Funes, the MemoriousBy Jorge Luis BorgesI remember him (I .docx

Funes, the Memorious
By Jorge Luis Borges
I remember him (I scarcely have the right to use this ghostly
verb; only one man on earth deserved the right, and he is dead),
I remember him with a dark passionflower in his hand, looking
at it as no one has ever looked at such a flower, though they
might look from the twilight of day until the twilight of night,
for a whole life long. I remember him, his face immobile and
Indian-like, and singularly remote, behind his cigarette. I
remember (I believe) the strong delicate fingers of the
plainsman who can braid leather. I remember, near those hands,
a vessel in which to make maté tea, bearing the arms of the
Banda Oriental; I remember, in the window of the house, a
yellow rush mat, and beyond, a vague marshy landscape. I
remember clearly his voice, the deliberate, resentful nasal voice
of the old Eastern Shore man, without the Italianate syllables of
today. I did not see him more than three times; the last time, in
1887. . . .
That all those who knew him should write something about him
seems to me a very felicitous idea; my testimony may perhaps
be the briefest and without doubt the poorest, and it will not be
the least impartial. The deplorable fact of my being an
Argentinian will hinder me from falling into a dithyramb - an
obligatory form in the Uruguay, when the theme is an
Uruguayan.
Littérateur, slicker, Buenos Airean: Funes did not use these
insulting phrases, but I am sufficiently aware that for him I
represented these unfortunate categories. Pedro Leandro Ipuche
has written that Funes was a precursor of the superman, "an
untamed and vernacular Zarathustra"; I do not doubt it, but one

must not forget, either, that he was a countryman from the town
of Fray Bentos, with certain incurable limitations.
My first recollection of Funes is quite clear: I see him at dusk,
sometime in March or February of the year '84. That year, my
father had taken me to spend the summer at Fray Bentos. I was
on my way back from the farm at San Francisco with my cousin
Bernardo Haedo. We came back singing, on horseback; and this
last fact was not the only reason for my joy. After a sultry day,
an enormous slate-grey-storm had obscured the sky. It was
driven on by a wind from the south; the trees were already
tossing like madmen; and I had the apprehension (the secret
hope) that the elemental downpour would catch us out in the
open. We were running a kind of race with the tempest. We rode
into a narrow lane which wound down between two enormously
high brick footpaths. It had grown black of a sudden; I now
heard rapid almost secret steps above; I raised my eyes and saw
a boy running along the narrow, cracked path as if he were
running along a narrow, broken wall. I remember the loose
trousers, tight at the bottom, the hemp sandals; I remember the
cigarette in the hard visage, standing out against the by now
limitless darkness. Bernardo unexpectedly yelled to him:
"What's the time, Ireneo?" Without looking up, without
stopping, Ireneo replied: "In ten minutes it will be eight o'clock,
child Bernardo Juan Francisco." The voice was sharp, mocking.
I am so absentminded that the dialogue which I have just cited
would not have penetrated my attention if it had not been
repeated by my cousin, who was stimulated, I think, by a certain
local pride and by a desire to show himself indifferent to the
other's three-sided reply.
He told me that the boy above us in the pass was a certain
Ireneo Funes, renowned for a number of eccentricities, such as
that of having nothing to do with people and of always knowing
the time, like a watch. He added that Ireneo was the son of

Maria Clementina Funes, an ironing woman in the town, and
that his father, some people said, was an "Englishman" named
O'Connor, a doctor in the salting fields, though some said the
father was a horse-breaker, or scout, from the province of El
Salto. Ireneo lived with his mother, at the edge of the country
house of the Laurels.
In the years '85 and '86 we spent the summer in the city of
Montevideo. We returned to Fray Bentos in '87. As was natural,
I inquired after all my acquaintances, and finally, about "the
chronometer Funes." I was told that he had been thrown by a
wild horse at the San Francisco ranch, and that he had been
hopelessly crippled. I remember the impression of uneasy magic
which the news provoked in me: the only time I had seen him
we were on horseback, coming from San Francisco, and he was
in a high place; from the lips of my cousin Bernardo the affair
sounded like a dream elaborated with elements out of the past.
They told me that Ireneo did not move now from his cot, but
remained with his eyes fixed on the backyard fig tree, or on a
cobweb. At sunset he allowed himself to be brought to the
window. He carried pride to the extreme of pretending that the
blow which had befallen him was a good thing. . . . Twice I saw
him behind the iron grate which sternly delineated his eternal
imprisonment: unmoving, once, his eyes closed; unmoving also,
another time, absorbed in the contemplation of a sweet-smelling
sprig of lavender cotton.
At the time I had begun, not without some ostentation, the
methodical study of Latin. My valise contained the De viris
illustribus of Lhomond, the Thesaurus of Quicherat, Caesar's
Commentaries, and an odd-numbered volume of the Historia
Naturalis of Pliny, which exceeded (and still exceeds) my
modest talents as a Latinist. Everything is noised around in a
small town; Ireneo, at his small farm on the outskirts, was not
long in learning of the arrival of these anomalous books. He
sent me a flowery, ceremonious letter, in which he recalled our

