ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the pervasive presence of James Joyce in 'Funes the Memorious' both in its embryonic and definitive versions. In a crucial 1976 interview with a group of writers and scholars, later edited by Richard Burgin, Jorge Luis Borges revisited the parallels between 'Funes the Memorious' and Ulysses that he had publicized in 1941. If Borges uses Pliny's treatise as a Chinese box insertion from which to draw further parallels and contrasts with Funes, in a larger scale Pliny's Historia Naturalis stands as a metaphor of 'Funes the Memorious'. Towards the end of 'Funes the Memorious', in an attempt to turn Funes's memory into an even more unusual prodigy, the narrator extends the list of 'precursors' of his fictional character. Thus the next mnemonic analogy is linked to the nominalistic language postulated by the British philosopher and the empiricist, John Locke.
