Borges explores this Dadaist gap between constructed generalizations and ungraspable particulars in “Funes, the Memorious.” Ireneo Funes is a boy from Uruguay who remembers everything in overwhelming detail. He cannot grasp why a “dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front).” He is so attentive to particular moments that his “own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time he saw them.” He “could continuously discern the tranquil advances of corruption, of decay, 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.” Even the “ferocious splendor” of Babylon, New York, London is pallid in comparison with the “heat and pressure” of Funes’s recollections.
Funes staggers under these heavy details because he is “almost incapable of ideas of a general, Platonic sort.” How, he asks, can “the generic symbol dog [embrace] so many individuals of diverse size and form?” He cannot think, if thinking “is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions.”
Funes could have been a great Dadaist, experiencing without effort the kind of buzzing rawness for which Duchamp, Solomon, and Wilson as faux Travolta strained. But the burdened Funes would actually have welcomed boring abstraction. Think of the peace of “Continuity,” for instance. You get a sore throat. You’re not worried, though. You’ve had one before, felt just like this one, and healed within five days. There’s no reason, you conclude, that this one won’t do the same, and you relax. What if you have no durable concepts of “sore throat,” “past,” or “healing”? Every new sore throat would be shocking, terrifying, as would every storm or death. These relentless startlings exhaust and sadden Funes. He dies sorrowful and young, of the “congestion of the lungs,” killer, as we know, of so many hypersensitive souls, such as Keats.
The melancholy grandeur of Borges’s “Funes” makes Dadaist shenanigans look rather silly, immature mocking of authority. Sure, authority for the rebel is a drag, but certainly some authority is necessary for a thriving existence, animated not only with continuity (we can cultivate values over time) but also with community (we can share similar values) and comprehension (we can understand what it means to love or to heal).
Still, I can see why Duchamp and Solomon were suspicious of authority, since most people in charge are, with varying degrees of awareness, oppressive, imposing their fantasies of power onto facts, laboring to blur the distinction between the two, hoping finally to force the multitudes to accept their fantasies as the only facts.