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ISSUE N.4
Heritage Cities and Oblivion August 2026
Edited by Samanta Bartocci (Università degli Studi di Sassari), Lino Cabras (Università degli Studi di Sassari), Annalucia D'Erchia (Politecnico di Milano), Luciana Macaluso (Università degli Studi di Palermo) and Claudia Tinazzi (Politecnico di Milano)
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«The dreamlike and slightly delirious universe»1 constructed by Jorge Luis Borges in Fictionsplaces in question our habitual ways of knowing, ordering, and representing the sensible world. “Funes, the Memorious” is the paradox through which Borges asserts oblivion through a character who cannot forget. Told in the form of a recollection, the story portrays the young «remote» Ireneo Funes before and after the event that will transform his existence.
Ireneo’s apparent virtuosity reveals the fiction devised by Borges in bringing together two contingencies: the condemnation to paralysis and the acquisition of a prodigious memory. The accident that leaves him physically disabled coincides, in fact, with the acquisition of an “extra-ordinary” faculty: Funes is capable of perceiving and remembering every detail of reality. Yet the presumed gift soon reveals its tragic nature.
Ireneo betrays himself by admitting that his memory «is like a garbage disposal», and thus, from
«prodigious», it becomes «implacable» and «vertiginous», while the present becomes «almost intolerable in its richness and sharpness».
In a story in which every word seems to have been written to make the suffocating absence of oblivion legible beneath the surface, the absolute capacity to remember coincides with the impossibility of thinking: that is, of the «freedom to distract oneself from the world». The fiction denies the possibility of oblivion, thereby making tangible its urgency as a conditio sine qua non of knowledge, grounded in the capacity to synthesize, abstract, and thus forget. It is here that memory is transformed into a condemnation, forcing Funes «to the bottom of the river, rocked and annulled by the current».
Thus Borges takes to the extreme a fundamental question: how far can our knowledge advance if we are not also capable of forgetting?
Funes el memorioso
Ficciones
Jorge Luis Borges
Everyman
Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics
London
1993
200 pages
English (original language: Spanish)
9781857151664
Ficciones, Buenos Aires: SUR, 1944
notes
Borges, Jorge Luis. 2003. Fictions, edited by Antonio Melis. Turin: Adelphi. The quotation is taken from G. Montesano’s review of the edition
Jorge Luis Borges, Funes el memorioso, Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics, London 1993