encounter, unfortunately brief, "on the seventh day of February
of the year '84," and alluded to the glorious services which Don
Gregorio Haedo, my uncle, dead the same year, "had rendered to
the Two Fatherlands in the glorious campaign of Ituzaingó," and
he solicited the loan of any one of the volumes, to be
accompanied by a dictionary "for the better intelligence of the
original text, for I do not know Latin as yet." He promised to
return them in good condition, almost immediately. The letter
was perfect, very nicely constructed; the orthography was of the
type sponsored by Andrés Bello: i for y, j for g. At first I
naturally suspected a jest. My cousins assured me it was not so,
that these were the ways of Ireneo. I did not know whether to
attribute to impudence, ignorance, or stupidity the idea that the
difficult Latin required no other instrument than a dictionary; in
order fully to undeceive him I sent the Gradus ad Parnassum of
Quicherat, and the Pliny.
On 14 February, I received a telegram from Buenos Aires
telling me to return immediately, for my father was "in no way
well." God forgive me, but the prestige of being the recipient of
an urgent telegram, the desire to point out to all of Fray Bentos
the contradiction between the negative form of the news and the
positive adverb, the temptation to dramatize my sorrow as I
feigned a virile stoicism, all no doubt distracted me from the
possibility of anguish. As I packed my valise, I noticed that I
was missing the Gradus and the volume of the Historia
Naturalis. The "Saturn" was to weigh anchor on the morning of
the next day; that night, after supper, I made my way to the
house of Funes. Outside, I was surprised to find the night no
less oppressive than the day.
Ireneo's mother received me at the modest ranch.
She told me that Ireneo was in the back room and that I should
not be disturbed to find him in the dark, for he knew how to
pass the dead hours without lighting the candle. I crossed the

cobblestone patio, the small corridor; I came to the second
patio. A great vine covered everything, so that the darkness
seemed complete. Of a sudden I heard the high-pitched,
mocking voice of Ireneo. The voice spoke in Latin; the voice
(which came out of the obscurity) was reading, with obvious
delight, a treatise or prayer or incantation. The Roman syllables
resounded in the earthen patio; my suspicion made them seem
undecipherable, interminable; afterwards, in the enormous
dialogue of that night, I learned that they made up the first
paragraph of the twenty-fourth chapter of the seventh book of
the Historia Naturalis. The subject of this chapter is memory;
the last words are ujt nihil non iisdem verbis redderetur
auditum.
Without the least change in his voice, Ireneo bade me come in.
He was lying on the cot, smoking. It seems to me that I did not
see his face until dawn; I seem to recall the momentary glow of
the cigarette. The room smelled vaguely of dampness. I sat
down, and repeated the story of the telegram and my father's
illness.
I come now to the most difficult point in my narrative. For the
entire story has no other point (the reader might as well know it
by now) than this dialogue of almost a half-century ago. I shall
not attempt to reproduce his words, now irrecoverable. I prefer
truthfully to make a résumé of the many things Ireneo told me.
The indirect style is remote and weak; I know that I sacrifice
the effectiveness of my narrative; but let my readers imagine
the nebulous sentences which coulded that night.
Ireneo began by enumerating, in Latin and Spanish, the cases of
prodigious memory cited in the Historia Naturalis: Cyrus, king
of the Persians, who could call every soldier in his armies by
name; Mithridates Eupator, who administered justice in the
twenty-two languages of his empire; Simonides, inventory of
mnemotechny; Metrodorus, who practised the art of repeating

faithfully what he heard once. With evident good faith Funes
marvelled that such things should be considered marvellous. He
told me that previous to the rainy afternoon when the blue-
tinted horse threw him, he had been - like any Christian - blind,
deaf-mute, somnambulistic, memoryless. (I tried to remind him
of his precise perception of time, his memory for proper names;
he paid no attention to me.) For nineteen years, he said, he had
lived like a person in a dream: he looked without seeing, heard
without hearing, forgot everything - almost everything. On
falling from the horse, he lost consciousness; when he
recovered it, the present was almost intolerable it was so rich
and bright; the same was true of the most ancient and most
trivial memories. A little later he realized that he was crippled.
This fact scarcely interested him. He reasoned (or felt) that
immobility was a minimum price to pay. And now, his
perception and his memory were infallible.
We, in a glance, perceive three wine glasses on the table; Funes
saw all the shoots, clusters, and grapes of the vine. He
remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the
30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his
recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-
bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in
the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the
battle of the Quebracho. These recollections were not simple;
each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal
sensations, etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his
fancies. Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day.
He told me: I have more memories in myself alone than all men
have had since the world was a world. And again: My dreams
are like your vigils. And again, toward dawn: My memory, sir,
is like a garbage disposal.
A circumference on a blackboard, a rectangular triangle, a
rhomb, are forms which we can fully intuit; the same held true
with Ireneo for the tempestuous mane of a stallion, a herd of

