Funes, the Memorious by Jorge Luis Borges

First published: "Funes el memorioso," 1944 (English translation, 1962)

Type of plot: Fantasy

Time of work: The 1880's

Locale: The eastern shore of the Uruguay River, in Uruguay

Principal Characters:

• Ireneo Funes, the man cursed with perfect memory
• The narrator

The Story

The history of the unfortunate Ireneo Funes is told by an unnamed narrator who, hearing of Funes's death, determines to put something into print about a very remarkable and, in one sense, disquieting man. Although he encountered Funes not more than three times, each meeting stamped itself on the narrator's memory.

The first, he tells the reader, was in February or March of 1884: He and his cousin were riding on horseback to his family's farm. As they rode along, hurrying to outpace a storm, they rode in a lane between high walls. On the top of one of the brick walls appeared an Indian boy. The narrator's cousin asked the boy what the time was, and the boy replied, "In ten minutes it will be eight o'clock." The cousin later explained, with some pride in a local curiosity, that the boy, Ireneo Funes, had the peculiar talent of always knowing the exact time without a watch.

Several times in the years that follow, the narrator asks about "the chronometer Funes," whenever he is in the area. In 1887, he hears that Funes has been thrown from a horse and crippled; unable to walk, he has become a recluse. The narrator glimpses him several times, but there is something strange about each occasion. He sees Funes behind a grilled window in the boy's house, unmoving each time, once with his eyes closed, once simply absorbed in smelling a blossom of lavender.

On a subsequent visit to the farm, the narrator brings along several books of Latin, the study of which he is beginning. During his visit, he receives a letter from Funes, asking if he might borrow one of the Latin texts and a dictionary. The narrator sends the books with some amusement that the small-town youth would think he could teach himself Latin with no more help than a dictionary. He forgets about the loan until he receives a telegram from Buenos Aires informing him that he must return immediately. He goes to the small ranch of Funes's mother to retrieve his books.

When he arrives, the woman tells him that Funes is in his room and cautions him not to be surprised to find him in the dark. Making his way to the room, the narrator overhears Funes reading—in Latin—from the book he has lent him. He enters Funes's room, and they begin a conversation that lasts until dawn.

Much to his surprise, the narrator discovers that Funes has indeed mastered even conversational Latin. They discuss the borrowed book, the Roman author Pliny's Historian naturalis (77 c.e.; The Historie of the World, 1601; better known as Natural History), which tells in one section of amazing feats of memory: Cyrus, the king of Persia, knowing each of his soldiers' names, and the like. Funes is astonished that anyone should think that such things were remarkable. He offers his own experience as an argument.

Funes says that until he was thrown from horseback, he was "blind, deaf-mute, somnambulistic, memoryless." The narrator disagrees, pointing out Funes's earlier talent with the time, but Funes's prior life now seems dreamlike to him. Now he finds that he has the ability to remember in every detail everything that he has ever experienced: every sound, every sight, every smell, as intensely and clearly as normal people do on only the most vivid of occasions. He thinks that his crippling was a small price to pay for an infallible memory. However, there are hints that even Funes does not think of his new mental powers as a complete blessing: Although he boasts that he has in himself more memories than all men have had through history, he also compares his memory to a garbage disposal. The narrator, writing the account years later, thinks of film and the phonograph, two recording devices that did not exist when Funes lived, yet which even in their exact preserving of history are not superior to this one individual.

The mental state of Funes is almost incomprehensible to the narrator as he tries to understand what it would be like to remember every leaf on every tree, not only each time he saw it but also each time he imagined it as well. So oppressive is the power of his memory that Funes finds it hard to sleep; the darkened room, the reader comes to understand, helps him relax because it limits the amount of perception available to him.

At the climax of the story, dawn comes, and the narrator first sees Funes's face, "more ancient than Egypt," although Funes is only nineteen years old. With alarm, the narrator realizes that his every word and gesture will live indelibly in the youth's memory, and he begins to fear. What would the man's memory carry at the end of a long life? The narrator never finds out: In 1889, at the age of twenty-one, Funes dies.