in
which a book can be infinite. I could think of nothing other than
a cyclic
volume, a circular one. A book whose last page was identical
with the first, a
book which had the possibility of continuing indefinitely. I
remembered too
that night which is at the middle of the Thousand and One
Nights when
Scheherazade (through a magical oversight of the copyist)
begins to relate
word for word the story of the Thousand and One Nights,
establishing the
risk of coming once again to the night when she must repeat it,
and thus on
to infinity. I imagined as well a Platonic. hereditary work.
transmitted from
father to son, in which each new individual adds a chapter or
corrects with
pious care the pages of his elders. These conjectures diverted
me; but none
seemed to correspond, not even remotely, to the contradictory

37. chapters of
Ts'ui Pên. In the midst of this perplexity, I received from
Oxford the
manuscript you have examined. I lingered, naturally, on the
sentence: I leave to
the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths.
Almost instantly, I
understood: 'the garden of forking paths' was the chaotic novel;
the phrase
'the various futures (not to all)' suggested to me the forking in
time, not in
space. A broad rereading of the work confirmed the theory. In
all fictional
works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives,
he chooses
one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts'ui Pên, he
chooses--
simultaneously--all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse
futures, diverse
times which themselves also proliferate and fork. Here, then, is
the
8
explanation of the novel's contradictions. Fang, let us say, has a
secret; a
stranger calls at his door; Fang resolves to kill him. Naturally,
there are
several possible outcomes: Fang can kill the intruder, the
intruder can kill
Fang, they both can escape, they both can die, and so forth. In
the work of
Ts'ui Pên, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of
departure for
other forkings. Sometimes, the paths of this labyrinth converge:
for example,

38. you arrive at this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are
my enemy, in
another, my friend. If you will resign yourself to my incurable
pronunciation,
we shall read a few pages."
His face, within the vivid circle of the lamplight, was
unquestionably that
of an old man, but with something unalterable about it, even
immortal. He
read with slow precision two versions of the same epic chapter.
In the first,
an army marches to a battle across a lonely mountain; the horror
of the rocks
and shadows makes the men undervalue their lives and they gain
an easy
victory. In the second, the same army traverses a palace where a
great festival
is taking place; the resplendent battle seems to them a
continuation of the
celebration and they win the victory. I listened with proper
veneration to
these ancient narratives, perhaps less admirable in themselves
than the fact
that they had been created by my blood and were being restored
to me by a
man of a remote empire, in the course of a desperate adventure,
on a
Western isle. I remember the last words, repeated in each
version like a secret
commandment: Thus fought the heroes, tranquil their admirable
hearts, violent their
swords, resigned to kill and to die.
From that moment on, I felt about me and within my dark body
an

39. invisible, intangible swarming. Not the swarming of the
divergent, parallel
and finally coalescent armies, but a more inaccessible, more
intimate agitation
that they in some manner prefigured. Stephen Albert continued:
"I don't believe that your illustrious ancestor played idly with
these
variations. I don't consider it credible that he would sacrifice
thirteen years to
the infinite execution of a rhetorical experiment. In your
country, the novel is
a subsidiary form of literature; in Ts'ui Pên's time it was a
despicable form.
Ts'ui Pên was a brilliant novelist, but he was also a man of
letters who
doubtless did not consider himself a mere novelist. The
testimony of his
contemporaries proclaims--and his life fully confirms--his
metaphysical and
9
mystical interests. Philosophic controversy usurps a good part
of the novel. I
know that of all problems, none disturbed him so greatly nor
worked upon
him so much as the abysmal problem of time. Now then, the
latter is the only
problem that does not figure in the pages of the Garden. He
does not even
use the word that signifies time. How do you explain this
voluntary omission?