cattle in a pass, the ever-changing flame or the innumerable ash,
the many faces of a dead man during the course of a protracted
wake. He could perceive I do not know how many stars in the
sky.
These things he told me; neither then nor at any time later did
they seem doubtful. In those days neither the cinema nor the
phonograph yet existed; nevertheless, it seems strange, almost
incredible, that no one should have experimented on Funes. The
truth is that we all live by leaving behind; no doubt we all
profoundly know that we are immortal and that sooner or later
every man will do all things and know everything.
The voice of Funes, out of the darkness, continued. He told me
that toward 1886 he had devised a new system of enumeration
and that in a very few days he had gone before twenty-four
thousand. He had not written it down, for what he once
meditated would not be erased. The first stimulus to his work, I
believe, had been his discontent with the fact that "thirty-three
Uruguayans" required two symbols and three words, rather than
a single word and a single symbol. Later he applied his
extravagant principle to the other numbers. In place of seven
thousand thirteen, he would say (for example) Máximo Perez; in
place of seven thousand fourteen, The Train; other numbers
were Luis Melián Lafinur, Olimar, Brimstone, Clubs, The
Whale, Gas, The Cauldron, Napoleon, Agustín de Vedia. In lieu
of five hundred, he would say nine. Each word had a particular
sign, a species of mark; the last were very complicated. . . . I
attempted to explain that this rhapsody of unconnected terms
was precisely the contrary of a system of enumeration. I said
that to say three hundred and sixty-five was to say three
hundreds, six tens, five units: an analysis which does not exist
in such numbers as The Negro Timoteo or The Flesh Blanket.
Funes did not understand me, or did not wish to understand me.
Locke, in the seventeenth century, postulated (and rejected) an

impossible idiom in which each individual object, each stone,
each bird and branch had an individual name; Funes had once
projected an analogous idiom, but he had renounced it as being
too general, too ambiguous. In effect, Funes not only
remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even
every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it. He
determined to reduce all of his past experience to some seventy
thousand recollections, which he would later define
numerically. Two considerations dissuaded him: the thought
that the task was interminable and the thought that it was
useless. He knew that at the hour of his death he would scarcely
have finished classifying even all the memories of his
childhood.
The two projects I have indicated (an infinite vocabulary for the
natural series of numbers, and a usable mental catalogue of all
the images of memory) are lacking in sense, but they reveal a
certain stammering greatness. They allow us to make out dimly,
or to infer, the dizzying world of Funes. He was, let us not
forget, almost incapable of general, platonic ideas. It was not
only difficult for him to understand that the generic term dog
embraced so many unlike specimens of differing sizes and
different forms; he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three-
fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog
at three-fifteen (seen from the front). His own face in the
mirror, his own hands, surprised him on every occasion. Swift
writes that the emperor of Lilliput could discern the movement
of the minute hand; Funes could continuously make out the
tranquil advances of corruption, of caries, of fatigue. He noted
the progress of death, of moisture. He was the solitary and lucid
spectator of a multiform world which was instantaneously and
almost intolerably exact. Babylon, London, and New York have
overawed the imagination of men with their ferocious
splendour; no one, in those populous towers or upon those
surging avenues, has felt the heat and pressure of a reality as
indefatigable as that which day and night converged upon the

unfortunate Ireneo in his humble South American farmhouse. It
was very difficult for him to sleep. To sleep is to be abstracted
from the world; Funes, on his back in his cot, in the shadows,
imagined every crevice and every moulding of the various
houses which surrounded him. (I repeat, the least important of
his recollections was more minutely precise and more lively
than our perception of a physical pleasure or a physical
torment.) Toward the east, in a section which was not yet cut
into blocks of homes, there were some new unknown houses.
Funes imagined them black, compact, made of a single
obscurity; he would turn his face in this direction in order to
sleep. He would also imagine himself at the bottom of the river,
being rocked and annihilated by the current.
Without effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese,
Latin. I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very capable of
thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to
abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing
but details, almost contiguous details.
The equivocal clarity of dawn penetrated along the earthen
patio.
Then it was that I saw the face of the voice which had spoken
all through the night. Ireneo was nineteen years old; he had
been born in 1868; he seemed as monumental as bronze, more
ancient than Egypt, anterior to the prophecies and the pyramids.
It occurred to me that each one of my words (each one of my
gestures) would live on in his implacable memory; I was
benumbed by the fear of multiplying superfluous gestures.
Ireneo Funes died in 1889, of a pulmonary congestion.
Note: The Eastern Shore (of the Uruguay River); now the Orient
Republic of Uruguay. (Return to top of page.)

