Text, Figure, Monogram: The Embodiment of the I in the Essayistic écriture at Octavio Paz’s El mono gramático

Abstract

This article traces the characteristics of the “essayistic” as a genuine mode of writing in Modernity, using Octavio Paz’s El mono gramático as an example. This work is regarded as one of the most complex by the 1990 Mexican Nobel Prize laureate and resists classification. It stages ambivalent and unstable figures of “the essayistic,” describing intents of shaping in general, and giving an aesthetic form to the writing subject in particular. The hope for a consistent self-formation is driven by a deep metaphysical ideal, which, however, is repeatedly shattered. In the figure of the Hindu Monkey God Hanumān, the monkey grammarian, Octavio Paz walks the fine line of a “writing of oneself” between a figurative and integral embodiment of the self and a disintegrating analytic discursivity. 'The “essayistic” unfolds in an ethos and aesthetics of endeavor which forces the subject to compromise, leaving it as an unmet aspiration, forever fractured and incomplete. It realizes itself processually as ascesis in intransitive writing and describes a self-critical and performative textual practice.