40. I proposed several solutions--all unsatisfactory. We discussed
them.
Finally, Stephen Albert said to me:
"In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only prohibited
word?"
I thought a moment and replied, "The word chess."
"Precisely," said Albert. "The Garden of Forking Paths is an
enormous
riddle, or parable, whose theme is time; this recondite cause
prohibits its
mention. To omit a word always, to resort to inept metaphors
and obvious
periphrases, is perhaps the most emphatic way of stressing it.
That is the
tortuous method preferred, in each of the meanderings of his
indefatigable
novel, by the oblique Ts'ui Pên. I have compared hundreds of
manuscripts, I
have corrected the errors that the negligence of the copyists has
introduced, I
have guessed the plan of this chaos, I have re-established--I
believe I have re-
established--the primordial organization, I have translated the
entire work: it
is clear to me that not once does he employ the word 'time.' The
explanation
is obvious: The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but
not false, image
of the universe as Ts'ui Pên conceived it. In contrast to Newton
and
Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform,
absolute time. He
believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying

41. net of divergent,
convergent and parallel times. This network of times which
approached one
another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for
centuries,
embraces all possibilities of time. 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. In the present one, which a favorable fate has granted me,
you have
arrived at my house; in another, while crossing the garden, you
found me
dead; in still another, I utter these same words, but I am a
mistake, a ghost."
"In every one," I pronounced, not without a tremble to my
voice, "I am
grateful to you and revere you for your re-creation of the garden
of Ts'ui
Pên."
10
"Not in all," he murmured with a smile. "Time forks perpetually
toward
innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy."
Once again I felt the swarming sensation of which I have
spoken. It
seemed to me that the humid garden that surrounded the house
was infinitely
saturated with invisible persons. Those persons were Albert and
I, secret,
busy and multiform in other dimensions of time. I raised my
eyes and the

42. tenuous nightmare dissolved. In the yellow and black garden
there was only
one man; but this man was as strong as a statue . . . this man
was approaching
along the path and he was Captain Richard Madden.
"The future already exists," I replied, "but I am your friend.
Could I see
the letter again?"
Albert rose. Standing tall, he opened the drawer of the tall desk;
for the
moment his back was to me. I had readied the revolver. I fired
with extreme
caution. Albert fell uncomplainingly, immediately. I swear his
death was
instantaneous--a lightning stroke.
The rest is unreal, insignificant. Madden broke in, arrested me.
I have
been condemned to the gallows. I have won out abominably; I
have
communicated to Berlin the secret name of the city they must
attack. They
bombed it yesterday; I read it in the same papers that offered to
England the
mystery of the learned Sinologist Stephen Albert who was
murdered by a
stranger, one Yu Tsun. The Chief had deciphered this mystery.
He knew my
problem was to indicate (through the uproar of the war) the city
called
Albert, and that I had found no other means to do so than to kill
a man of
that name. He does not know (no one can know) my
innumerable contrition

43. and weariness.
1
Death and the Compass
To Mandie Molina Vedia
Of the many problems which exercised the daring perspicacity
of Lonnrot none was
so strange - so harshly strange, we may say - as the staggered
series of bloody acts
which culminated at the villa of Triste-le-Roy, amid the
boundless odor of the
eucalypti. It is true that Erik Lonnrot did not succeed in
preventing the last crime,
but it is indisputable that he foresaw it. Nor did he, of course,
guess the identity of
Yarmolinsky's unfortunate assassin, but he did divine the secret
morphology of the
vicious series as well as the participation of Red Scharlach,
whose alias, is Scharlach
the Dandy. This criminal (as so many others) had sworn on his
honor to kill
Lonnrot, but the latter had never allowed himself to be
intimidated. Lonnrot thought
of himself as a pure thinker, an Auguste Dupin, but there was
something of the
adventurer in him, and even of the gamester.

