HONG LOU MENG IN JORGE LUIS BORGES’S NARRATIVE

Haiqing Sun

Debo a la conjunción de un espejo y de una

enciclopedia el descubrimiento […]
Jorge Luis Borges

C
ao Xueqin’s Hong Lou Meng (Dream of the Red Chamber)
represents the highest achievement of the classical narra-
tive during the Ming-Qing period of China.1 Studies of
the text have long become an important subject for scholars
worldwide. In 1937, Jorge Luis Borges dedicates one of his es-
says on world literature to Hong Lou Meng, which displays a
curious observation of this masterpiece.2 Based on German
scholar Franz Kuhn’s translation, Borges presents the Chinese
novel as “[…] la novela más famosa de una literatura casi tres
veces milenaria […] Abunda lo fantástico” (4: 329). Known as a
master of fictitious narrative himself, Borges seems not ready to

1 The English versions of the title and author of Hong Lou Meng in the referen-
ces include the following: Hung Lou Meng and Tsao Hsue Kin (by Borges), Hong
Lou Meng and Cao Xue Qin (by Xiao, and Scott), and Hung Lu Meng and Tsao
Hsueh Chin (by Balderston). Others use the translation Dream of the Red Chamber
or the original title The Story of the Stone.
2 Borges wrote this series of essays for the journal El Hogar in Argentina.

Variaciones Borges 22 (2006)

16 HAIQING SUN

present any further understanding of Hong Lou Meng in the es-

say. He reviews the first three chapters of the novel in an
abstract and somehow schematic way:

El primer capítulo cuenta la historia de una piedra de origen

celestial, destinada a soldar una avería del firmamento y que no
logra ejecutar su divina misión; el segundo narra que el héroe de
la obra ha nacido con una lámina de jade bajo la lengua; el
tercero nos hace conocer al héroe (…) (4: 329)

Then, he comes to admit that he feels confused by the “grand

view” of Hung Lou Meng’s narrative: “[l]a novela prosigue de
una manera un tanto irresponsable o insípida; los personajes
secundarios pululan y no sabemos bien cuál es cuál. Estamos
como perdidos en una casa de muchos patios” (4: 329). For a
Hong Lou Meng scholar, this statement may sound “irresponsible
and insipid,” for how could a reader of this famous novel com-
pletely ignore the love story of Baoyu and Daiyu, and the fate of
the Garden of Total Vision (Da Guan Yuan)?3 and, how could a
critic praise the author to be great (un gran escritor), and at the
same time say that he has not quite understood the work? Be-
sides, Borges’s review of Hong Lou Meng shows an emphasis on
the fantastic factors such as “historia de una piedra de origin
celestial,” and “el héroe de la obra ha nacido con una lámina de
jade bajo la lengua” (4: 329). Meanwhile, these fantastic issues
appear mostly in the outskirt of the novel, as a lead toward the
main story happened in real world.4 For a Western reader who
has no knowledge of the novel, Borges’s summary can be mis-
leading and damaging. However, if one sets aside the possibility
that Borges somehow misreads this novel, it is interesting to
notice that the manner with which he presents Hong Lou Meng
coincides with his perception of the nature of classical literature.

3 There are different translations of the name of the garden in Hong Lou Meng.
Dore Levy uses “The Garden of Total Vision.” Other scholars such as Scott and
Xiao use the translation “The Garden of Grand View.”
4 Borges’s “Olaf Stapledon,” a synthetic biography of the writer of fantastic
worlds appeared the same day in El Hogar as his essay on Hong Long Meng. This
fact also may suggest that Borges has read the Chinese novel solely as fantastic
literature.
 HONG LOU MENG 17

