Another Frenesi name game--Borges

[MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu]

Longish post ensues--

Hopelessly behind as usual, I may be working at cross-purposes
with the VL flow, but I did notice someone playing with
Frenesi's name yesterday, so maybe this will be interesting;
then again, it might well be completely improbable and unhelpful--
most likely 'twill be both.

Always, and like all of you, I find myself stumbling over the most
amazing things in nooks and crannies.  Here a random encounter
with a J. M. Coetzee article on Borges in a recent _NYRB_led me to
reread a beautiful Borges story, "Funes the Memorious" (sometimes
translated as "Funes, His Memory). In this story the title character,
Ireneo Funes,
suffers a fall from a horse which renders him crippled, but also
transforms him into a prodigy of memory and perception, a
virtual, no, an Ideal, recording device:

"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 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."

Now I am no anagrammatist, but one glance
at his full name was enough: "Ireneo Funes," my god, the
name "Frenesi" almost falls out of it, with some interesting
letters left over.  Is it a stretch to see perhaps some connection
between Funes, who records forever every impression, imprints
every memory, and a character whose very existence might
be said to consist of a filmed succession of her own pasts?
Read in this light, some of the descriptions of Funes' consciousness
become quite charged:

"He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his fancies. Two or
three times he had reconstructed an entire day."

"In those days, neither the cinema nor the phonograph yet existed; yet
it seems strange, almost incredible, that no one should have experimented
on Funes. The truth is that we all live by leaving behind;  . . . ."

More general ways the story might resonate with the P, --

Funes lives in a world of Crutchfieldian singularities,

(BTW, the left-over letters, after "Frenesi" is removed, 
"O"  "U" "N" "E" form "one," "uno,"  "une,"); 

he is incapable of generalizing:
 "His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him on every occasion."

I really like this one:

"He was disturbed by the fact that adog at three-fourteen
(seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog
at three-fifteen (seen from the front)."

I think I recognize that dog.

Finally this poignant description of Funes might uncannily 
describe the way Pynchon's work faces the world:

"He was the solitary and lucid spectator of a multiform world
which was instantaneously and almost intolerably exact."

Ireneo Funes. Frenesi. All those ones.


memoriously,
jm