Funes the Memorious
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Funes the Memorious (original Spanish title: Funes el memorioso) is a fantasy short story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. It appeared in the 1944 anthology Ficciones, part two (Artifices). The title has also been translated as "Funes, His Memory".
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[edit] Summary
"Funes the Memorious" tells the story of a fictional version of Borges himself as he meets Ireneo Funes, a teenage boy who lives in Fray Bentos, Uruguay, in 1884. Borges's cousin asks the boy for the time, and Funes replies instantly, without the aid of a watch and accurate to the minute.
Borges returns to Buenos Aires, then in 1887 comes back to Fray Bentos, intending to relax and study some Latin. He learns that Ireneo Funes has meanwhile suffered a horseback riding accident and is now hopelessly crippled. Soon enough, Borges receives a note from Funes, requesting that the visitor lend him some of his Latin books and a dictionary. Borges, disconcerted, sends Funes what he deems the most difficult works "in order fully to undeceive him".
Days later, Borges receives a telegram from Buenos Aires calling for his return due to his father's ill health. As he packs, he remembers the books and goes to Funes's house. Funes's mother escorts him to a patio where the youth usually spends his dark hours. As he enters, Borges is greeted by Funes' voice speaking perfect Latin, reciting "the first paragraph of the twenty-fourth chapter of the seventh book of the Historia Naturalis (by Pliny the Elder).
Funes enumerates to Borges the cases of prodigious memory cited in the Historia Naturalis, and adds that he marvels that those are considered marvellous. He reveals that, since his fall from from the horse, he perceives everything in full detail and remembers it all. He remembers, for example, the shape of clouds at all given moments, as well as the associated perceptions (muscular, thermal, etc.) of each moment. Funes has an immediate intuition of the mane of a horse or the form of a constantly changing flame that is comparable to our (normal people's) intuition of a simple geometric shape such as a triangle or square.
In order to pass the time, Funes has engaged in projects such as reconstructing a full day's worth of past memories, and constructing a "system of enumeration" that gives each number a different, arbitrary name. Borges correctly points out to him that this is precisely the opposite of a system of enumeration, but Funes is incapable of such understanding. A poor, ignorant young boy in the outskirts of a small town in a backward country, he is hopelessly limited in his possibilities, but (says Borges) his absurd projects reveal "a certain stammering greatness". Funes, we are told, is incapable of Platonic ideas, of generalities, of abstraction; his world is one of intolerably uncountable details. He finds it very difficult to sleep, since he recalls "every crevice and every moulding of the various houses which [surround] him".
Borges spends the whole night talking to Funes in the dark. When dawn reveals Funes's face, only 19 years old, Borges sees him "as monumental as bronze, more ancient than Egypt, anterior to the prophecies and the pyramids".
[edit] Analysis
Borges explores a variety of topics in the text, such as the need of generalization and abstraction to thought and science. However, he claims that "Funes the Memorious" is just a long parable about insomnia, which Borges himself suffered in real life, and which he references in several of his other stories and poems.
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[edit] Real-life parallels
The real-life case of Daniel Tammet bears a certain similitude to fictional Ireneo Funes: he had epileptic seizures that may have a part in his unusual talents; his memory for numbers is prodigious (he can recite the number pi correctly to its 22514th digit), and finally, he has explained that he "sees" numbers as shapes, some of them more pleasant than others.
Another real-life case, Solomon Shereshevskii, a stage memory-artist (mnemonist), is described by the Russian neuropsychologist Luria in his book, The Mind of a Mnemonist (Russian original). Luria discusses explicitly some of the trade-offs — hinted at by Borges — that come with supernormal memory power. (Further Skywriting on this topic.)
[edit] References
- Funes, the Memorious - The Borges Collection at the University of Virginia Library. Full text of the story.
- Summary and analysis - From the Literature, Arts, & Medicine Database, an annotated bibliography of prose, poetry, film, video and art.
