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  • Jorge Luis Borges's "Funes the Memorious":A Philosophical Narrative
  • Edmond Wright

In his initial remarks on language in the Essay concerning Human Understanding, John Locke has this to say about the problem of choosing from the chaos of sensation what to give a name to, for it is obvious that, if we were quite arbitrary about it, we could give a name not just to any-thing but to every instantaneous choice from our sensory experience:

The multiplication of words would have perplexed their use, had every particular thing need of a distinct name to be signified by.

(III, I, 3)

This is a fantasy of an absolute nominalism, in which the Real is taken to be categorizable as an all-embracing infinity of particulars matching an infinity of words. It reminds us of one of Bertrand Russell's comments, that finally, to banish all sameness from the "common" referent, one would have to have a word for every infinitesimal instant of every object, hapax legomena, a language of "once-only-names" (Russell 1923: 85). For example, if I now pick out the present momentary co-existence of this part of this wood-grain in the table in front of me with my finger under the precise conditions of light from the window at this instant of time, and call this chance concatenation "Jabberwocky" or "Wakdjunkaga," it is plain that I shall have to multiply my ontological choice at the very next instant, for that object has already ceased to be, since my finger has moved, the light has changed, and no doubt some of the dust that lay on the table has already been blown away by my breath. As an inevitable result of this profligacy with entities, there will be no end to their number. There will be "an explosion of entities" in the universe, as the philosopher Ernest Sosa would say (1987: 155–87). What immediately strikes any sensible person is the utter uselessness of such a language. Not only would it be drowned in its own meticulousness, but it would have no link with human purposes, social or personal. This is the predicament into which Borges places his Ireneo Funes.

One can reach a similar conclusion another way. You have heard of the monkey typing forever on a typewriter with the result that it would finally type out all of Shakespeare. One can add to that, for if it went on typing to eternity, it would inevitably type out all that could ever be said [End Page 33] in all those languages that use the Roman alphabet, including not only all of Shakespeare and all books that have ever been written or could be, but all those books with one letter displaced, with two letters displaced, and all the nonsense that could ever be made up, and, of course, the process would be repeated chaotically ad infinitum. This, as one can equally readily see, is equally useless to us mortal human beings caught within the valuable limitations of space and time.

These two fantasies concerning language and that which it tries to apply itself to, the Real, provide the starting-points for two of the stories, if we may call them so, of the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges – "Funes the Memorious" and "The Library of Babel." That library, like the sheets produced by the unending typing of the monkeys, contains books of "four hundred and ten pages" each, "each page, of forty lines, each line of some eighty letters which are black in colour" (79–80) and they are made up of twenty-five letters arranged in all the combinations possible. The result is that every book that could possibly be written is included in the library, together with all its possible misprints and rearrangements, including all the nonsensal combinations of the letters. In Borges's fantasy the Library is inhabited by scholars in pursuit of the "catalogue of catalogues" that would provide the guide through the labyrinth.

The word "Babel" brings home the uselessness of both these odd impossibilities – first, the remembering, conceptualizing, and wording of the infinitesimal detail of our sensory experience, and, second, arriving at a language so complete in...

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