Translated by Anthony Kerrigan
In Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by John Sturrock
(original publication 1942; English translation, Grove Press,
1962; rpt. by Alfred A. Knopf/Everyman, 1993),
83-91.
SHORT ESSAY. LENGTH: 1000 WORDS MAXIMUM!
REFERENCING STYLE: HARVARD
ESSAY QUESTION:
Select one of Jorge Luis Borges’ short stories and one of David
Eagleman’s tales from the afterlives. What themes or ideas do
the two pieces of short fiction that you have selected share?
How do the two pieces differ in their treatment of those
themes/ideas?
In order to answer this question effectively you need to give
careful consideration to your selection of stories.
You are free to reference material other than the texts referred
to in either of these two options however this is not required for
an effective response.
YOU NEED TO GET ACESS TO THE BOOKS
“LABYRINTHS” BY JORGE LUIS BORGES AND “SUM:
FORTY TALES FROM THE AFTERLIVES” BY DAVID
EAGLEMAN IN ORDER TO ANSWER THIS QUESTION!!
CAN ONLY USE 1 SCHOLARLY TEXT. I WILL SEND YOU
SOME NOTES ON BORGES.
ALSO SEND U THE MARKING CRITERIA. YOU
MUSSSSTTTTTTT FOLLOW IT
STRICTLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am paying for 4 pages (1100) but I only need 1000 words
max! this is strict!
PLEASE FOCUS MAINLY ON ANSWERING THE
QUESTION!! ANSWER THE QUESTION ON A MASTERS
LEVEL, NOT HIGHSCHOOL PLEASE!
Assessment Criteria For Minor Writing Task
Your minor writing tasks will be assessed based on the
following criteria-
1.
Evidence of critical and evaluative thinking
2.
Logical structure of your argument/story
3.
Demonstrated originality and initiative in analysis/story
4.
Level of engagement with the set texts
5.
Clarity and precision in written expression
6.
Correctness in spelling, punctuation and grammar
7.
Appropriate and consistent acknowledgement of quotations and
sources

International Texts and Contexts
Week 5 – Short Fiction
Ideas about Borges for this week
Borges provides us with an interesting example of the ways
different art-forms relate to one another and cross pollinate,
particularly...The relationship of Borges’ short fiction to the
visual arts (Borges as a precursor to Conceptualism, fiction as
idea, Borges as context) and later we’ll link this line of thought
to the question-How can this week’s stories be thought of as
“interrogations of structural paradoxes”? (the incompleteness of
complete systems)And in the tuts- science as a context for
Borges stories
Often Cited Borges QuotationIn the prologue to ficciones
Borges describes his procedure for writing in the following
terms;
It is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance to
compose huge books to explain in five hundred pages an idea
whose full oral exposition takes only a few minutes. A
better procedure is to pretend that these books already exist
and to offer a summary, a commentary.... I have
preferred to write notes on imaginary books.
From the prologue to ficciones (cited in the Ulmer reading
available on vUWS)
Conceptual Art: Borges and UlmerUlmer states “The key to
Borges' Conceptualism is his creation of a hybrid form which
synthesizes the criticism and practice of literature.”

(p.846)Ulmer argues that many of Borges’ stories contain “the
essence of Conceptual Art, the main point of which is the
assertion that art has nothing to do with formal objects, but that
ideas and concepts alone are art.” (p.846)Ulmer’s definition of
conceptual art is a little extreme however we could say in
conceptual art the idea is often as important than the form it
takes, or that the form is only important insofar as it is a vehicle
for the idea.
An example From Week 1Santiago Sierra’s bricking-up of the
Spanish pavilion at the Venice Biennale
Santiago SierraWe aren’t interested in the formal aspects of the
work (what type of bricks he used, the patterns that the cement
might have made on the ground, the exact type of rubbish left
behind etc.)But rather we’re interested in the meaning of the
idea of bricking up the pavilion and denying access to anyone
who doesn’t have a Spanish passport
Another Example: Joseph Kosuth “One and three chairs”
Joseph KosuthFormal and technical elements
-design of the chair
-typography of the dictionary definition
-type of film and photographic printAll less important
than the ideas about language and perception that are raised by
thinking about the differences between these three modes of
referring to the chair

