Borges I read not long after Nabokov. Having grown up with a secondhand bookseller for a dad, Borges made sense to me right away. There had always been something magical about all the evenings spent driving in the dark to garages in Huddersfield or damp terraced rooms on the outskirts of Halifax, watching as dad picked through endless boxes and sports bags heaped with books. Borges got into these moments and, again from a seemingly impossible distance, transfigured them. Borges, perhaps more than any modern writer, takes on directly the infinite as the promise of literature, its curse being always to break that promise. Borges’ talent is that he manages to make these stories read not like intellectual exercises but as the leftover case files of literature’s unsolved crimes. In this story we learn of Ireneo Funes who is given a perfect memory after a riding accident. Being able to perceive not only the individuality of every leaf on a tree, but each of his perceptions of each leaf, destroys his ability to talk, his ability to live. As I learned from philosophy a little later, it is a story that will absorb and spit back as much Hegel as it will Nietzsche, will wrestle with the paradox of sense certainty as ferociously as it will the reductive epistemological violence of conceptuality. It will also, like the Babylonian libraries and books of sand, remake into the patterns of the infinite the memory of an excited child on a rainy night watching his dad drive from the back of a Volvo.
First published as ‘Funes el memorioso’ in La Nación, June 1942 and collected in the 1944 anthology Ficciones. The first English translation appeared in Avon Modern Writing No. 2, 1954. Collected in Labyrinths, New Directions, 1964/Penguin, 1970 and in Fictions and Collected Fictions, Viking, 1998/Penguin, 2000, where it is translated by Andrew Hurley as ‘Funes, His Memory’
A Personal Anthology 