44. The first crime occurred at the Hotel du Nord - that high prism
that dominates the
estuary whose waters are the colors of the desert. To this tower
(which most
manifestly unites the hateful whiteness of a sanitorium, the
numbered divisibility of a
prison, and the general appearance of a bawdy house) on the
third day of December
came the delegate from Podolsk to the Third Talmudic
Congress, Doctor Marcel
Yarmolinsky, a man of gray beard and gray eyes. We shall
never know whether the
Hotel du Nord pleased him: he accepted it with the ancient
resignation which had
allowed him to endure three years of war in the Carpathians and
three thousand
years of oppression and pogroms. He was given a sleeping room
on floor R, in front
of the suite which the Tetrarch of Galilee occupied not without
some splendor.
Yarmolinsky supped, postponed until the following day an
investigation of the
unknown city, arranged upon a cupboard his many books and
his few possessions,
and before midnight turned off the light. (Thus declared the
Tetrarch's chauffeur,
who slept in an adjoining room.) On the fourth, at 11:03 A.M.,
there was a telephone
call for him from the editor of the Yiddische Zeitung; Doctor
Yarmolinsky did not
reply; he was found in his room, his face already a little dark,
and his body, almost
nude, beneath a large anachronistic cape. He was lying not far
from the door which
gave onto the corridor; a deep stab wound had split open his

45. breast. In the same
room, a couple of hours later, in the midst of journalists,
photographers, and police,
Commissioner Treviranus and Lonnrot were discussing the
problem with
equanimity.
"There's no need to look for a Chimera, or a cat with three
legs," Treviranus was
saying as he brandished an imperious cigar. "We all know that
the Tetrarch of
Galilee is the possessor of the finest sapphires in the world.
Someone, intending to
steal them, came in here by mistake. Yarmolinsky got up; the
robber had to kill him.
What do you think?"
"It's possible, but not interesting," Lonnrot answered. "You will
reply that reality
hasn't the slightest need to be of interest. And I'll answer you
that reality may avoid
the obligation to be interesting, but that hypotheses may not. In
the hypothesis you
have postulated, chance intervenes largely. Here lies a dead
rabbi; I should prefer a
purely rabbinical explanation; not the imaginary mischances of
an imaginary robber."
2
Treviranus answered ill-humoredly:

46. "I am not interested in rabbinical explanations; I am interested
in the capture of the
man who stabbed this unknown person."
"Not so unknown," corrected Lonnrot. "Here are his complete
works." He indicated
a line of tall volumes: A Vindication of the Cabala; An
Examination of the Philosophy
of Robert Fludd; a literal translation of the Sepher Yezirah; a
Biography of the Baal
Shem; a History of the Sect of the Hasidim; a monograph (in
German) on the
Tetragrammaton; another, on the divine nomenclature of the
Pentateuch. The
Commissioner gazed at them with suspicion, almost with
revulsion. Then he fell to
laughing.
"I'm only a poor Christian," he replied. "Carry off all these
moth-eaten classics if you
like; I haven't got time to lose in Jewish superstitions."
"Maybe this crime belongs to the history of Jewish
superstitions," murmured
Lonnrot.
"Like Christianity," the editor of the Yiddische Zeitung dared to
put in. He was a
myope, an atheist, and very timid.
No one answered him. One of the agents had found inserted in
the small typewriter
a piece of paper on which was written the following
inconclusive sentence.

47. The first letter of the Name has been spoken
Lonnrot abstained from smiling. Suddenly become a bibliophile
- or Hebraist - he
directed that the dead man's books be made into a parcel, and he
carried them to
his office. Indifferent to the police investigation, he dedicated
himself to studying
them. A large octavo volume revealed to him the teachings of
Israel Baal Shem-Tob,
founder of the sect of the Pious; another volume, the virtues and
terrors of the
Tetragrammaton, which is the ineffable name of God; another,
the thesis that God
has a secret name, in which is epitomized (as in the crystal
sphere which the Persians
attribute to Alexander of Macedon) his ninth attribute, eternity -
that is to say, the
immediate knowledge of everything that will exist, exists, and
has existed in the
universe. Tradition numbers ninety-nine names of God; the
Hebraists attribute this
imperfect number to the magical fear of even numbers; the
Hasidim reason that this
hiatus indicates a hundredth name-the Absolute Name.
From this erudition he was distracted, within a few days, by the
appearance of the
editor of the Yiddische Zeitung. This man wished to talk of the
assassination;
Lonnrot preferred to speak of the diverse names of God. The
journalist declared, in
three columns, that the investigator Erik Lonnrot had dedicated
himself to studying
the names of God in order to "come up with" the name of the

