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Transcript

Funes the Memorious

Jorge Luis Borges

The limits of observation.

  • Funes' memory allows him to become the ultimate observer.
  • In both physical and mental state, Funes is trapped in a state of passivity.
  • For a discourses to occur, both literary and medical, observation and active thought (diagnosis) must occur.
  • This comes through the narratorial voice: 'I remember (I think)' (87). 'I am so unperceptive' (88).

Is laughter the best medicine?

  • The absurdity of Funes' tasks, such as inventing an 'original system of numbering' (92).

  • Irony - an unlimited memory, yet unable to think.

  • The juxtaposition of author and narrator.

  • It is through the subtle humour in Funes that his condition is made understandable to the reader.

The Gap Between Mind and Body.

  • 'Pedro Leandro Ipuche has written that Funes was a precursor of the supermen,"a vernacular and rustic Zarathustra"' (87).
  • Bernardo's 'certain local pride and desire to show' (88).
  • 'hopelessly paralysed' (89).
  • Before his fall, 'he had been what all humans are: blind, deaf, addled-brained, absent-minded.' (91).
  • 'Now his perception and his memory were infallible.' (91).

Order of Presentation.

Funes: an epistemological question?

  • Real life Funes.
  • The Gap between mind and body.
  • Unification of mind and body.
  • Is laughter is the best medicine?
  • The limits of observation.
  • Epistemological questions.
  • Comparison can be drawn with 'The Library of Babel'.

  • Borges is questioning the nature of knowledge: 'Funes takes careless pleasure in his growing store of data and has no desire to go beyond raw accumulation.' (Bell-Villada, 107).

  • Borges is questioning the reader how they see and interpret the world and their experiences.

  • 'perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things' (92).

Real life Funes?

  • Savant syndrome, defined by Darold A Treffert as 'a rare,but extraordinary condition in which persons with serious mental disabilities [...] have some"island of genius" which stands in marked, incongrous contrast to overall handicap' (2010: 1-12).
  • Luria's The Mind of a Mnemonist. (1969).

Unification of mind and body.

  • 'My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap. (92).
  • 'his awareness that the task was interminable, his awareness that it was usless' (93).
  • 'I suspect, however, that he was not very capable of thought.' (94).
  • 'His fatal congestion of the lungs neatly parallels the mental congestion that has rendered his life useless' (Bell-Villada, 106).
  • 'These memories were not simple ones; each visual image linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc.' (92)
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