The primary target audience of this site is people with a specific interest in the story of ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’. Consequently these are people who are interested in the works of Borges, or perhaps Latin American literature or are readers of fiction in general. Since the site itself could be described as hyperfiction, visitors of the site could have an interest in hypertext’s application in narration.

Readers of the Moulthrop article, or readers of hypertext theorists such as Landow or Bolter, people with an interest in literary theory and electronic text, students, might be attracted to the site. Relevant keywords have been inserted in the source code to facilitate users of search engines.

I have already mentioned that the site makes use of the text’s self references. These have been highlighted in the form of links between the webpages-paragraphs. However hypertext’s capabilities extend beyond materialisation of intratextuality.

The site can be expanded to include documents such as commentaries, criticism, texts that seem to have influenced the author, texts that he explicitly or implicitly refers to, works that he has been an influence for. All the range of the text’s intertextual references can be linked to this corpus. For example hypertext can represent the striking analogies of the Borgesian text and Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose. The library of the Eco novel can be linked to Borges’ Library of Babel’ story, the Garden to the labyrinthine structure of the monastery’s library, the blind librarian Jorge can be linked directly to Jorge Luis Borges.

Themes existing in both books such as the mirrors or the burning of a medieval monastery can be linked together. Philosophical and theological documents of the Byzantine and Middle Ages can also be linked, as their influence on both works is evident.

The site does not interfere with the original text. It represents only intratextual references. However there exist two links that represent the site’s connection with both the Web and simultaneously serve as intertextual documents. Borges in the text mentions Tacitus’ Annals and the Chinese novel Hung Lu Meng. A translation of the Annals and the original Chinese version of the ‘Dream of the Red Chambers’, as is the English translation of the novel’s title, are linked to the relevant phrases.

Vaios Papanagnou
London, October 1999 (edited July 2005)