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Collected Fictions
Borges Stories - M.R. 2013
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Discussion - Week Nine - Borges - Funes, His Memory
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This is such a sad story! When we first meet Funes- he is full of life-he doesn't walk,he runs. In our next meeting with him,he is a cripple & the physical life has been completely subsumed by the mental one: I myself, alone, have more memories than all mankind since the world began.It's almost like a Faustian bargain; only Poor Funes had never asked for this gift!
He reasoned (or felt) that immobility was a small price to pay. Now his perception and his memory were perfect.
But then comes the poignant line : “My memory, sir, is like a garbage disposal.” — honestly,who would like to have a memory like that?!
Any neurologist will tell you that if you don't get proper amount of sleep,your memory & concentration will be affected & in extreme cases,might get impaired– no such thing here! Funes dies of "lung congestion",not some brain-related complication.
As a person who loves sleeping,to me this story is nothing short of a nightmare! A crude paraphrasing of Shakespeare's famous line from Richard III :Some sleep,some sleep,my unlimited memory for some sleep!
Through the contrast with the narrator's imperfect/faulty memory with Funes' perfect one ( notice the constant use of the word 'recall'), we realise that our forgetfulness is indeed a blessing- there's a reason why God made us the way we are.
Borges revisits the subject of memory in two more remarkable stories-The Secret Miracle & Shakespeare's Memory.
John Barth,in his essay, The Parallels! Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges,commented on the lack of memorable characters in Borges' stories but Funes is an unforgettable character!Here's an article that comments upon the Barth one. ( I think,Z already shared the Barth one in the resource section,I'm putting the Waggish article here as we are reading each single story in its own particular segment so reference material shd be on hand & there's no cause of spoilers as most people visiting this thread will already have read the story.)
http://www.waggish.org/2003/john-bart...
Here is an excerpt from an article that throws some light on this story:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles...
This story also came in under some fire for translation-related issues regarding Borges:
"Bell-Villada (CL) speaks of how Hurley's choice of titles "exemplify his skill", insisting that presenting Funes the Memorious as Funes, His Memory "achieves extra clarity" -- while Manguel (O) calls the same revision "both inaccurate and ugly". What is a poor reader to think ? "From Complete Reviews.com
Mod
Here's an artic..."
It's true, Funes is memorable. Pierre Menard is knowable only through his act of writing his Quixote and not really anything else.
Mala, this isn't a literary comment, but do you know,A. R. Luria's The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory
It's Luria's work with a man who, for all practical purposes, could not forget. Luria was a famous Soviet neuropsychologist.
I made the connection. But THEN I looked to see if I could find anything online about the book for you (I have the book) and I did on an NYU site. Here's the link:
http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/Annotation?...
I read through what the brief description said and then I came to the last line.
S.’s incredible memory and all its attendant advantages and detriments recall Borges’s short story, Funes the Memorious (Funes el Memorioso).
Mala wrote: "This is such a sad story! When we first meet Funes- he is full of life-he doesn't walk,he runs. In our next meeting with him,he is a cripple & the physical life has been completely subsumed by the ..."I agree Mala, this sounds like hell to me. Do you think that Funes' assertion that he was grateful for the accident was sincere, or was there an air of desperation to his claim? The garbage disposal line does seems to give the lie to his enthusiasm for his current state.
Lung congestion is something that frequently occurs because of heart failure, essentially a heart that can't carry its burden. It's also something that occurs to the bedridden due to pneumonia. I assumed initially that Borges had the later cause in mind. On reflection, I'm wondering if he was thinking of the former.
It may be a Hell to envy (I'm inclined to envy it).Meanwhile, I remember thinking previously that there's some kind of similarity between Borges's writings and Raul Ruiz's films. Now the idea returns!
In On Top of the Whale there is a man who lives in an estate in Patagonia. In his home there also live the last two surviving Yachatones Indians. A linguist comes to study their language. He displays a series of objects to them (an iron, a can of oil, a book), and they reveal the names. All of them are named "Yamaskoma," except that there appear to be some pronunciation differences, different stress on syllables, maybe slight tonal differences, or an "n" for an "m." In fact, everything they say sounds like "Yamaskoma," their greetings, every time they speak to their host, it's just a one word utterance "Yamaskoma," perhaps slightly varied in pronunciation.
When the Indians leave, their host speaks to the linguist and teaches a little of what he has learned of their language. Now it appears to have more variance in its lexicon. But each word has a variety of definitions. One word, for example, is defined as: "Walk in bad weather;freighter;dog;what others think of you;rock on your head if you insult an elder."