Conceptual Art and BorgesIn the Sierra example the form (a
brick wall, plastic covering a sign, the gallery space) is less
important than the idea (denying access, excluding people based
on their nationality)Similarly for Borges the form (a long novel)
is less important than the key idea that the novel might contain.
Ideas are prioritized by condensing them into short fictions and
doing away with descriptive details or extraneous plot elements
that are not important to the idea.
Analyzing BorgesGiven that Borges has a strong focus on ideas
those ideas are probably a useful way to focus our analysisI
would suggest that formal analysis (that might look at elements
like narrative POV, focalization, character, plot etc.) would
only be useful if that analysis returned us immediately to a
consideration of the ideas.
Yes Borges and ideas,
I get it, but which ideas?Many possibilities, how many? Search
for Borges on Project Muse or Jstor you’ll find articles on
- Borges and chaos theory
- Borges and structuralism
- Borges and philosophy
- Borges and science
- Borges and garden gnomes
- and literally thousands more….
Do this search it might help you to empathize with the
narrator of “The Library of Bable”

Ok lots of ideas but where to start?With one. In his or her
article (available on vUWS) Selnes argues that in Ficciones (the
orginal Spanish language book that contains all of the stories
that I have selected for study) Borges is engaged with “an
interrogation of structural paradoxes” (p.83)Structure can be
thought of as an aid to understanding in the sense that it can
help us to locate parts in relation to one another and, perhaps,
some notion of a whole. Borges shows us various ways in which
structure, when we push it to its limits, can actually hamper our
ability to understand.
What limits of structure does Borges’ show us in his short
fictions?
Consider his (very) short story On Exactitude in Science-
...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained
such
Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied
the
entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the
entirety of
a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no
longer
satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map
of the
Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which
coincided point for point with it. The following
Generations,
who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as
their
Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was
Useless,

and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they
delivered
it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the
Deserts
of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of
that Map,
inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land
there is
no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Map/structureThe map as a way of structuring an understanding
of where things are in relation to one anotherPast a certain
threshold the more accurate the map the less useful it is to our
understanding (a 1:1 map adds nothing to our understanding of
the spatial relationship between things and places)Borges shows
as the limits of the map as a structure for understanding.
From the late 60s Mason Williams’ Bus
Borges and the limits of structureThe hexagons are structured in
the same wayThere is the same number of
-shelves on each wall
-books on each shelf
-pages in each book
-lines on each page and…
-letters on each lineThe Library of Babel contains “all
the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical
symbols”But despite this clear and coherent structure any hope
of finding sense is defeated by the scale of the library and its
lack of order- “for every sensible line of straightforward

statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal
jumbles and incoherences.”As is the case with the map the
understanding that structure might provide is overwhelmed by
the very scale of the structure[Can you imagine a way of
ordering this library that would make it useable despite the
problems of scale?]
Funes the memorious We also encounter the limits of structure
particularly with regards to naming and classifying This naming
and classifying needs to be general enough to function
effectivelyUnderstanding relies on generalizingIf we follow
Funes’ system of classification from the general to the specific
[Animal-Dog-Breed-Name of Dog- Name for dog at three-
fourteen (seen in profile)- name dog at three-fifteen (seen from
the front)] we can see that there is a level of specificity that is
impossible for anyone other than Funes to understandThe
usefulness of the structures in language created by naming and
classification start to break down once we reach a certain level
of specificity
Limits of Structure: ClassifyingIn other stories Borges also
reveals the limits of structure in relation to classificationFrom
The Analytical Language of John Wilkins
These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies
remind us of those which doctor Franz Kuhn attributes to a
certain Chinese encyclopaedia entitled 'Celestial Empire of
benevolent Knowledge'. In its remote pages it is written that
the animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor,
(b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f)
fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present
classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a
very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just

broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look
like flies.The logic of our classificatory structures breaks down
when the categories no longer make sense to us
Writing and the limits
of structuring ideas In the Library
I cannot combine some characters
dhcmrlchtdj
which the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one
of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one
can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and
fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name
of a god. To speak is to fall into tautology. This wordy and
useless epistle already exists in one of the thirty volumes of the
five shelves of one of the innumerable hexagons -- and its
refutation as well. (An n number of possible languages use the
same vocabulary; in some of them, the symbol library allows
the correct definition a ubiquitous and lasting system of
hexagonal galleries, but library is bread or pyramid or anything
else, and these seven words which define it have another value.
You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?)
of structuring ideas In the Lottery of Babylon
At the level of narration, the structural effects of the

