revisiting mavis gallant and the garden of forking paths
As I was reading through Mavis Gallant’s most recent short story collection, Going Ashore, I was thoroughly impressed by the story “Wing’s Chips” (1954).
A girl tells the story of living in interwar Quebec with her English father, a painter who chooses to live on the French side of the region rather than the English. Ostracized by both the English and the French, he attains his moment of triumph with a Chinese family who asks him to paint a sign for their restaurant. Gallant’s depiction of the Chinese family is cute, controlled, though somewhat stereotypical, but only because of the truth it contains.
The Wing children were solemn little Chinese, close in age and so tangled in lineage that it was impossible to sort them out as sisters, brothers, and cousins.
Her descriptive dexterity is displayed in the way she depicts their hierarchy:
Their [the young ones’] English was excellent and their French Canadian idiom without flaw. Those nearest my age were Florence, Marjorie, Ronald, and Hugh. The older set of brothers and cousins – those of my father’s generation – had abrupt, utilitarian names: Tommy, Jimmy, George. The still older people – most of whom seldom came out of the rooms behind the shop – used their Chinese names. There was even a great-grandmother, who sat, shrunken and silent, by the great iron range where the chips swam in a bath of boiling fat.
Gallant paints a very human picture in a very Canadian story, rich in character, as revealed by their actions.
In contrast, yesterday, I took an hour off in the afternoon to revisit “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941), a classic by Jorge Luis Borges. It occurred to me, only a page or two into the story, that I had read this before in university. I decided to pick up Borges yesterday because his birthday was highlighted on Google’s main page. In any case, due to a lack of technical knowledge on my part, I had printed this story in very small font, and that strained my eyes, not to mention having to pause every here and there to wrap my mind around the philosophical and metaphysical concepts that Borges throws at me. The garden is a time-warp. He (through the character Stephen Albert) explains the garden as follows:
The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Tsui Pen 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 net of divergent, convergent 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.
Borges differs from Gallant (and most fiction writers) by his focus on concepts and philosophy as opposed to emotions and human relations. The cross-cultural aspect – as seen also in the earlier excerpt of Gallant’s story – is also a trademark of Borges’s writing . The narrator, a Chinese man serving as a German spy, is running from an English captain. When being told about the Garden by the Anglo professor, the narrator reflects:
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.
At times, in my life, I also find myself in situations where I am riding on the thrill of having streams of different cultures flowing through me and even bigger is the thrill, more satisfactory, at least, when I am able to navigate through these cultures effortlessly, as a result of the skills and understandings I have acquired over the years, living as – I’d like to think-- a worldly man. Times like this I remind myself to be thankful, and in doing so, I avoid letting my undeserved fortunes get the best of me. I must not let them get to me if I intend to live and learn seriously.
A girl tells the story of living in interwar Quebec with her English father, a painter who chooses to live on the French side of the region rather than the English. Ostracized by both the English and the French, he attains his moment of triumph with a Chinese family who asks him to paint a sign for their restaurant. Gallant’s depiction of the Chinese family is cute, controlled, though somewhat stereotypical, but only because of the truth it contains.
The Wing children were solemn little Chinese, close in age and so tangled in lineage that it was impossible to sort them out as sisters, brothers, and cousins.
Her descriptive dexterity is displayed in the way she depicts their hierarchy:
Their [the young ones’] English was excellent and their French Canadian idiom without flaw. Those nearest my age were Florence, Marjorie, Ronald, and Hugh. The older set of brothers and cousins – those of my father’s generation – had abrupt, utilitarian names: Tommy, Jimmy, George. The still older people – most of whom seldom came out of the rooms behind the shop – used their Chinese names. There was even a great-grandmother, who sat, shrunken and silent, by the great iron range where the chips swam in a bath of boiling fat.
Gallant paints a very human picture in a very Canadian story, rich in character, as revealed by their actions.
In contrast, yesterday, I took an hour off in the afternoon to revisit “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941), a classic by Jorge Luis Borges. It occurred to me, only a page or two into the story, that I had read this before in university. I decided to pick up Borges yesterday because his birthday was highlighted on Google’s main page. In any case, due to a lack of technical knowledge on my part, I had printed this story in very small font, and that strained my eyes, not to mention having to pause every here and there to wrap my mind around the philosophical and metaphysical concepts that Borges throws at me. The garden is a time-warp. He (through the character Stephen Albert) explains the garden as follows:
The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Tsui Pen 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 net of divergent, convergent 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.
Borges differs from Gallant (and most fiction writers) by his focus on concepts and philosophy as opposed to emotions and human relations. The cross-cultural aspect – as seen also in the earlier excerpt of Gallant’s story – is also a trademark of Borges’s writing . The narrator, a Chinese man serving as a German spy, is running from an English captain. When being told about the Garden by the Anglo professor, the narrator reflects:
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.
At times, in my life, I also find myself in situations where I am riding on the thrill of having streams of different cultures flowing through me and even bigger is the thrill, more satisfactory, at least, when I am able to navigate through these cultures effortlessly, as a result of the skills and understandings I have acquired over the years, living as – I’d like to think-- a worldly man. Times like this I remind myself to be thankful, and in doing so, I avoid letting my undeserved fortunes get the best of me. I must not let them get to me if I intend to live and learn seriously.
posted by Adam C at
2:03 AM
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