When one first encounters the image of forking paths, it is hard to avoid the image of a tree. And the language of Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths”—with bifurcating, pullulating, and branching—further enforces such an image. The essential problem of this image, however, is that a tree’s branches seem rarely (if ever) to converge. And we, as readers, know that a branching road (or forking path) risks converging (and that any wanderer on this road should caution to steer him or herself always left). We also know that the paths and realities of Ts’ui Pên’s labyrinth and novel, while sometimes parallel and sometimes divergent, also sometimes converge.

This image of branching and budding (like frost spreading across a windowpane) is shared with the prototypical model of genealogy—the family tree. In this model, each offspring is a branch, further pullulating and bifurcating through marriage, labor, and sex. And these branches, as the image implies, very rarely converge; if they did, it would be a result of incest, taboo.

The prototypical HTML sitemap also resembles this family tree. Here, websites are implied to branch-off or bifurcate, but never cross-reference or converge. It is only through the browser’s back button—through going back up through the levels of the site, before then proceeding back down—that a user is capable of full navigation. This model, however, (like the image of the tree as a metaphor for narrative) denies the essential ability to hyperlink through crosscurrents, jump across branches, converge.