lottery are equally disturbing. Although there are only a few
explicit marks of enunciation in the text, the general condition
of writing among the Babylonians is exposed quite
meticulously. Scribes, historians, and editors, the narrator
asserts, conscientiously indulge in errors, dis-crepancies,
falsifications. Moreover, the history (even in the sense of the
past) of the Company is relentlessly subjected to the
lottery’s haphazard revisionism. A method to correct chance has
been in- vented but its operations “no se divulgan sin alguna
dosis de enga-ño” (460). In a retrospective comment the
narrator includes his own exposition in this economy of
deception: “yo mismo, en esta apresu-rada declaración, he
falseado algún esplendor, alguna misteriosa monotonía”
(460). This remark may seem an ominous one for the narrative
situation of the story; but in a sense it only corroborates
the predicament which defines the Babylonian’s discourse in
the first place. No one could rightly claim to have dodged the
all- pervasive influence of the lottery. Thus one cannot simply
dismiss the possibil-ity that the narration which is to
account for the nature of the lottery in Babylon is the result of
an I nfinite series of drawings. This means, in a quite accurate
sense, that the figural span between story and discourse is
suspended. There is no longer any significant distance
between the narrated events and the act of narration. The
two levels have become continuous, unidimensional—like a
Möbius strip.
of structuring ideas And for Funes the Memorious writing is not
only redundant
He told me that toward 1886 he had devised a
new system of enumeration and that in a very few days he
had gone before twenty-four thousand. He had not written

it down, for what he once meditated would not be
erased.But writing and language are far too general to be of
much use in describing his experience
Borges’ FictionsStructures so large and comprehensive that they
ceases to make sense. Structure instead of aiding understanding
serves to undermine it
The Library of Babel
by Jorge Luis Borges
By this art you may contemplate the variations of the 23
letters...
The Anatomy of Melancholy, part 2, sect. II, mem. IV
The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an
indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries,
with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings.
From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper
and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable.
Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides
except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to
ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase. One of the
free sides leads to a narrow hallway which opens onto another
gallery, identical to the first and to all the rest. To the left and
right of the hallway there are two very small closets. In the
first, one may sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy one's fecal
necessities. Also through here passes a spiral stairway, which
sinks abysmally and soars upwards to remote distances. In the
hallway there is a mirror which faithfully duplicates all
appearances. Men usually infer from this mirror that the Library
is not infinite (if it were, why this illusory duplication?); I
prefer to dream that its polished surfaces represent and promise
the infinite ... Light is provided by some spherical fruit which
bear the name of lamps. There are two, transversally placed, in

each hexagon. The light they emit is insufficient, incessant.
Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth; I
have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of
catalogues; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write,
I am preparing to die just a few leagues from the hexagon in
which I was born. Once I am dead, there will be no lack of
pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the
fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and
dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite. I
say that the Library is unending. The idealists argue that the
hexagonal rooms are a necessary form of absolute space or, at
least, of our intuition of space. They reason that a triangular or
pentagonal room is inconceivable. (The mystics claim that their
ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber containing a great
circular book, whose spine is continuous and which follows the
complete circle of the walls; but their testimony is suspect; their
words, obscure. This cyclical book is God.) Let it suffice now
for me to repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere
whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose
circumference is inaccessible.
There are five shelves for each of the hexagon's walls; each
shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is
of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each
line, of some eighty letters which are black in color. There are
also letters on the spine of each book; these letters do not
indicate or prefigure what the pages will say. I know that this
incoherence at one time seemed mysterious. Before
summarizing the solution (whose discovery, in spite of its tragic
projections, is perhaps the capital fact in history) I wish to
recall a few axioms.
First: The Library exists ab aeterno. This truth, whose
immediate corollary is the future eternity of the world, cannot
be placed in doubt by any reasonable mind. Man, the imperfect
librarian, may be the product of chance or of malevolent
demiurgi; the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves,
of enigmatical volumes, of inexhaustible stairways for the

