Funes the Memorious
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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“With one look, you and I perceive three wine glasses 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 feathers of spray lifted by an oar on the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of Quebracho. Nor were those memories simple–every visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations and so on. He was able to reconstruct dreams, every daydream he had ever had. Two or three times he had constructed an entire day; he had never once erred or faltered, but each reconstruction had itself taken an entire day.” |
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"Funes the Memorious" (1942, original Spanish title: "Funes el memorioso") is a short story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges about Funes, an autistic savant who possesses eidetic memory.
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Publication history
First published in La Nación in June 1942, it appeared in the 1944 anthology Ficciones, part two (Artifices). The first English translation appeared in 1954 in Avon Modern Writing No. 2. The title has also been translated as "Funes, His Memory".
Plot 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' 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 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, 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".
Major themes
Borges explores a variety of topics in the text, such as the need of generalization and abstraction to thought and science.
Savants
Funes may be compared to an autistic savant, in that he has acquired an extraordinary ability, memory, without the obvious need for study or practice. The story raises the unresolved question of how much unfulfilled potential the human brain truly contains.
The very existence of eidetic memory is controversial, although hyperthymesia, the ability to recall one's past day-by-day, has been confirmed to exist by some neurologists.
Wasted miracles
The early death of Funes echoes the idea of unfulfilled potential, the wasted miracle of a plainsman with phenomenal abilities who lives and dies in obscurity. The unheeded marvel is a common theme in Borges's writing.
Counting systems
Funes claims to have invented a system of enumeration which gives every numeral (up to at least 24,000) its own arbitrary name. The narrator argues that a positional number system is a better tool for abstraction.
Artificial languages
The narrator mentions that "Locke, in the seventeenth century, postulated (and rejected) an impossible idiom in which each individual object, each stone, each bird and branch had an individual name; Funes had once projected an analogous idiom, but he had renounced it as being too general, too ambiguous" because it did not take into account the when — given that physical objects are constantly changing in subtle ways, Funes insisted that in order to refer to an object unambiguously you must specify a time.
Generalization
Because Funes can distinguish every physical object at every distinct time of viewing, he has no clear need of generalization (or detail-suppression) for the management of sense impressions. The narrator claims that this prevents abstract thought, given that induction and deduction rely on this ability.
Allusions/references to actual history, geography and current science
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.)