In another essay, “Sobre los clásicos”, Borges suggests that

the classical works are not defined by self-sufficient merits but
by reading, by the reader’s choice. “Clásico es aquel libro que
una nación o un grupo de naciones, o un largo tiempo han
decidido leer como si en sus páginas todo fuera deliberado, fatal,
profundo como el cosmos y capaz de interpretaciones sin
término” (2: 151). He also claims that the limitation of a work is
due to the limitation of its readers’ range. For example, “Para los
alemanes y austríacos el Fausto es una obra genial; para otros,
una de las más famosas formas del tedio” (2: 151). If one takes
into account such a point of view, it is not quite strange, then, to
find that Borges’s essay on Hong Lou Meng does not provide
much comment or analysis essential to further understand the
Chinese classics, for the central idea in this short essay is in fact
about a western writer being amazed by a novel containing more
than one hundred chapters and more than three hundred charac-
ters. Different from most of the Hong Lou Meng scholars, Borges’s
focus is not on certain specific aspects of the novel, such as its
characters, plots, narrative strategies, or historical contexts, but
on the general fact that a novel can have so vast a textual con-
struction. The amazement becomes even stronger considering
that the novel is distanced from him by time, space, and lan-
guage. Borges should not be criticized here as a professional
Hong Lou Meng scholar, for the sake of Hong Lou Meng and many
other classical works, because he is first a writer. For example, to
the Arabic treasure One Thousand and One Nights, Borges sug-
gests that this work is so great that it is not necessary to have
read it (completely), because it is already part of our memory. 5
Apparently, this statement is not about weighing the literary
quality of a masterpiece, but rather about an observation of its
general and global value. These classics are quoted as a cultural
reference in Borges’s own literary product, including his fictions.
His short story “The Garden of the Forking Paths” (“El jardín de
senderos que se bifurcan,” 1941) is such a piece, in which both
Hong Lou Meng and One Thousand and One Nights are mentioned

5 “Es un libro tan vasto que no es necesario haberlo leído, ya que es parte
previa de nuestra memoria […]” (“Las mil y una noches,” 3: 241).
18 HAIQING SUN

(1: 475 and 1: 477). This story, written four years after that intro-
ductory essay on Hong Lou Meng, provides us a chance to view
another and more detailed interpretation of Cao Xueqin’s great
novel, and the writing of the “total vision” from a master’s mind.
“The Garden of Forking Paths” is one of Borges’s most fa-
mous short stories. The story starts with an incident of a British
artillery mentioned in Liddell Hart’s A History of the World War,
and proposes that a deposition from a spy provides explanations
to that incident. The spy is named Yu Tsun, a Chinese scholar
from former German colony Tsing Tao (Qing Dao), who works
for the German intelligence in England during the World War.
Yu Tsun needs to pass a message from England to his supervisor
in Berlin, about the location of some British artillery. Knowing
that he is exposed and that a British intelligence agent is after
him, Yu Tsun heads to a house that he has selected apparently at
random in a phonebook. It is the address of Stephen Albert, a
Sinologist, who has been working to solve an ancient mystery in
Chinese culture left by Yu Tsun’s great-grandfather Ts’ui Pên.
Ts’ui Pên is said to have written a novel more complex than
Hong Lou Meng, and to have built a garden with forking paths,
but he is murdered before he can complete his work and reveal
the location of his creations. Albert talks with Yu Tsun about the
mystery, as he finds out that Ts’ui Pên’s enormous novel and his
garden of imminent forking paths are eventually one same work,
a labyrinth of time. Yu Tsun then kills Albert, and confesses his
motive: the British artillery is located in a city by the same name,
and when Albert’s murder makes the news, German intelligence
will figure out the secret, and bomb the French city of Albert.
This story takes the shape of a spy thriller. Its narrative ap-
parently follows a generic mode of the criminal fiction, accord-
ing to which the central task of the narrative is to live the
mystery and “delay” the solution for the pleasure of reading the
text, as Roland Barthes observes: “Truth is brushed past,
avoided, lost . . . The dynamics of the text is thus paradoxical: it
is a static dynamics: the problem is to maintain the enigma in the
initial void of its answer” (75). From the beginning of the narra-
tive until the last paragraph of the text, Yu Tsun’s motive re-
 HONG LOU MENG 19

mains mysterious. The reader is kept in the dark about his mis-
sion in the war as the narrative focuses on his efforts to escape
from his pursuers. His escape as a narrative matter forms a “de-
lay” for the mystery of his action, maintains the suspense over
his fate, and bridges the gap between his initial motive—to serve
a cause in World War I in Europe, and the denouement of his
efforts—the destruction of a cultural mission about ancient
China. It is during the escape that Yu Tsun is led by the Sinolo-
gist Albert into another mystery, the garden of the forking paths
from China. Therefore, this escape is where the story differenti-
ates itself from most popular criminal fiction, and from where
the reader can detect the metaphysical sense of the text: “Bajo
árboles ingleses medité en ese laberinto [chino] perdido […]
Absorto en esas ilusorias imágenes, olvidé mi destino de
perseguido [por la policía]” (1: 475).
At this point, the narrative also “escapes,” along with Yu
Tsun, from a modern spy story into an examination of an Orien-
tal cultural product. Yu Tsun’s encounter with the garden of
forking paths, an enigma in both Chinese studies and the history
of his own family, takes about two thirds of the textual space,
and forms the core of the narrative. On first introducing the
enigma in the story, Borges uses Hong Lou Meng as a reference
for the general image of a mysterious Chinese artwork:

