‘Funes, His Memory’, ‘Funes el memorioso’

The unnamed narrator of ‘Funes el memorioso’ has many of the biographical details of Borges: for example he spends the summer in Uruguay with his relations the Haedo family, and studies Latin. The events he relates, however, are dated 1887, and he writes about them fifty years later, around 1937, at the age of about seventy. He writes a contribution to a collection on Ireneo Funes, who, after a fall from a horse, had acquired total recall. The time lapse and the fallibility of his memory explain the schematic and short account. The charm of the story lies in the almost oxymoronic combination of provincial small-town Uruguay and the grand theme of total memory illustrated with quotes from Pliny and Locke. The older Borges chides his younger version for his snobbery towards the locals, but is not devoid of petty and supercilious sarcasm when referring to Uruguayan writers: ‘Unfortunately I am Argentine, and so congenitally unable to produce the dithyramb that is the obligatory genre in Uruguay, especially when the subject is an Uruguayan’ (F 91).1 For the Uruguayan poet Ipuche, Funes was ‘un Zarathustra cimarrón y vernáculo’ (I 485), ‘a maverick and vernacular Zarathustra’ (F 91); ‘Borges’ peevishly replies that he was also a limited, small-time compadrito.

‘Borges’s’ first encounter with Funes, who is even then able to tell the time without a watch, comes after a gallop across the pampa with his cousin Bernardo Haedo under a dramatic stormy sky. The literariness of this Güiraldes-like passage is echoed when he next visits Fray Bentos. On the first occasion Funes had been seen on high, on an elevated sidewalk; on the second, he learns that Funes has been thrown down from his horse and is paralysed. The symmetry and magic point to the construction of the short story as outlined in ‘Narrative Art and Magic’: ‘I recall the sensation of unsettling magic that this news gave me. … [it] struck me as very much like a dream confected out of elements of the past’ (F 93).2 Such literary structuring is, as we shall see, the antithesis of the world of Funes. Funes has asked to borrow some Latin texts and a dictionary to learn the language; Borges goes to retrieve them, and spends a whole night talking with him, which is the basis of the conceptual side to the story.