Borges Marathon, Part 18: Funes, His Memory

Haven’t we all wished for a better memory sometimes? One of the reasons I started this blog was to help me remember the books I’d enjoyed reading but whose details continually slipped from my mind. When I think of all the knowledge contained in the hundreds of books I’ve read and the tiny proportion of it that I’ve retained, I mourn. And as for the events of life, that’s even worse. A few things stick out, but so much is lost forever.

In his short fiction “Funes, His Memory” (often translated as “Funes the Memorious” in other editions), Jorge Luis Borges explores what it would be like to have an unlimited memory. It’s not as pleasant as you might think.

The man with the unlimited memory is Ireneo Funes, a young Uruguayan from a small country village, and the narrator of the story is a man who meets him just a few times. The narrator’s memory, unlike that of Funes, is far from perfect: he remembers and tells us all kinds of irrelevant details but has forgotten much of the conversation with Funes that is the main thrust of his story.

“I will not attempt to reproduce the words of it, which are now forever irrecoverable. Instead, I will summarize, faithfully, the many things Ireneo told me. Indirect discourse is distant and weak; I know that I am sacrificing the effectiveness of my tale.”

Funes suffers no such limitations. He remembers absolutely everything.

“With one quick look, you and I perceive three wineglasses on a table; Funes perceived every grape that had been pressed into the wine and all the stalks and tendrils of its vineyard. He knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on the morning of April 30, 1882, and he could compare them in his memory with the veins in the marbled binding of a book he had seen only once, or with the feathers of spray lifted by an oar on the Rio Negro on the eve of the Battle of Quebracho.”

It sounds like a gift, but it quickly comes to look more like a curse. Remembering everything and perceiving all the tiny differences between objects makes it impossible for Funes to generalise. A word like “dog” makes no sense to him because he remembers every dog he’s ever seen and how different they each were from each other, and even how the same dog appears and behaves differently at different times.

He invents his own numbering system, memorising thousands of simpler alternatives for numbers: “Instead of seven thousand thirteen (7013), he would say, for instance, “Máximo Pérez”; instead of seven thousand fourteen (7014), “the railroad”. He couldn’t understand why this random list of words was not a useful number system: even though it was quicker to say “the railroad” than “seven thousand and fourteen”, it didn’t communicate the numbers of thousands, hundreds, tens, etc. For him, it was simple to divide the railroad by the whale to get Napoleon, so the system was of no importance to him.

These difficulties hint at a larger problem: by perceiving and remembering everything in its infinite difference, Funes becomes unable to think.

“He had effortlessly learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin. I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very good at thinking. To think is to ignore (or forget) differences, to generalize, to abstract. In the teeming world of Ireneo Funes there was nothing but particulars—and they were virtually immediate particulars.”

Linked to that, I think, is the idea of insomnia. In the foreword to this collection, Artifices (1944), Borges refers to the story “Funes, His Memory” as “one long metaphor for insomnia.” This feeling of endless teeming particulars crowding in the brain is what insomnia sometimes feels like for me. Sleep is a kind of ignoring and forgetting, a retreat from this teeming world into the general, abstract world of dreams. Funes is unable to do this, so he rarely sleeps. The conversation with the narrator takes place overnight, in total darkness.

Readers of other parts of my Borges Marathon (if there are any) may be noticing parallels with other Borges fictions at this point. I found myself thinking of “The Library of Babel“, in which the idea of an infinite library containing every possible book quickly comes to seem more like a nightmare than a dream. In the chaos of infinite books, all meaning is lost. To make any sense of the world, we need to select from it, retaining some things and discarding others. An infinite library, like an infinite memory, encompasses everything but prevents us from perceiving patterns and creating order.

Like many Borges fictions, this is less of a traditional story than a fictional exploration of an idea. There is no plot as such: things happen, but more to set the stage for the exploration of the idea. Funes has no narrative arc, no goals or character development in the conventional sense. When he has served his purpose, Borges disposes of him callously in a quick final paragraph: “Ireneo Funes died in 1889 of pulmonary congestion.” The narrator, too, seems like a mere vehicle for delivering the story, with little life of his own.

I recognise that some readers may find this kind of thing may be frustrating, but I find it very effective. Borges overturns traditional ideas of story-telling and gives us something different, something fresh and surprising. I’m pulled through the fictions not by wanting to find out what happens to Funes or the narrator but by wanting to see where Borges and his spiralling imagination will take us next.

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On his blog A Writer’s Life, British novelist Andrew Blackman shares book reviews, insights into the writing process and the latest literary news, as well as listing short story contests with a total of more than $250,000 in prize money.