Algo entiendo de laberintos: no en vano soy bisnieto de aquel

Ts’ui Pên, que fue gobernador de Yunnan y que renunció al
poder temporal para escribir una novela que fuera todavía más
populosa que el Hung Lou Meng y para edificar un laberinto en el
que se perdieran todos los hombres. Trece años dedicó a esas
heterogéneas fatigas, pero la mano de un forastero lo asesinó y
su novela era insensata y nadie encontró el laberinto. (1: 475)

This is the only time in the narrative that Hong Lou Meng is men-
tioned. A reader can choose to believe that the mentioning of
Cao Xueqin’s novel is pure coincidence, and that Borges may
have possibly cited other classical works instead. However, there
is at least one more coincidence for the reader’s consideration,
since, similar to what we have seen in his essay “Hung Lou Meng
20 HAIQING SUN

de Tsao Hsue Kin,” the Chinese classic is still viewed as a novel

with too many characters. Therefore, it is arguable that the large
number of characters in Hong Lou Meng is a fact that attracts, and
confuses the reader-writer Borges, and is taken by him not only
as a major characteristic of the novel’s narrative, but also as an
important poetical component of his own story. Besides, the
“garden” in Borges’s story is represented by at least three differ-
ent images, and the connections among these images also re-
mind the reader of Hong Lou Meng.
Through the mystery of Ts’ui Pên, Yu Tsun’s great-
grandfather, Borges shows different levels of access towards a
distant yet profound culture. The first image of garden which
appears in the narrative is Stephen Albert’s residence, a physical
imitation of a Chinese garden that helps Yu Tsun recall his an-
cestor. It has avenues, pavilions, Chinese music, lanterns, vases,
books, and, not a Chinese but a Western researcher in it. The
depiction shows an outsider’s view of Chinese culture, with a
display of “unfamiliarity” from sporadic and trivial samples of
artworks. This simulation of a Chinese garden-residence is not
only a symbol of a mixture of culture, but also a platform for a
“narrative hybrid”: it is a site for both a story of Chinese study
and for a wartime crime; it is a connection between the past and
present across two continents and across civilization and barba-
rism, and most importantly, it is the conjunction in the narratives
for the other two “gardens”—Yu Tsun’s imaginative work of his
ancestor’s creation, and Albert’s research and solution to that
garden’s mystery. The narrative of the last two gardens repre-
sents a trajectory of the text’s further reach onto a metaphysical
level. The garden of forking paths is a complex notion carrying
different outlooks and physical natures for each of the two main
characters. For the Sinologist Albert, it is an academic challenge
in such fields as literature, history, and philosophy. For Yu Tsun,
the imagined garden is a multi-universe, or in the words of critic
David M. Balch, “implications of the many-worlds view of
physical reality” (59), in which “[i]t is by the act of observation
that the wave function, the total number of probabilities, col-
lapses into one” (60). As Yu Tsun probes, it does not obey the
physical rules:
 HONG LOU MENG 21

[l]o imaginé inviolado y perfecto en la cumbre secreta de una

montaña, lo imaginé borrado por arrozales o debajo del agua, lo
imaginé infinito, no ya de quioscos ochavados y de sendas que
vuelven, sino de ríos y provincias y reinos… Pensé en un
laberinto de laberintos, en un sinuoso laberinto creciente que
abarcara el pasado y el porvenir y que implicara de algún modo
los astros. (1: 475)

This perception illustrates an artwork un-locatable in either

“time” or “space” from a common sense, since there is no limit,
border, or direction.
Interestingly, some Hong Lou Meng scholars hold visions
similar to those of the narrator in “The Garden of Forking
Paths,” in their access toward the Garden of Total Vision in the
narrative of Hong Lou Meng. For example, Mary Scott observes
that the image of garden has a rich and complex set of associa-
tions in the narrative:

A garden, whose most important feature is the harmonious rela-

tionship between its building and its topography, reflects the
subtler, less immediately perceptible order and harmony in the
larger universe, in which the strict symmetries of human society
are subsumed in larger harmonies, which are given verbal ex-
pression as an infinite number of complementary pairs: yin yang
… light and shadow, solid and void […]. (88)

She indicates further that the Chinese garden uses limited means
to express the consonance of human beings with the universal
order which may reflect the infinite, and that “in order to give
the impression of unlimited visual space, the actual physical
space is divided so that there are no uninterrupted lines of sight
and no point from which the garden as a whole can be sur-
veyed” (88). On measuring the meta-structure of Hong Lou
Meng’s narrative, Xiao Chi also suggests

a large part of the narrative turns out to be a garden in which the

narrator emulates his characters’ perambulations along a maze
occasionally punctuated by a pavilion or a bridge at the water’s
edge. [….] The encapsulated realm of the narrative, like its sub-
ject the garden, reflects the same leitmotif, that is, the alternation
22 HAIQING SUN

between denseness and sparseness, solid and void, convex and

concave, bright and dark—in sum, yin and yang.” (171-72)