traveler and latrines for the seated librarian, can only be the
work of a god. To perceive the distance between the divine and
the human, it is enough to compare these crude wavering
symbols which my fallible hand scrawls on the cover of a book,
with the organic letters inside: punctual, delicate, perfectly
black, inimitably symmetrical.
Second: The orthographical symbols are twenty-five in
number.(1) This finding made it possible, three hundred years
ago, to formulate a general theory of the Library and solve
satisfactorily the problem which no conjecture had deciphered:
the formless and chaotic nature of almost all the books. One
which my father saw in a hexagon on circuit fifteen ninety-four
was made up of the letters MCV, perversely repeated from the
first line to the last. Another (very much consulted in this area)
is a mere labyrinth of letters, but the next-to-last page says Oh
time thy pyramids. This much is already known: for every
sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of
senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences. (I
know of an uncouth region whose librarians repudiate the vain
and superstitious custom of finding a meaning in books and
equate it with that of finding a meaning in dreams or in the
chaotic lines of one's palm ... They admit that the inventors of
this writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but
maintain that this application is accidental and that the books
signify nothing in themselves. This dictum, we shall see, is not
entirely fallacious.)
For a long time it was believed that these impenetrable
books corresponded to past or remote languages. It is true that
the most ancient men, the first librarians, used a language quite
different from the one we now speak; it is true that a few miles
to the right the tongue is dialectical and that ninety floors
farther up, it is incomprehensible. All this, I repeat, is true, but
four hundred and ten pages of inalterable MCV's cannot
correspond to any language, no matter how dialectical or
rudimentary it may be. Some insinuated that each letter could
influence the following one and that the value of MCV in the

third line of page 71 was not the one the same series may have
in another position on another page, but this vague thesis did
not prevail. Others thought of cryptographs; generally, this
conjecture has been accepted, though not in the sense in which
it was formulated by its originators.
Five hundred years ago, the chief of an upper hexagon (2)
came upon a book as confusing as the others, but which had
nearly two pages of homogeneous lines. He showed his find to a
wandering decoder who told him the lines were written in
Portuguese; others said they were Yiddish. Within a century, the
language was established: a Samoyedic Lithuanian dialect of
Guarani, with classical Arabian inflections. The content was
also deciphered: some notions of combinative analysis,
illustrated with examples of variations with unlimited
repetition. These examples made it possible for a librarian of
genius to discover the fundamental law of the Library. This
thinker observed that all the books, no matter how diverse they
might be, are made up of the same elements: the space, the
period, the comma, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He
also alleged a fact which travelers have confirmed: In the vast
Library there are no two identical books. From these two
incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total
and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the
twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though
extremely vast, is not infinite): Everything: the minutely
detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies,
the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands
of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those
catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true
catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on
that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel,
the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all
languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.
When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all
books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness.
All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret

treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose
eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe
was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited
dimensions of hope. At that time a great deal was said about the
Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated
for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained
prodigious arcana for his future. Thousands of the greedy
abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the
stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their
Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors,
proferred dark curses, strangled each other on the divine
stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts, met
their death cast down in a similar fashion by the inhabitants of
remote regions. Others went mad ... The Vindications exist (I
have seen two which refer to persons of the future, to persons
who are perhaps not imaginary) but the searchers did not
remember that the possibility of a man's finding his
Vindication, or some treacherous variation thereof, can be
computed as zero.
At that time it was also hoped that a clarification of
humanity's basic mysteries -- the origin of the Library and of
time -- might be found. It is verisimilar that these grave
mysteries could be explained in words: if the language of
philosophers is not sufficient, the multiform Library will have
produced the unprecedented language required, with its
vocabularies and grammars. For four centuries now men have
exhausted the hexagons ... There are official searchers,
inquisitors. I have seen them in the performance of their
function: they always arrive extremely tired from their
journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost killed
them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs;
sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it,
looking for infamous words. Obviously, no one expects to
discover anything.
As was natural, this inordinate hope was followed by an
excessive depression. The certitude that some shelf in some

hexagon held precious books and that these precious books were
inaccessible, seemed almost intolerable. A blasphemous sect
suggested that the searches should cease and that all men should
juggle letters and symbols until they constructed, by an
improbable gift of chance, these canonical books. The
authorities were obliged to issue severe orders. The sect
disappeared, but in my childhood I have seen old men who, for
long periods of time, would hide in the latrines with some metal
disks in a forbidden dice cup and feebly mimic the divine
disorder.
Others, inversely, believed that it was fundamental to
eliminate useless works. They invaded the hexagons, showed
credentials which were not always false, leafed through a
volume with displeasure and condemned whole shelves: their
hygienic, ascetic furor caused the senseless perdition of
millions of books. Their name is execrated, but those who
deplore the ``treasures'' destroyed by this frenzy neglect two
notable facts. One: the Library is so enormous that any
reduction of human origin is infinitesimal. The other: every
copy is unique, irreplaceable, but (since the Library is total)
there are always several hundred thousand imperfect facsimiles:
works which differ only in a letter or a comma. Counter to
general opinion, I venture to suppose that the consequences of
the Purifiers' depredations have been exaggerated by the horror
these fanatics produced. They were urged on by the delirium of
trying to reach the books in the Crimson Hexagon: books whose
format is smaller than usual, all-powerful, illustrated and
magical.
We also know of another superstition of that time: that of
the Man of the Book. On some shelf in some hexagon (men
reasoned) there must exist a book which is the formula and
perfect compendium of all the rest: some librarian has gone
through it and he is analogous to a god. In the language of this
zone vestiges of this remote functionary's cult still persist.
Many wandered in search of Him. For a century they have
exhausted in vain the most varied areas. How could one locate

