Transpersonality and the Collapse of the Self in Jorge Luis Borges’s Funes the Memorious: A Cognitive-Poetic Approach

Akhondzadeh, Barbod; Saei Dibavar, Sara

doi:10.22034/jalds.2026.737479

Transpersonality and the Collapse of the Self in Jorge Luis Borges’s Funes the Memorious: A Cognitive-Poetic Approach

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Barbod Akhondzadeh

Sara Saei Dibavar

Department of English language and Literature, University of Mazandaran, Babolsar, Iran

10.22034/jalds.2026.737479

Abstract

In Jorge Luis Borges’s Funes the Memorious (1962), perfect memory becomes not a sign of cognitive mastery but the condition for the disintegration of thought and selfhood. This article employs a transpersonal and cognitive-poetic reading of the story to argue that Borges presents absolute recall as a limit-case that exposes the impossibility of identity without abstraction, forgetting, and narrative mediation. Incapable of categorization or conceptual generalization, Funes remains trapped within an endless accumulation of discrete perceptions that resists linguistic and narrative organization. Drawing on Paul Ricœur’s theory of narrative identity and Maurice Halbwachs’s concept of collective memory, the article contrasts Funes’s mnemonic isolation with the narrator’s retrospective emplotment, through which overwhelming perception is transformed into coherent meaning. From a cognitive-poetic perspective, the story demonstrates that comprehension depends not on exhaustive memory but on processes of selection, reduction, and shared interpretive schemata. Borges thus anticipates a transpersonal model of subjectivity in which identity is narratively constituted through collective memory rather than exhaustive individual recollection.

Keywords

Funes the Memorious

cognitive poetics

narrative identity

collective memory

transpersonality