Scott’s and Xiao’s points of view show that the image of the
Garden of Total Vision and the image of Hong Lou Meng’s textual
structure can coincide in a sense that they both resemble an am-
bition of universal representation. Meanwhile, these scholars’
approaches to the Garden’s significance have also been reflected
not only in what Borges perceives of Hong Lou Meng in his short
essay, but also in what he conceives of as a “garden of forking
paths” in his story. First, Borges’s comment on Hong Lou Meng’s
narrative mode as “una casa de muchos patios” insinuates inter-
ruptions of sights and space, with which agrees Scott’s illustra-
tion for the garden of “no uninterrupted lines of sight” or point
of overlook. Second, what the garden means for the story of
Borges is what Mary Scott has indicated in her study of Hong Lou
Meng; she says that the garden is “a dominant image” in the
narrative that consists largely of an account of life (83). Then, the
manner of “forking paths” or conjunctions in multiple levels of
the narrative can be observed in both the short story and in Hong
Lou Meng through the representation of the garden: it is both a
residence and a display of natural views, an imagined dream
work, a labyrinth of fate for its characters, and a metaphysical
object for literary study as well as universal reflection. Further-
more, as Borges states in his story about how the garden is cre-
ated by the act of writing, the Garden of Total Vision is also
created by Cao Xueqin along with the writing of his novel. In
addition, both gardens are not only created by the authors of the
texts, but also by certain characters in the texts. Such a character
is Jia Bao Yu in Hong Lou Meng, as Scott points out: “Baoyu ‘cre-
ates’ Daguayuan in his dream,” and also by “naming many of
the most important places in it” (92); and in Borges’s story, it is
Yu Tsun’s ancestor Ts’ui Pên.
Borges does not merely mention Ts’ui Pên’s name as author
of a book, but also illustrates him as part of a great and mysteri-
ous culture:
 HONG LOU MENG 23

Gobernador de su provincia natal, doctor en astronomía, en

astrología y en la interpretación infatigable de los libros
canónicos, ajedrecista, famoso poeta y calígrafo: todo lo
abandonó para componer un libro y un laberinto. Renunció a los
placeres de la opresión, de la justicia, del numeroso lecho, de los
banquetes y aun de la erudición y se enclaustró durante trece
años en el Pabellón de la Límpida Soledad. (1: 476)

It is notable that, although Ts’ui Pên’s image does not exactly

resemble Cao Xueqin, the author of Hong Lou Meng, there is at
least some coincidence between the two. For example, the
knowledge of astrology, canonical books, the chess game, and of
lyric poems that Ts’ui Pên possesses, is what Cao Xueqin dis-
plays with the writing of Hong Lou Meng. Ts’ui Pên’s self-
sacrifice for thirteen years for creating his novel, as quoted in the
above, is also echoed by Zhiyanzhai’s preface to Hong Lou Meng,
in which he claims that every word of Cao’s novel is written
with blood, and the author’s ten years’ work is quite unusual
(Miller 216). Ts’ui Pên writes in a society in which, as Borges
indicates, “la novela es un género subalterno; en aquel tiempo
era un género despreciable” (1: 478), while this is also the fate of
Cao, as his novel was considered corrupting and erotic, and had
to circulate in a private and secret mode during his time. Moreo-
ver, like Cao Xueqin, whose name cannot be separated from this
one sole work, the image of Ts’ui Pên is molded not only by a
brief biographical introduction, but also by an illustration of his
work that represents the third image of the garden, that of both a
book and a labyrinth.
In Borges’s story, the third image of the garden is brought up
by the Sinologist Albert, who solves the mystery of the location
of Ts’ui Pên’s work and announces: “el jardín de senderos que se
bifurcan era la novela caótica” (1: 477). This statement can be
made again for the Garden of Total Vision in Hong Lou Meng,
and it reflects a multi-universe onto the act of writing. Borges
describes in his story that the publication of Ts’ui Pên’s mysteri-
ous book was madness. “El libro es un acervo indeciso de borra-
dores contradictorios” (1: 476). This chaotic image echoes
Borges’s feeling of Cao’s novel as he himself claims in the 1937
24 HAIQING SUN

