In Jorge Luis Borges's 1941 detective story, “El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan” [“The Garden of Forking Paths”], Sinologist Stephen Albert understands that the two tasks for which Ts'ui Pên had renounced his post as Governor of Yunnan—to “write a book” and to “construct a maze” (96)—were one and the same. “The novel's confusion suggested that it was the labyrinth” (96): an “infinite maze” left “to various future times, but not to all” (97). For Albert, the latter phrase implies “the image of bifurcating in time, not in space” because Ts'ui Pên had chosen not one but simultaneously all alternatives, thus “[creating] various futures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times” (98). Ts'ui Pên did not view “time” as “absolute and uniform” but rather believed

Borges, in making Ts'ui Pên's novel one that could be read in multiple ways, is arguably inventing the “hypertext” novel; new media scholars have cited his vision of the “forking paths” as radical within the field of hypertext fiction, with implications for establishing the genealogy of the digital medium.

Why this foray into Borges, time, and hypertext in the context of adaptation and appropriation, and more particularly, adaptation for the theater? It is inspired, in large part, by Gérard Genette's observation about the “palimpsestuous nature of texts,” namely that “[a]ny text is a hypertext, grafting itself onto a hypotext, an earlier text that it imitates or transforms” (ix, emphasis added).