Circular time, pullulation and failure in “The Garden of Forking Paths”, by Jorge Luis Borges

Abstract

The article intends to show that, despite the fact that different readings of “The garden of forking paths”, by Jorge Luis Borges, always mention the importance of the term “pullulation” – a word that appears there three times at a crucial moment in the narrative –, this importance is rarely made explicit. By carefully discussing the passage in which the word is repeatedly used, the hope is to expand the current reading linked to it of the work's circularity and multiplicity. At the same time, the article hopes to show how this expansion implies the failure (and there is nothing negative about it) of the text itself and of its interpretation, and how that idea of failure was already widespread in this story and also in the other two stories by Borges (“Death and the compass” and “Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, dead in his labyrinth”) that re-read the three Edgar Allan Poe’s detective stories.