48. assassin. Lonnrot,
habituated to the simplifications of journalism, did not become
indignant. One of
those shopkeepers who have found that there are buyers for
every book came out
with a popular edition of the History of the Sect of the Hasidim.
The second crime occurred on the night of the third of January,
in the most
deserted and empty corner of the capital's western suburbs.
Toward dawn, one of
3
the gendarmes who patrol these lonely places on horseback
detected a man in a
cape, lying prone in the shadow of an ancient paint shop. The
hard visage seemed
bathed in blood; a deep stab wound had split open his breast. On
the wall, upon the
yellow and red rhombs, there were some words written in chalk.
The gendarme
spelled them out . . .
That afternoon Treviranus and Lonnrot made their way toward
the remote scene of
the crime. To the left and right of the automobile, the city
disintegrated; the
firmament grew larger and the houses meant less and less and a
brick kiln or a
poplar grove more and more. They reached their miserable
destination: a final alley
of rose-colored mud walls which in some way seemed to reflect

49. the disordered
setting of the sun. The dead man had already been identified. He
was Daniel Simon
Azevedo, a man of some fame in the ancient northern suburbs,
who had risen from
wagoner to political tough, only to degenerate later into a thief
and even an
informer. (The singular style of his death struck them as
appropriate: Azevedo was
the last representative of a generation of bandits who knew how
to handle a dagger,
but not a revolver.) The words in chalk were the following:
The second letter of the Name has been spoken
The third crime occurred on the night of the third of February.
A little before one
o'clock, the telephone rang in the office of Commissioner
Treviranus. In avid
secretiveness a man with a guttural voice spoke: he said his
name was Ginzberg (or
Ginsburg) and that he was disposed to communicate, for a
reasonable remuneration,
an explanation of the two sacrifices of Azevedo and
Yarmolinsky. The discordant
sound of whistles and horns drowned out the voice of the
informer. Then the
connection was cut off. Without rejecting the possibility of a
hoax (it was carnival
time), Treviranus checked and found he had been called from
Liverpool House, a
tavern on the Rue de Toulon - that dirty street where cheek by
jowl are the
peepshow and the milk store, the bordello and the women
selling Bibles. Treviranus

50. called back and spoke to the owner. This personage (Black
Finnegan by name, an old
Irish criminal who was crushed, annihilated almost, by
respectability) told him that
the last person to use the establishment's phone had been a
lodger, a certain
Gryphius, who had just gone out with some friends. Treviranus
immediately went to
Liverpool House, where Finnegan related the following facts.
Eight days previously,
Gryphius had taken a room above the saloon. He was a man of
sharp features, a
nebulous gray beard, shabbily clothed in black; Finnegan (who
put the room to a use
which Treviranus guessed) demanded a rent which was
undoubtedly excessive;
Gryphius immediately paid the stipulated sum. He scarcely ever
went out; he dined
and lunched in his room; his face was hardly known in the bar.
On this particular
night, he carne down to telephone from Finnegan's office. A
closed coupe stopped in
front of the tavern. The driver did not move from his seat;
several of the patrons
recalled that he was wearing a bear mask. Two harlequins
descended from the
coupe; they were short in stature, and no one could fail to
observe that they were
very drunk. With a tooting of horns they burst into Finnegan's
office; they embraced
Gryphius, who seemed to recognize them but who replied to
them coldly; they
exchanged a few words in Yiddish - he, in a low guttural voice;
they, in shrill, falsetto
tones - and then the party climbed to the upstairs room. Within
a quarter hour the

