Chapter 1: (Introduction) The Garden of Forking Paths

Timeline:
1941: Borges writes "The Garden of Forking Paths
- Jorge Luis Borges, Argentinian writer, librarian, played with the manipulation of space and time, disillusionment, can be read as hypertext novel, explored the concept of a parallel universe

1963: Jolio Cortazar writes Hopscotch in Paris
- Included "expandable" chapters, another Argentinian writer, Borges was familiar with his work and published his first short story in 1946

1987: Stuart Moulthrop creates a hypertextual version of "The Garden of Forking Paths"
- Also wrote hypertext novel set during Gulf War


Summary:

• Initially, the Web was rejected by the New Media community
• Borges' work can be analogous to concepts of New Media, hypertext, the creation of parallel universes and the manipulation of time and space
• Other texts inspiring writers in the digital age by Borges include, "The Library of Babel" and "The Book of Sand"
• The complex way in which Borges organizes his fiction parallels the way a computer programmer fiddles with codes in order to create things within the digital space

I was secretly thankful when I realized we would look at a Borges story I had already encountered here at NYU. The first time I discovered Borges was the way it should be read, in its vernacular Spanish. Although challenging, we were given Borges poems and stories to dissect in my 11th grade Spanish class. Obviously the task was daunting, and ironically now, looking back it was a lot of decoding. Translating at times, word for word of an idiom into English in order to insure my comprehension. Borges would be laughing at how removed from his original discourse I am right now...I'm reading a translation of a short story in a text book about digital media and blogging about it online...

The second time I encountered this story was in a Post Modern Fiction class I took in Florence. Although Borges does not necessarily fit within the chronological time frame of postmodernism, his ideas certainly do. His incessant flirtation with time and space is almost filmic and at times, very surreal. Again, I was delighted to find that Post Modernism was linked to New Media and New Media to Borges creating a non linear web of relativity that Borges would admire. I would love to see if any of his stories from Ficciones would translate well on film.