That the governing structural principle of Jorge Luis Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths" is the analogy among fictional levels goes almost without saying. In the fashion of Chinese boxes, many parallels are established between the characters Yu Tsun, Stephen Albert, and Ts'ui Pên, forming a chain that modern psychoanalysis would call "intersubjective repetition." (p. 639)

What is less self-evident is that the analogies between the diegetic and the metadiegetic levels of narration function to collapse classical oppositions either by identifying them with each other or by rendering them interchangeable. Thus a message addressed to the public becomes esoteric, whereas an esoteric transmission appears in a public medium; the best form of revelation is omission, while the most effective method of concealment is exposure; the same speech act is both a success and a failure; speech itself (or writing) is shown to be an action, and action, in...