51. three descended, very joyous; Gryphius, staggering, seemed as
drunk as the others.
He walked - tall, dazed - in the middle, between the masked
harlequins. (One of the
women in the bar remembered the yellow, red and green
rhombs, the diamond
4
designs.) Twice he stumbled; twice he was held up by the
harlequins. Alongside the
adjoining dock basin, whose water was rectangular, the trio got
into the coupe and
disappeared. From the running board, the last of the harlequins
had scrawled an
obscene figure and a sentence on one of the slates of the
outdoor shed.
Treviranus gazed upon the sentence. It was nearly
foreknowable. It read:
The last of the letters of the Name has been spoken
He examined, then, the small room of Gryphius-Ginzberg. On
the floor was a violent
star of blood; in the corners, the remains of some Hungarian-
brand cigarettes; in a
cabinet, a book in Latin - the Philologus Hebraeo-Graecus
(1739) of Leusden - along
with various manuscript notes. Treviranus studied the book with
indignation and had
Lonnrot summoned. The latter, without taking off his hat, began

52. to read while the
Commissioner questioned the contradictory witnesses to the
possible kidnapping. At
four in the morning they came out. In the tortuous Rue de
Toulon, as they stepped
on the dead serpentines of the dawn, Treviranus said:
"And supposing the story of this night were a sham?"
Erik Lonnrot smiled and read him with due gravity a passage
(underlined) of the
thirty-third dissertation of the Philologus:
Dies Judaeorum incipit a solis occasu usque ad solis occasum
diei sequentis.
"This means," he added, "that the Hebrew day begins at
sundown and lasts until the
following sundown."
Treviranus attempted an irony.
"Is this fact the most worthwhile you've picked up tonight?"
"No. Of even greater value is a word Ginzberg used."
The afternoon dailies did not neglect this series of
disappearances. The Cross and
the Sword contrasted them with the admirable discipline and
order of the last
Eremitical Congress; Ernest Palast, writing in The Martyr,
spoke out against "the
intolerable delays in this clandestine and frugal pogrom, which
has taken three
months to liquidate three Jews"; the Yiddische Zeitung rejected
the terrible

53. hypothesis of an anti-Semitic plot, "even though many
discerning intellects do not
admit of any other solution to the triple mystery"; the most
illustrious gunman in the
South, Dandy Red Scharlach, swore that in his district such
crimes as these would
never occur, and he accused Commissioner Franz Treviranus of
criminal negligence.
On the night of March first, the Commissioner received an
imposing-looking, sealed
envelope. He opened it: the envelope contained a letter signed
Baruj Spinoza, and a
detailed plan of the city, obviously torn from a Baedeker. The
letter prophesied that
on the third of March there would not be a fourth crime,
inasmuch as the paint shop
in the West, the Tavern on the Rue de Toulon and the Hotel du
Nord were the
"perfect vertices of an equilateral and mystic triangle"; the
regularity of this triangle
was made clear on the map with red ink. This argument, more
geometrico,
5
Treviranus read with resignation, and sent the letter and map on
to Lonnrot - who
deserved such a piece of insanity.
Erik Lonnrot studied the documents. The three sites were in fact
equidistant.
Symmetry in time (the third of December, the third of January,