essay, that on reading it he seems to be lost in a labyrinth, and

that the text is ruled by a desperate carnality, abundant dreams,
and the confusion of reality and dreams, from which he even
detects something comparable to Poe, Kafka and Dostoevsky. 6
Interestingly, the sense of chaos in Hong Lou Meng is also a major
issue for its critics, whose probes diverge into different direc-
tions. For example, Zuyan Zhou believes that chaos is a philoso-
phical outcome from Taoism and Buddhism in Hong Lou Meng,
while Lucien Miller notices that the narrator’s uncertain where-
abouts sets a base for the chaotic nature of the narrative (224-25).
Other critics, such as Jeanne Knoerle, believe that the abundant
non-event scenes including poetry writing separate Hong Lou
Meng from the classic norm of the novel, and makes for its narra-
tive lack of coherence (Xiao, 162). Some comments on this Chi-
nese novel, including Borges’s at one point, are disparaging, but
they in fact imply the nature of a narrative with juxtapositions,
unexpected by a Western reader, of different times and types of
events. Hong Lou Meng is unquestionably a vast convolution of
reality and dream, narrative and poetry, romance and popular
life, comedy and tragedy, and garden and labyrinth. This narra-
tive mode is somehow signaled in the story by Borges which, in
addition to transformations of times and mysteries, also contains
a conjunction of different genres such as criminal mystery, rep-
resented as the major clue in the text, epical history, represented
by Liddell Hart’s book that initiates the mystery, and metaphysi-
cal writing, represented by Ts’ui Pên’s creation in the core of the
mystery.
As revealed in the above, the three images of garden in the
mystery story, the simulation of a Chinese garden in an English
residence, the imagined multi-universal garden, and the unity of
labyrinth and text, all carry reflections of Hong Lou Meng. In
other words, the Hong Lou Meng depicted as a classical master-

6 “La [certidumbre de un gran escritor] corrobora en el décimo capítulo, no

indigno de Edgar Allan Poe o de Franz Kafka [. . .] Una desesperada carnalidad
rige toda la obra. […] los sueños abundan: son más intensos porque el escritor no
nos dice […] y creemos que se trata de realidades […] (Dostoievski, hacia el final
de Crimen y castigo, maneja ese procedimiento una vez, o dos veces
consecutivas)” 4: 329).
 HONG LOU MENG 25

piece with a huge number of characters can be the ultimate ref-

erence for Borges’s mysterious garden.
Now, what is Hong Lou Meng? Readers who have certain
knowledge about the novel would agree that it is a world and
not only a world. People most commonly believe that it is an
encyclopedic work. For example, Dore Levy calls it “a micro-
cosm of society” (103). Lin Yu Tang summarizes that “[It] dis-
plays a ubiquitous knowledge of all aspects of Chinese life—
official corruption, court etiquette, religious and superstitious
practices, … poetry, food, wine games, card and dice games,
music, painting, medicine, astrology … Confucian philosophy
and Taoism—all presented with expert knowledge” (27). Borges
may not have expressed exactly the same feeling when he nar-
rates about the Sinologist’s admiration towards Ts’ui Pên’s
achievement by saying “A mí, bárbaro inglés, me ha sido de-
parado revelar ese misterio diáfano” (476). Nevertheless, the
universal and encyclopedic image that these scholars figure for
Hong Lou Meng is also the image that Borges uses to depict what
he believes to be great literature in his story: “El jardín de senderos
que se bifurcan es una imagen incompleta, pero no falsa, del uni-
verso” (1: 479).
As to the general textual structure, Hong Lou Meng presents
the old Chinese puzzle of a box inside a box, as Xiao indicates:
“The tale of the Stone embraces the misfortune of Zhen Shiyin,
whose story embraces the ‘core’ of the narrative” (157). A similar
structure is followed, though in a rather miniature way, by the
narrative of “The Garden of Forking Paths,” in which A History
of the World War, a historic book by Liddell Hart—not Borges’s
fictitious creation—provides an event that embraces Yu Tsun’s
deposition of his task of espionage, and the spy’s deposition
embraces a mystery that involves an ancient Chinese novel and
labyrinth, in which the core of the entire narrative, as in Hong
Lou Meng, is a garden.
Besides Hong Lou Meng, another factor that connects the three
notions of garden in the story is Yu Tsun, whose experience as
both protagonist and narrator in the text involves both a scheme
in a world war and a mystery of a garden. His major task as
26 HAIQING SUN

