Gaddis in the NYT
Graphs, Maps, Trees
Aleksandr Hemon on “Funes the Memorious”:
The work of Jorge Luis Borges belongs to the tradition of literature with cosmic ambition: the Bible, the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Ulysses, etc.—the works that strive to convey complete universes, containing everything. They’re contingent upon (and thus imply the belief in) the totality of language: all of history, all of memory, all of current cosmology and/or theology, all the unbreakable continuity of human experience can be deposited and narrated in language. Indeed, in such works language seems to be able to cover the perpetual entirety of the past, present, and future and involve the real, the imagined, and all that is in between. They offer crucial evidence that it is utterly impossible to conceptualize humanity without literature. Their philosophical/ethical/aesthetical ambition demands total commitment from the reader—an ideal reader would devote his/her entire life to the exegesis of, say, Joyce’s Ulysses, thereby erasing all the nonreaderly aspects of his/her existence.
Such a reader, of course, would be a perfect Borgesian character, for whom the experience of life is unavailable outside literature . . .
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See below a reference to ZAKHOR by Yosef Yerushalmi. He writes about Borges’ Funes:
Zakhor by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi
A unique meditation on the role memory, forgetting and history plays in the life of the Jewish people. From the Torah to the Spanish Inquisition and the assimilation of German Jews, Yerushalmi illustrates how the Jewish people celebrate their own story and the tragedies that befell them.
His broad interest even entails a brief summary of a strange short story (Funes, the Memorist) written by the great Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges.
A brief book with a lasting memory of its own.
Addendum:
I recently read [Zakhor] by Yosef Yerushalmi, a meditation on the role memory and history plays with the Jewish people. An interesting book, made more so, by his siting Borges’ short story:[Funes the Memorious] stating that:
“it haunts me largely because, though Borges did not intend it so (he called it a ‘metaphor of insomnia’), it looms as a possibly demonic denouement to modern historiography as a whole.”
“though not conscious of it when i first wrote these lines, I have subsequently realized that Nietzsche had alraedy pointed to insomnia as a metaphor for obsession with history when he declared: ‘thus even a happy life is possible without remembrance, as the beast shows; but life in any sense is absolutely impossible without forgetfulness. Or, to put my conclusion even better, there is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of historical sense, that injures and finally destroys the living thing, be it a man or a people or a system or a culture’.”
i immediately picked up my collection and read the Funes story, a fascinating and maddening piece that envelops many of Borges’ creations.