54. the third of
February); symmetry in space as well . . . Of a sudden he sensed
he was about to
decipher the mystery. A set of calipers and a compass
completed his sudden
intuition. He smiled, pronounced the word "Tetragrammaton"
(of recent
acquisition), and called the Commissioner on the telephone. He
told him:
"Thank you for the equilateral triangle you sent me last night. It
has enabled me to
solve the problem. Tomorrow, Friday, the criminals will be in
jail, we can rest
assured."
"In that case, they're not planning a fourth crime?"
"Precisely because they are planning a fourth crime can we rest
assured."
Lonnrot hung up. An hour later he was traveling in one of the
trains of the Southern
Railways, en route to the abandoned villa of Triste-le-Roy.
South of the city of our
story there flows a blind little river filled with muddy water
made disgraceful by
floating scraps and garbage. On the further side is a
manufacturing suburb where,
under the protection of a chief from Barcelona, gunmen
flourish. Lonnrot smiled to
himself to think that the most famous of them - Red Scharlach -
would have given
anything to know of this clandestine visit. Azevedo had been a
comrade of
Scharlach's; Lonnrot considered the remote possibility that the

55. fourth victim might
be Scharlach himself. Then, he put aside the thought . . . He had
virtually deciphered
the problem; the mere circumstances, or the reality (names,
prison records, faces,
judicial and penal proceedings), scarcely interested him now.
Most of all he wanted
to take a stroll, to relax from three months of sedentary
investigation. He reflected
on how the explanation of the crimes lay in an anonymous
triangle and a dust-laden
Greek word. The mystery seemed to him almost crystalline now;
he was mortified
to have dedicated a hundred days to it.
The train stopped at a silent loading platform. Lonnrot
descended. It was one of
those deserted afternoons which seem like dawn. The air over
the muddy plain was
damp and cold. Lonnrot set off across the fields. He saw dogs,
he saw a wagon on a
dead road, he saw the horizon, he saw a silvery horse drinking
the crapulous water
of a puddle. Dusk was falling when he saw the rectangular
belvedere of the villa of
Triste-le-Roy, almost as tall as the black eucalypti which
surrounded it. He thought
of the fact that only one more dawn and one more nightfall (an
ancient splendor in
the east, and another in the west) separated him from the hour
so much desired by
the seekers of the Name.
A rust colored wrought-iron fence defined the irregular
perimeter of the villa. The
main gate was closed. Without much expectation of entering,

56. Lonnrot made a
complete circuit. In front of the insurmountable gate once again,
he put his hand
between the bars almost mechanically and chanced upon the
bolt. The creaking of
the iron surprised him. With laborious passivity the entire gate
gave way.
6
Lonnrot advanced among the eucalypti, stepping amidst
confused generations of
rigid, broken leaves. Close up, the house on the estate of Triste-
le-Roy was seen to
abound in superfluous symmetries and in maniacal repetitions: a
glacial Diana in one
lugubrious niche was complemented by another Diana in
another niche; one balcony
was repeated by another balcony; double steps of stairs opened
into a double
balustrade. A two-faced Hermes cast a monstrous shadow.
Lonnrot circled the
house as he had the estate. He examined everything; beneath the
level of the terrace
he noticed a narrow shutter door.
He pushed against it: some marble steps descended to a vault.
Versed now in the
architect's preferences, Lonnrot divined that there would be a
set of stairs on the
opposite wall. He found them, ascended, raised his hands, and
pushed up a trap

57. door.
The diffusion of light guided him to a window. He opened it: a
round, yellow moon
outlined two stopped-up fountains in the melancholy garden.
Lonnrot explored the
house. He traveled through antechambers and galleries to
emerge upon duplicate
patios; several times he emerged upon the same patio. He
ascended dust-covered
stairways and came out into circular antechambers; he was
infinitely reflected in
opposing mirrors; he grew weary of opening or half-opening
windows which
revealed the same desolate garden outside, from various heights
and various angles;
inside, the furniture was wrapped in yellow covers and the
chandeliers bound up
with cretonne. A bedroom detained him; in the bedroom, a
single rose in a porcelain
vase - at the first touch the ancient petals fell apart. On the
second floor, on the top
story, the house seemed to be infinite and growing. The house is
not this large, he
thought. It is only made larger by the penumbra, the symmetry,
the mirrors, the
years, my ignorance, the solitude.
Going up a spiral staircase he arrived at the observatory. The
evening moon shone
through the rhomboid diamonds of the windows, which were
yellow, red and green.
He was brought to a halt by a stunning and dizzying
recollection.
Two men of short stature, ferocious and stocky, hurled