narrator is to mislead the reader to avoid the revelation of the

answer to the mystery until the end of the narrative. If the reader
only sees this text as a crime mystery then, the secret Chinese
garden, Hong Lou Meng, and the solution to the ancient mystery
about a Hong Lou Meng-like novel would merely be considered
as elements that help carry the narrative to a generic end—the
solution of Yu’s plot and crime. However, Daniel Balderston
insightfully points out that Yu Tsun’s name comes from an un-
usual source: “[in “The Garden of Forking Paths”], the name of
the Chinese spy, Yu Tsun, is that of a character, a student, in
Tsao Hsueh-Chin’s Dream of the Red Chamber [Hong Lou Meng]”
(42). Scholars commonly agree that what Cao Xueqin mentions
in Hong Lou Meng as “Chia-yu-tsun-yen, ‘fictive language and
vulgar words’, is a homophone for the second half of the [first]
chapter title and points to the story in chapter 1 of the character
“Chia Yu-tsun” (Miller 217). Balderston also notices the function
of this character in the narrative, when he quotes Manuel Ferrer
in his study that “despite his seeming extended absence, this Yu
Tsun is the one who is behind the whole development and plot
of the novel” (42). Balderston does not delve further Yu Tsun’s
role in the narrative, but rather examines Sun Tzu, the author of
Art of War (Sun Zi Bing Fa), whom he believes to have more
things to do with Yu Tsun’s spying scheme and the structure of
Borges’s story. 7 In fact the character Yu Tsun in “The Garden of
Forking Paths” is like Jia Yu Tsun in Hong Lou Meng, in a way
that his own story ceases to bring up the story of a garden that
explores a different dimension of the narrative. In Borges’s story,
once facing the mystery of the garden, the character Yu Tsun
stops being a mastermind. When Stephen Albert is presenting
the grand enigma and its possible answers all at once based on
his research, Yu Tsun cannot plot and succeed as he does in es-
pionage, nor has he a position in the representation of the myste-
rious garden. Like Jia Yu Tsun in Hong Lou Meng, Yu Tsun is

7
Balderston suggests: “No one has remarked, however, on another near
homophone (at least to the Western ear) to Yu Tsun’s name, that of the author of
a work written more than two thousand years ago, The Art of War by Sun Tzu.”
Balderston believes that since Sun Tzu’s work contains a chapter on use of spies,
“Yu Tsun was no doubt educated in Sun Tzu’s Art of War” (42).
 HONG LOU MENG 27

visible in this part of the narrative due to his connection with

other characters in a net of relationship: Yu Tsun is reader of
Stephen Albert, whose research makes Yu Tsun think of his
home country and his roots; meanwhile, this researcher of the
Chinese garden is a target of Yu Tsun’s brutality; Ts’ui Pên, the
author of the garden, subject of the research, who shares Albert’s
fate of being murdered, is Yu Tsun’s great-grandfather; and Al-
bert, on guiding the other in the examination of the mystery of
Tsui Pen, becomes fatally trapped himself in a scheme during
the World War, to which he himself may have never paid atten-
tion, and thus fulfills a spy’s mission. So Yu Tsun sighs:

Yo oía con decente veneración esas viejas ficciones, acaso menos

admirables que el hecho de que las hubiera ideado mi sangre y
de que un hombre de un imperio remoto me las restituyera, en el
curso de una desesperada aventura, en una isla occidental. [. . .]
Desde ese instante, sentí a mi alrededor y en mi oscuro cuerpo
una invisible, intangible pululación. (1: 478)

This expression of Yu Tsun’s feeling gathers all times and

spaces that involve all the characters. In addition to his envision-
ing the whole of time-space in the narrative, it is noticeable that
his meditation, at the moment of the final revelation of the gar-
den’s secret, shows a tracing of time and reversal of space to that
of the narrative in the whole text. It does not go from a modern
war into an old empire, and into an interesting novel, but gazes
from inside a mysterious ancient text to a current crisis. At this
point, Yu Tsun returns to the center of the narrative, and re-
sumes his control of the story. Therefore arguably, like Jia Yu
Tsun, whose story resurfaces in the ending part of Hong Lou
Meng, Yu Tsun’s position in the narrative is secondary to his role
in the narrative, a fact that, along with his name, reminds the
reader of the connection between Borges’s story and Hong Lou
Meng.
The above examination of the reflections of Hong Lou Meng in
the narrative of “The Garden of Forking Paths” may raise a ques-
tion: does Borges mean to re-structure or re-imagine the ancient
Chinese masterpiece in a cunning and concise way through this
28 HAIQING SUN