the venerated and secret hexagon which housed Him? Someone
proposed a regressive method: To locate book A, consult first
book B which indicates A's position; to locate book B, consult
first a book C, and so on to infinity ... In adventures such as
these, I have squandered and wasted my years. It does not seem
unlikely to me that there is a total book on some shelf of the
universe; (3) I pray to the unknown gods that a man -- just one,
even though it were thousands of years ago! -- may have
examined and read it. If honor and wisdom and happiness are
not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my
place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but for one
instant, in one being, let Your enormous Library be justified.
The impious maintain that nonsense is normal in the Library and
that the reasonable (and even humble and pure coherence) is an
almost miraculous exception. They speak (I know) of the
``feverish Library whose chance volumes are constantly in
danger of changing into others and affirm, negate and confuse
everything like a delirious divinity.'' These words, which not
only denounce the disorder but exemplify it as well, notoriously
prove their authors' abominable taste and desperate ignorance.
In truth, the Library includes all verbal structures, all variations
permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a
single example of absolute nonsense. It is useless to observe
that the best volume of the many hexagons under my
administration is entitled The Combed Thunderclap and another
The Plaster Cramp and another Axaxaxas mlö. These phrases, at
first glance incoherent, can no doubt be justified in a
cryptographical or allegorical manner; such a justification is
verbal and, ex hypothesi, already figures in the Library. I
cannot combine some characters
dhcmrlchtdj
which the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one
of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one

can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and
fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name
of a god. To speak is to fall into tautology. This wordy and
useless epistle already exists in one of the thirty volumes of the
five shelves of one of the innumerable hexagons -- and its
refutation as well. (An n number of possible languages use the
same vocabulary; in some of them, the symbol library allows
the correct definition a ubiquitous and lasting system of
hexagonal galleries, but library is bread or pyramid or anything
else, and these seven words which define it have another value.
You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?)
The methodical task of writing distracts me from the
present state of men. The certitude that everything has been
written negates us or turns us into phantoms. I know of districts
in which the young men prostrate themselves before books and
kiss their pages in a barbarous manner, but they do not know
how to decipher a single letter. Epidemics, heretical conflicts,
peregrinations which inevitably degenerate into banditry, have
decimated the population. I believe I have mentioned suicides,
more and more frequent with the years. Perhaps my old age and
fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect that the human species --
the unique species -- is about to be extinguished, but the
Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly
motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless,
incorruptible, secret.
I have just written the word ``infinite.'' I have not
interpolated this adjective out of rhetorical habit; I say that it is
not illogical to think that the world is infinite. Those who judge
it to be limited postulate that in remote places the corridors and
stairways and hexagons can conceivably come to an end --
which is absurd. Those who imagine it to be without limit forget
that the possible number of books does have such a limit. I
venture to suggest this solution to the ancient problem: The
Library is unlimited and cyclical. If an eternal traveler were to
cross it in any direction, after centuries he would see that the
same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus

repeated, would be an order: the Order). My solitude is
gladdened by this elegant hope. (4)Translated by J. E. I.
Notes
1 The original manuscript does not contain digits or capital
letters. The punctuation has been limited to the comma and the
period. These two signs, the space and the twenty-two letters of
the alphabet are the twenty-five symbols considered sufficient
by this unknown author. (Editor's note.)2 Before, there was a
man for every three hexagons. Suicide and pulmonary diseases
have destroyed that proportion. A memory of unspeakable
melancholy: at times I have traveled for many nights through
corridors and along polished stairways without finding a single
librarian.
3 I repeat: it suffices that a book be possible for it to exist.
Only the impossible is excluded. For example: no book can be a
ladder, although no doubt there are books which discuss and
negate and demonstrate this possibility and others whose
structure corresponds to that of a ladder.
4 Letizia Álvarez de Toledo has observed that this vast
Library is useless: rigorously speaking, a single volume would
be sufficient, a volume of ordinary format, printed in nine or ten
point type, containing an infinite number if infinitely thin
leaves. (In the early seventeenth century, Cavalieri said that all
solid bodies are the superimposition of an infinite number of
planes.) The handling of this silky vade mecum would not be
convenient: each apparent page would unfold into other
analogous ones; the inconceivable middle page would have no
reverse.

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