Collected Fictions

In an interview on Memory and the Digital Age

Tell me about your first book, Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges.

Jorge Luis Borges is Argentinian and a masterful short story teller. All of his short stories have an intriguing question behind them. In his famous short story Funes the Memorius he writes about a young man who, after a riding accident, has forgotten how to forget. He remembers everything he has been exposed to in excruciating detail. He can’t walk any more and lies in his bed and has books brought to him. He reads them once and remembers everything. Borges describes how he visits this young man and realises that Funes has lost his ability to forget and thus to generalise and to extract. Borges writes that Funes only sees the trees but never the forest. He remembers all the details but can never rise above them.

How did Borges influence your book about memory in the digital age?

Borges asks what happens if we can’t forget? Will we, like Funes, be forever tied to an excruciatingly detailed past? Or will we be able to forget parts of it over time and therefore be able to evolve and move on? We might as a society have had that riding accident in a sense that we now have digital tools available to us that make it impossible to forget. Everything digital these days is being stored and kept accessible because of low storage costs, easy retrieval and a global network.