narrative? Or, is this story a poetic cultivation of a concept that

Hong Lou Meng represents? To consider these questions, another
story by Borges may be taken as reference, in which the author
also shows fascination with mysteries in the act of writing and
an ancient masterpiece. “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote” is a
story from the same collection, in which Borges depicts a writer
who challenges Cervantes by re-writing Don Quijote. He writes it
exactly as Cervantes does, yet he is not imitating or copying, he
is doing an original work with an experience completely differ-
ent from that of the original author. The representation of writ-
ing has an interesting function in this story, as it is in fact not
about a pseudo re-writing but rather consists of an access to the
poetics of a classical work. Robert Chibka points out that Pierre
Menard rewrites the Quixote “by gesturing toward it, not
(re)presenting it,” and that Stephen Albert takes the same way to
interpret Ts’ui Pên’s work by “merely alluding indirectly to the
idea” (116). The question Chibka does not consider is that, if
behind the story of Pierre Menard stands the Quixote, then what
may be standing behind Ts’ui Pên and Stephen Albert? Mean-
while, if in a way the writing of “The Garden of Forking Paths”
can be valued as a poetic access to Hong Lou Meng, then it is nec-
essary to consider how this poetic access is made, for it is not via
a “re-writing” of a same book, as depicted in “Pierre Menard,”
but via the “writing” of another book comparable to Hong Lou
Meng, and via the detection of mysteries. So far, the character Yu
Tsun and Albert each has a mission in mystery: to pose an
enigma in the Europe of World War I, and to solve one from
ancient China; and to study Borges’s possible mission with the
text, mystery again is a focus.
The Sinologist Albert confronts not one but two mysteries of
the garden: the location of Ts’ui Pên’s labyrinth, and the method
with which to read his manuscripts. The first mystery is solved
when Albert suggests that the book and the labyrinth is one
same work. The other mystery surfaces on the first one’s solu-
tion, regarding how to understand Ts’ui Pên’s novel which is
“chaotic,” “contradictory,” and “shapeless” (1: 476). This is a
core mystery in the story and is similar to the mystery that
Borges implies in his essay on Hong Lou Meng, in which he com-
 HONG LOU MENG 29

plains that Cao Xueqin’s novel is like a labyrinth—“una casa con

muchos patios.” In the story, the second half of Albert’s presen-
tation to Yu Tsun concentrates exclusively on this mystery, and
reveals how he finally understands the manuscripts of Tsui Pen.
But Albert’s understanding is not from the stand of a reader, but
from that of a writer. Namely, he understands how the novel is
written instead of what is written. The Sinologist sees that such a
novel is not just any labyrinth, but “un invisible laberinto de
tiempo” (1: 476), in which “la imagen de la bifurcación en el
tiempo, no en el espacio” (1: 477). Time is the factor that decides
the writing of Ts’ui Pên’s unique narrative, as the author sug-
gests through Stephen Albert, that “El jardín de senderos que se
bifurcan es una enorme adivinanza, o parabola, cuyo tema es el
tiempo […] A diferencia de Newton y de Schopenhauer, su
antepasado [Tsui Pen] no creía en un tiem fpo uniforme,
absoluto. Creía en infinitas series de tiempos, en una red
creciente y vertiginosa de tiempos divergentes, convergentes, y
paralelos” (1: 478-79). That is to say, it is an illogical move (the
forking, converging, and parallel) of time that produces so many
stories and characters in Ts’ui Pên’s work. Meanwhile, the same
can be suggested for the narrative of Hong Lou Meng, as Zong Pu
points out: “The time in Hong Lou Meng is an old mystery; the
characters’ ages are not clear […]. The order in which the events
happen is not clear either, for [the order] is not lineal or multi-
lineal, but spreads to all directions” (5).8 This “spatial” image of
time that Zong Pu illustrates is also indicated by Knoerle, that
“time is the dynamic element and space is incidental [in Hong
Lou Meng]” (88), and by Xiao, who believes “the thematic signifi-
cance of the garden of the novel built in the ‘timescape’ [of Hong
Lou Meng] is clear” (176). The notion of “timespace,” and the
idea of “bifurcating in time” imply similarly a “time as space”
for a vast textual building, and Borges’s discussion of time in a
mode of forking paths eventually resonates with the Hong Lou
Meng scholars who propose time as a key to the novel’s secrets.

8 This article is originally in Chinese; the English translation is mine.

30 HAIQING SUN

“Value based in aesthetics produces an enclave immune to

time and causation” (Xiao, 176). This statement for Hong Lou
Meng’s narrative actually agrees with Borges’s core idea about
Ts’ui Pên’s book and garden, which forms the aesthetic base for
Borges’s story. Xiao Chi points out that the time in the narrative
of Hong Lou Meng does not follow common logic:

[D]estiny always takes free will as its core determining factor.

