The relentless memory

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Relentless Memory is a story about the character Ireneo Funes. After an accident, he has the gift of not forgetting anything and at the same time recording all details. The story comes from Jorge Luis Borges and was published in the short story collection " Fictions ".

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In “the inexorable memory” the narrator describes three encounters with “Ireneo Funes”. When you first meet, you will notice that you can always tell the exact time without having to use any aids. At the second meeting, the narrator learns that Funes was thrown from a horse and has meanwhile become paralyzed by this accident. Since that accident, he has been living completely withdrawn in a dark room. However, Funes sends a letter in which he asks for books that the narrator has with him. He then received this - a Latin dictionary and a volume of the Naturalis Historia by Pliny the Elder . When the two people meet a little later, Funes already knows Latin and lists Pliny’s descriptions, which deal with astonishing memories, because since his accident he now has both an all-encompassing perception and an infallible memory.

So Funes can now record any impressions and reproduce them in the smallest detail: “He knew exactly the shapes of the southern clouds of the sunrise on April 30, 1882 and was able to compare them in his memory with the grain on a parchment tape that he only looked at once and with the lines of spray churned by an oar on the Río Negro on the eve of the Quebracho battle. These memories, however, were not simple-minded; every optical image was connected with sensations of heat in the muscles, etc. ”Using his memory, Funes had also devised a number system in which every digit was replaced by words, and was thinking about summarizing memories in digits. When Funes also remembered things, he had innumerable thoughts, since he could perceive and recapitulate every smallest change.

However, he was not capable of real thinking besides reconstructing: “Thinking means forgetting the difference, means more generalizing, abstracting. In the crammed world of Funes there was nothing but details, almost immediate. "

The story closes with the narrator's fear of unnecessarily burdening Funes' memory with unnecessary gestures. Even though he was only 19 years old, he seemed ages old. Ultimately, Funes dies of a pulmonary embolism.

History of origin and influences

James Joyce died in January 1941 , whereupon Borges published a “Fragment to Joyce” in the newspaper “ Sur ”. In it he describes a previously unpublished work on Ireneo Funes. Borges himself referred to Ulysses by James Joyce and Zarathustra by Nietzsche as “pre-texts” for the creation of Ireneo Funes. In order to be able to understand Ulysses with a single reading, one needs an infinite memory, which received its fictional character and thus became the “ideal reader” of Joyce's work.

Just as James Joyce broadcast the Odyssey in Ulysses, Borges now broadcasts the Ulysses in his own way in Ireneo Funes. While Joyce draws a unique, detailed picture of a day in Dublin, Funes manages to reconstruct exactly every day. In order to reproduce the idea of ​​the exact (re-) construction, however, Borges uses the version of the short story, which he justifies in the preface to The Garden of Paths That Branch: “It is tedious and exhausting nonsense to write thick books; to roll out a thought on five hundred pages, the perfectly adequate oral presentation of which takes a few minutes. "

"The Relentless Memory" appeared for the first time on June 7, 1942 in the newspaper "La Nación". The finished work was published in 1944 in his short story work " Fiktionen ".

Interpretations

Borges addresses ideas of infinity in many of his stories - the library of Babel as an infinite library, the sand book as an infinite book, the garden of paths that branch off with infinite possibilities - in the story of Ireneo Funes he treats an almost infinite memory with the Ability to remember everything with all the details.

Borges himself saw “The Relentless Memory” as a metaphor for insomnia from which he himself suffered: "Then I said to myself, let us suppose there was a person who couldn't forget anything he had perceived, and it's well known that this happened to James Joyce, who in the course of a single day could have brought out “Ulysses,” a day in which thousands of things happened. I thought of someone who couldn't forget those events and who in the end dies swept away by his infinite memory. In a word that fragmentary hoodlum is me, or is an image I stole for literary purposes but which corresponds to my own insomnia. " In addition, it is a reference to James Joyce's work Finnegans Wake .

Impact history

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Borges, Jorge Luis: The inexorable memory, in: Ebj .: Fiktionen, (= Collected Works, First Part of the Stories) p. 184
  2. ↑ Borges, Jorge Luis: The inexorable memory, in: Ebj .: Fiktionen, (= Collected Works, First Part of the Stories) p. 187
  3. ↑ https://www.gwern.net/docs/borges/1941-borges-afragmentonjoyce.pdf
  4. ↑ James Joyce, Author of 'Funes the Momorious', in: Borges and Joyce. An Infinite Conversation, Great Britain 2011, ISBN 978-907625-05-3, p. 70.
  5. ^ Foreword to "The garden of paths that branch out" In: Universal history of wickedness, fictions, the Aleph. The first part of the stories Borges, Munich 1991, ISBN 978-3-446-19878-4 , p. 97.
  6. ↑ https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/borges-memory-funes-the-memorious
  7. ↑ "The second story is a long metaphor of insomnia" in: Foreword to Kunststücke, Borges, Jorge Luis: Fiktionen, (= Collected Works, First Part of the Stories) p. 178
  8. ↑ https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/borges-memory-funes-the-memorious
  9. ↑ https://books.google.de/books?id=SmlhCVt1t9cC&pg=PT289&lpg=PT289&dq=cloud+atlas+funes&source=bl&ots=jz_Tf-igEm&sig=ACfU3U0Eado0lcm3_7szAZKPA6KYlvFUnA&hl=de&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjF-Ljp07TkAhVILVAKHSq7AT4Q6AEwBXoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=cloud%20atlas % 20funes & f = false