In a later scene, the linguist is again interviewing one of the Indians. The Indian observes each of several items the linguist displays and names it: "chewin... acho... jewing... achoa... genach... chavac..." We notice that there's great similarity between some of these words. We also see that the objects being displayed all appear to be stone carvings of owls, in different sizes and colors. "chamanaca... chewin..." Soon we also notice that the linguist is again holding up some of the same objects that he displayed earlier, but they have new names on a second viewing.
When he holds up just one of the stone owls, it is named "chamanaca." When he rotates it slightly, it is now named "chewin."
This is all very reminiscent of Funes's linguistic pursuits, in giving a unique name to every possible number, or perhaps every experience, and his problems in identifying the likenesses in things which he sees for their specific differences (e.g. each dog is unique so it's very strange to him to imagine their being related or sharing a common lexical term, and each angle or circumstance defining how he sees his own face in a mirror makes it surprising and unique... and a dog seen from a different angle at a different time seems deserving of a unique name).
"Identifying the likeness in things" is the ability to use abstractions. This level of sensory connectedness has the downside of the inability to think. We are usually better at thinking abstractly and work to gain that connection to sensation which is what art requires. But the extreme version of thinking only in specifics is not a hell I'd envy.
Again, when this problem was identified in real life (to some extent) in Luria's "The Mind of a Mnemonyst" he was forced to look at it as a syndrome.
His subject's memory was virtually unmeasurable. For example, he could repeat a list of nonsense syllables he heard once ten years previously. But in doing so he would recall all the physical detail, perhaps, if I remember, a stain or a smell in the room he saw the paper. But in other ways he was limited. It didn't come without a price.
Borges connects this with insomnia. As an insomniac, I'm somewhat suspicious. :-)
The conclusion in Pliny's Natural History, as referred to in Funes states"Lapses occur when the body is sound, but resting. As sleep gradually steals over one, it restricts the memory and causes the inactive mind to wonder where it is."
Maybe more on Pliny next time.
Mod
If your mind can never rest - that is, never filter the barrage of information that stimulates our senses while we're awake - then Funes' condition is like a waking insomnia. A never-ending flood of data with no rest of any kind. Horrific, really...
Yes, but for most people with insomnia, the play of ideas, even if not necessarily coherent ones, would be mixed in with sensory information. What is unusual about Funes is that he is limited to sensory information.
Getting back to our favorite topic, religion, Funes is an intersection of God and man. He's a "what if...". What if God was spacially and temporally limited, like man? What if man was unlimited in awareness, observation, and retention... "omniscient" though only within the scope of the senses of one person in one (short) lifetime?On a different tangent, it's interesting that Funes doesn't reveal any particular poignant memories. If this were a typical science fiction story, for instance, I'd expect the story to dwell on trauma relived, or escapism into an infinitely relived nostalgia. But Funes does not reveal a preference for one type of memory over another, appearing detached from the significance of what he perceives, even of his own former life.
On a different different tangent, Funes is not just an infinitely deep database of retained perceptions. He's also a consciousness which is capable of selection and focused attention. He can remember, and he can remember having remembered. Remembering and having remembered are acts of consciousness. That's, perhaps, the real mystery Funes, the one that's hard to come to terms with. (Even though that is also our own dilemma).
Bill wrote: "Mala, this isn't a literary comment, but do you know,A. R. Luria's The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory [bookcover:The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory..."
Thanks for the links,Bill. Very interesting– truth is stranger than fiction! But the story came first,right? So Borges' imagination produced a work which was later validated by scientific evidence. Still,just like the case study subject 'M', Funes remains a rare phenomenon.
What is sad about the story is Funes was accidently given a 'gift' but ultimately what came off it? Nothing. In "his poor South American hinterland", Funes could only waste his genius in "an infinite vocabulary for the natural series of numbers, and a pointless mental catalog of all the images of his memory". His life & achievements remain only in the imperfect memory of the narrator & will die/vanish with him.
Whitney wrote:"Do you think that Funes' assertion that he was grateful for the accident was sincere, or was there an air of desperation to his claim?"Of course he was trying to compensate for his incurable loss- these are the lies that we all tell ourselves,at some time or the other,to make an unbearable situation,bearable.
But more than that,what caught my attention was Borges' almost mythic representation of Funes:
"The leery light of dawn entered the patio of packed earth.
It was then that I saw the face that belonged to the voice that had been talking all night long. Ireneo was nineteen, he had been born in 1868; he looked to me as monumental as bronze—older than Egypt, older than the prophecies and the pyramids."