For destiny to be realized, in this sense time also must move
along through the inner logic of becoming. . . The Stone does not
really rely on such an inner logic. On the contrary, as Haun
Saussy observes, narrative time sometimes takes a special form
since the plot of this novel unfolds like a riddle: “asking and an-
swering a riddle takes time, during which possible solutions are
tried out, refined or rejected.” (171)

This approach mirrors what Borges describes in “The Garden

of Forking Paths”, about a novel’s writing, that its progress does
not obey the one-universe rule: “En todas las ficciones, cada vez
que un hombre se enfrenta con diversas alternatives, opta por
una y elimina las otras en la del casi inextricable Ts’ui Pên, opta
–simultáneamente– por todas. Crea, así, diversos porvenires,
diversos tiempos, que también proliferan y se bifurcan.” (1: 477,
original emphasis). In this statement, Borges proposes an indefi-
nite time as his definite answer to the question of how a huge
and complex narrative construction can be done. As a writer
amazed by a novel of so many characters, Borges probably al-
ready realizes that time is a central and problematic issue in the
narrative. It is then arguable that what Borges figures out in his
story, with the representation of a mysterious garden-novel, may
be what used to puzzle him during the reading of Hong Lou
Meng, as shown by his essay. Therefore, if “The Garden of Fork-
ing Paths” does carry a mission for Borges, it would be a chal-
lenge to the mystery of Hong Lou Meng, on how Hong Lou Meng
can be written. Albert’s proposal that “time” is a key to the mys-
tery of Ts’ui Pên can also imply Borges’s return to his question-
able reading of Hong Lou Meng. Borges would try to detect not
what specific stories Hong Lou Meng tells, but rather how it man-
ages to tell all its stories. If the essay on Hong Lou Meng reveals
 HONG LOU MENG 31

how Borges reads the masterpiece with some difficulty, the story
can be an evidence of how he understands it in a metaphysical
way. Time, as a narrative matter in “The Garden of Forking
Paths,” reflects Borges’s vision of fiction; it apparently refers to a
Chinese novel, but provides insight into all of literature. Maybe
without the problematic reading of Hong Lou Meng, Borges
would have written this story in a quite different way, and the
story is, without question, more valuable in every sense.
Hong Lou Meng is not a central image in the story of “The
Garden of Forking Paths,” but the way in which Borges presents
an Oriental masterpiece through different mysteries in the story
can be related, from various perspectives, to his previous percep-
tion of Hong Lou Meng’s textual grandeur. Harold Bloom notes
that “for Borges, any encyclopedia existent or surmised, is both a
labyrinth and a compass” (434). Such is the role for Hong Lou
Meng in Borges’s “The Garden of the Forking Paths,” not only
because it is an encyclopedic novel, but also because it has a dual
function in Borges’s narrative: as a “labyrinth,” it provides the
image for a metaphysical garden, and as a “compass,” it pro-
vides the reader a lead to the solution(s) of his garden’s myster-
ies.
Although this story by Borges is famous for being a crime fic-
tion or a metaphysical mystery, it is arguable that behind all the
interests to create suspense and tension through genre, there
remains an effort by Borges to understand Hong Lou Meng, to try
to fathom how Cao Xueqin sets a narrative through a time sys-
tem that can afford such a large number of characters—a fact
that symbolizes the novel’s size and value. The above examina-
tion finds that there are multiple parallels between the study of
Hong Lou Meng and the significant thematic issues of Borges’s
story, as Borges’s aesthetic approach to an imagined ancient
Chinese novel is joined by Hong Lou Meng researchers on the
narrative of meta-garden and meta-fiction. I have no further
knowledge of whether Borges has studied Cao Xueqing’s novel
on later occasions, but the mystery of the garden of forking paths
re-illustrates his understanding of Hong Lou Meng well beyond
the limitation and confusion shown in his essay written four
32 HAIQING SUN

years before. Borges does not candidly imagine what Hong Lou
Meng is; he goes to an extreme to imagine a book that exceeds
Hong Lou Meng’s grandeur, and as a result, such a book frees
itself to a metaphysical realm, out of the bonds of time or space,
and becomes an invisible labyrinth. It may be one of the story’s
merits to show us how literary representation is more fascinating
than plain statement of a truth. This imagination of a
book/labyrinth can be seen as an artful use of the author’s
knowledge of a Chinese masterpiece, while poetically it also
provides an ultimate acknowledgement to Hong Lou Meng’s un-
doubted achievements.

Haiqing Sun
Texas Southern University
 HONG LOU MENG 33

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