jorge luis borges' short story, funes the memorious

the frontal cortex

In Jorge Luis Borges' short story, Funes the Memorious, which may or may not have been based on Luria's patient, Borges invents a character (Ireneo Funes) whose "perception and memory are infallible...the present to him was almost intolerable in its richness and sharpness." Like D.C., Funes is driven mad by his boundless memory. He invents a nonsensical language where every object in the universe correlates to his private sign: "He then applied this absurd principle to numbers. In place of seven thousand thirteen, he would say (for example) Maximo Perez; in place of seven thousand fourteen, The Railroad; other numbers were Luis Melian Lafinur, Olimar, sulphur, the reins...In place of five hundred, he would say nine. Each word had a particular sign, a kind of mark, the last in the series were very complicated...I tried to explain to him that this rhapsody of incoherent terms was precisely the opposite of a system of numbers..." For Funes though, his "language" was the only way he could encode reality. Unable to forget anything, Funes needed a dictionary as infinite as life itself: "Funes remembered not only every leaf of every tree of every wood, but also every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it. He was, let us not forget, almost incapable of ideas of a general, Platonic sort. To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence...Ireneo Funes died in 1889, of congestion of the lungs."