It is cause Funes has become a chronicler,a repository for all the memories of the world:
"Funes could continually perceive the quiet advances of corruption, of tooth decay, of weariness. He saw—he noticed —the progress of death, of humidity. He was the solitary, lucid spectator of a multiform, momentaneous, and almost unbearably precise world."
An amazing character!
Mala wrote: "What is sad about the story is Funes was accidently given a 'gift' but ultimately what came off it? Nothing. In "his poor South American hinterland", Funes could only waste his genius in "an infinite vocabulary for the natural series of numbers, and a pointless mental catalog of all the images of his memory"...."What do you think Funes would have accomplished had he existed in a situation with more opportunity? He reminds me of those child prodigies who master calculus when they're five and can memorize pi to 2000 digits. Ultimately, few or none of them end up creating anything of lasting value.
Mod
I didn't get the sense he could accomplish much with his so-called gift. Maybe if he was paired up with some computer wizards he might have been able to design info-something-or-others, but basically, he is living in an info-insomniac hell. No rest, no peace, no gift.
@ Whitney: Yeah,kind of like that kid in the movie Magnolia. I don't know,I just wanted a happy ending for him :-(@ Jim: No girlfriend either. Poor boy.
@ Jim: No girlfriend either. Poor boy."
Heck, maybe he'd had one already, and he had plenty of memories to get by on.
Which reminds me... maybe his life was short (he died in something like two years after his injury? Maybe a bit longer?). But just as in various other Borges texts which play with the relationship of the infinite and the infinitessimal, perhaps if his attention was acute enough to appreciate the experience of an instant, then through the miracle of recursion he could be psychically immortal.Our pity for him may stem from misunderstanding him. Or, as he is another kind of microcosm, perhaps our pity for him is really pity for ourselves and despair at the human condition which we fear to prolong and intensify.
I guess,we'll just have to imagine that part...Borges doesn't do love & sex,damnit.
"Funes the Memorious," listed in Richard Burgin's Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges as one of Borges's favorite stories, is about Ireneo Funes, a young man who cannot forget anything. His memory is so keen that he is surprised by how different he looks each time he sees himself in a mirror because, unlike the rest of us, he can see the subtle changes that have taken place in his body since the last time he saw his reflection. The story is filled with characteristic Borgesian detail. Funes's memory, for instance, becomes excessive as a result of an accidental fall from a horse. In Borges an accident is a reminder that people are unable to order existence because the world has a hidden order of its own. Alazraki saw this Borgesian theme as "the tragic contrast between a man who believes himself to be the master and maker of his fate and a text or divine plan in which his fortune has already been written." The deliberately vague quality of the adjectives Borges typically uses in his sparse descriptive passages is also apparent: Funes's features are never clearly distinguished because he lives in a darkened room; he was thrown from his horse on a dark "rainy afternoon"; and the horse itself is described as "blue-gray"—neither one color nor the other. "This dominant chiaroscuro imagery," commented Bell-Villada, "is further reinforced by Funes's name, a word strongly suggestive of certain Spanish words variously meaning 'funereal,' 'ill-fated,' and 'dark.'" The ambiguity of Borges's descriptions lends a subtle, otherworldly air to this and other examples of his fiction."A good article for reference to the stories:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/j...
Thanks for the extra links in this comment thread to Borges, Funes and other examples of mnemonists. Fascinating! One of my favourite Borges' stories as well - I love the form of this story.
This is such an interesting thread. Someone mentioned Pliny's Natural Selection. What about comparing some of this with Robert Burton's Anatomy of MelancholyThe Anatomy of Melancholy
Mod
The Anatomy of Melancholy"
I haven't read Burton. What connections can you tell us about?
Brain Pain
Books mentioned in this topic
The Anatomy of Melancholy (other topics)Natural History: A Selection (other topics)
The Mind of a Mnemonist (other topics)
ut nihil non iisdem verbis redderetur auditum - Pliny
(hearing the same words that cannot be restored) – (google translation, sort of)
I will not attempt to reproduce the words of it, which are now forever irrecoverable. – Borges
A debilitating injury to the body cracks open Funes’ mind, allowing him to perceive and retain everything he sees and hears with total recall. A kind of nightmare to lose the filters that help us process the endless barrage of sensation.
In his introduction to the Artifices story collection of 1944, Borges wrote, “Funes, His Memory . . . is one long metaphor for insomnia.” Does that come through in the story?