58. themselves upon him and
took his weapon. Another man, very tall, saluted him gravely,
and said:
"You are very thoughtful. You've saved us a night and a day."
It was Red Scharlach. His men manacled Lonnrot's hands.
Lonnrot at length found
his voice.
"Are you looking for the Secret Name, Scharlach?"
Scharlach remained standing, indifferent. He had not
participated in the short
struggle; he scarcely stretched out his hand to receive Lonnrot's
revolver. He spoke;
in his voice Lonnrot detected a fatigued triumph, a hatred the
size of the universe, a
sadness no smaller than that hatred.
"No," answered Scharlach. "I am looking for something more
ephemeral and
slippery, I am looking for Erik Lonnrot. Three years ago, in a
gambling house on the
Rue de Toulon, you arrested my brother and had him sent to
prison. In the
exchange of shots that night my men got me away in a coupe,
with a police bullet in
7
my chest. Nine days and nine nights I lay dying in this desolate,
symmetrical villa; I

59. was racked with fever, and the odious double-faced Janus who
gazes toward the
twilights of dusk and dawn terrorized my dreams and my
waking. I learned to
abominate my body, I came to feel that two eyes, two hands,
two lungs are as
monstrous as two faces. An Irishman attempted to convert me to
the faith of Jesus;
he repeated to me that famous axiom of the goyim: All roads
lead to Rome. At night,
my delirium nurtured itself on this metaphor: I sensed that the
world was a labyrinth,
from which it was impossible to flee, for all paths, whether they
seemed to lead
north or south, actually led to Rome, which was also the
quadrilateral jail where my
brother was dying and the villa of Triste-le-Roy. During those
nights I swore by the
god who sees from two faces, and by all the gods of fever and
of mirrors, to weave a
labyrinth around the man who had imprisoned my brother. I
have woven it, and it
holds: the materials are a dead writer on heresies, a compass, an
eighteenth-century
sect, a Greek word, a dagger, the rhombs of a paint shop.
"The first objective in the sequence was given me by chance. I
had made plans with
some colleagues - among them, Daniel Azevedo - to take the
Tetrarch's sapphires.
Azevedo betrayed us; with the money we advanced him he got
himself inebriated
and started on the job a day early. In the vastness of the hotel
he got lost; at two in
the morning he blundered into Yarmolinsky's room. The latter,
harassed by

60. insomnia, had set himself to writing. He was editing some
notes, apparently, or
writing an article on the Name of God; he had just written the
words The first letter
of the Name has been spoken. Azevedo enjoined him to be
quiet; Yarmolinsky
reached out his hand for the bell which would arouse all the
hotel's forces; Azevedo
at once stabbed him in the chest. It was almost a reflex action:
half a cen tury of
violence had taught him that it was easiest and surest to kill . . .
Ten days later, I
learned through the Yiddische Zeitung that you were perusing
the writings of
Yarmolinsky for the key to his death. For my part I read the
History of the Sect of
the Hasidim; I learned that the reverent fear of pronouncing the
Name of God had
given rise to the doctrine that this Name is all-powerful and
mystic. I learned that
some Hasidim, in search of this secret Name, had gone as far as
to offer human
sacrifices . . . I knew you would conjecture that the Hasidim had
sacrificed the rabbi;
I set myself to justifying this conjecture.
"Marcel Yarmolinsky died on the night of December third; for
the second sacrifice I
selected the night of January third. Yarmolinsky died in the
North; for the second
sacrifice a place in the West was preferable. Daniel Azevedo
was the inevitable
victim. He deserved death: he was an impulsive person, a
traitor; his capture could
destroy the entire plan. One of our men stabbed him; in order to
link his corpse to

