Language and Human Consciousness Theme Analysis

Many of the stories in Ficciones examine the use of language, demonstrating how deeply language is intertwined with human consciousness. Many of the stories in the collection center around a writer and their work, often presenting that work as vast, intricate, or all-encompassing. In turn, the stories themselves come to hint at a fundamental link between language and creation, even when the ideas created by such works are confounding, reflexive, and obscure. To be human is to engage with language and understand the world through this medium, the stories indicate. For example, in “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” Menard undertakes the task of writing Don Quixote in the original Spanish. Menard specifies that the idea is not to copy the original text, but to arrive at it on his own. Even though Menard’s work and the work of Cervantes, the original author, appear to be the same side by side, Borges explains that they are different because Menard is engaging with and arriving at the language within his own cultural context, which differs greatly from Cervantes’s 17th-century context. Thus, each person’s relationship with language is unique to their own circumstances and consciousness.

In “Funes, the Memorious,” Ireneo Funes provides another example of the deep connection between language and consciousness. After Funes experiences a traumatic accident that leaves him paralyzed and with a “prodigious” memory and mind, he begins to develop a new system of classifying language. Funes loses the ability to understand “that the generic term dog embraced so many unlike specimens of differing sizes and different forms,” and, as a result, he works on a numbering system to categorize each individual type of dog and even differentiate between specimens viewed from different angles. Funes’s unique and exhaustive system of categorization after his life-altering accident further emphasizes the fact that use of language is deeply tied to one’s own unique consciousness—after all, the sudden alteration of his life is the catalyst for his newfound way of perceiving the world.