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)