61. the other one I wrote on the paint shop diamonds The second
letter of the Name
has been spoken.
"The third 'crime' was produced on the third of February. It was
as Treviranus must
have guessed, a mere mockery, a simulacrum. I am Gryphius-
Ginzberg-Ginsburg; I
endured an interminable week (filled out with a tenuous false
beard) in that perverse
cubicle on the Rue de Toulon, until my friends spirited me
away. From the running
board one of them wrote on a pillar The last of the letters of the
Name has been
spoken. This sentence revealed that the series of crimes was
triple. And the public
thus understood it; nevertheless, I interspersed repeated signs
that would allow you,
Erik Lonnrot, the reasoner, to understand that it is quadruple. A
portent in the
North, others in the East and West, demand a fourth portent in
the South; the
8
Tetragrammaton - the name of God, JHVH - is made up of four
letters; the
harlequins and the paint shop sign suggested four points. In the
manual of Leusden I
underlined a certain passage: it manifested that the Hebrews
calculate a day counting
from dusk to dusk and that therefore the deaths occurred on the
fourth day of each

62. month. To Treviranus I sent the equilateral triangle. I sensed
that you would supply
the missing point. The point which would form a perfect rhomb,
the point which
fixes where death, exactly, awaits you. In order to attract you I
have premeditated
everything, Erik Lonnrot, so as to draw you to the solitude of
Triste-le-Roy."
Lonnrot avoided Scharlach's eyes. He was looking at the trees
and the sky divided
into rhombs of turbid yellow, green and red. He felt a little
cold, and felt, too, an
impersonal, almost anonymous sadness. It was already night;
from the dusty garden
arose the useless cry of a bird. For the last time, Lonnrot
considered the problem of
symmetrical and periodic death.
"In your labyrinth there are three lines too many," he said at
last. "I know of a Greek
labyrinth which is a single straight line. Along this line so many
philosophers have lost
themselves that a mere detective might well do so too.
Scharlach, when, in some
other incarnation you hunt me, feign to commit (or do commit)
a crime at A, then a
second crime at B, eight kilometers from A, then a third crime
at C, four kilometers
from A and B, halfway enroute between the two. Wait for me
later at D, two
kilometers from A and C, halfway, once again, between both.
Kill me at D, as you
are now going to kill me at Triste-le-Roy."
"The next time I kill you," said Scharlach, "I promise you the

63. labyrinth made of the
single straight line which is invisible and everlasting."
He stepped back a few paces. Then, very carefully, he fired.
Study Questions for Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Born in 1928, Marquez won the Nobel Prize in 1982 and was
perhaps best known for his third novel, 100 Years of
Solitude[1967], although he published multiple collections of
short stories and essays, as well as eight novels. You can find
additinal information about his life and works through the
Marquez link in our schedule of readings. Known as Gabo to his
friends and fans, Garcia Marquez was considered one of the
most significant Latin american writers of his generation and,
along with Borges and others, was associated with magical
realism, fiction that blurs the boundaries between the mundane
and the fantastic, reality and dream.
As your read "A Very old Man with Enourmous Wings" [1955],
consider some of the following issues:
1. Who narrates this story? Characterize the narrator.
2. After the old man arrives at the coastal fishing
village, the villagers provide six interpretations of who the old
man is. What are the six interpretations and how is each
interpretation somehow a result of the individual biases or
perspectives of the villager stating the interpretation?
3. To what extent do these interpretations of what the
old man is warn us about attempting to provide rational
explanations for fantastic or irrational events?
4. How do Pelayo and Elisenda benefit from the
presence of the very old man?
5. Why does Garcia Marquez introduce the spider
woman into the story? That is, how does her presence in the
story provide a comment on human nature and on the villagers'
reactions to the very old man?
6. Does this story, which some readers and critics

64. consider to be a children's story, a fairy tale, have a moral, a
lesson for us, just as the story of the spider woman functions as
a lesson to children who disobey their parents?