Text, Figure, Monogram:  
The Embodiment of the I in the 
Essayistic écriture at Octavio Paz’s  
El mono gramático
Veit Lindner
Philologie der LMU München, Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, 80539 München, Germany
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9595-9334
veit.lindner@romanistik.uni-muenchen.de
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 dissintegrating 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.
Keywords: Mexican literature / Paz, Octavio / literary genres / essay / essayistic writing / 
ascesis / monogram
9
Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 46.2 (2023)
As the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature of the year 1990, the 
Mexican poet and diplomat Octavio Paz is certainly known to the wider 
public. His work El mono gramático, however, seems to be rather unfa-
miliar beyond Hispanicist circles, despite being considered Paz’s work 
with the highest intellectual density (Gómez Arciénaga 154). Though 
written in Cambridge in 1970 in Spanish, the text was first published 
in 1972 in French language by Geneva’s art publisher Skira. The text 
itself shifts back and forth between prose and poetry, addressing the 
PKn, letnik 46, št. 2, Ljubljana, avgust 2023
10
search for a divine primaeval language; a paradisiac state of transpar-
ency, when the sign still referred directly to the things of the universe, 
speech provided absolute knowledge, and the speaker was in harmony 
with his I, language, and world. This, in Octavio Paz’s perception, 
means nothing less than a vision of poetry itself. It is not quite possible 
to assign a specific genre to the text, since it ranges between Far Eastern 
meditation, study on philosophy of language, and autobiographic pil-
grim- or travel literature. It traces an associative array of verbal images, 
as well as reflections and parentheses in which the author interrupts, 
comments on and corrects himself. Of equal importance to the linguis-
tic signs, however, appear to be inserted images, photographs and repli-
cas of paintings, showing abstract pieces of art and religious sculptures.
Despite the difficulty to define any exact content, it is possible to 
specify a vague narrative frame: an autobiographical Octavio Paz sits 
in his room in Cambridge by dawn and remembers a historically docu-
mented excursion to Galta, on which he went together with his second 
wife Marie José and his good friend, the photographer Eusebio Rojas. 
Galta is a temple and palace complex, which is situated near the city 
of Jaipur in northern India and accommodates the main sanctuary for 
the monkey-shaped Hindu (semi)god Hanumān. The god is envisaged 
as a superhero against the legions of the demon king Rāvana, but also 
as a poet, savant, advisor, and companion of the highest deity, Rāma. 
Paz is on a dusty road towards Galta, which metaphorically stands for 
poetry itself. The poet thus takes the road to poetry. His destination, 
however, seems to blur like a mirage and disintegrates into an array of 
images and free associations, remaining oddly ungraspable. The heat of 
the afternoon shimmers in a mélange of different odors: fire, incense, 
a rotting carcass at the wayside. The smell is blended with the voices of 
the pilgrims who that very day celebrate the solemnity of Hanumān. 
They sing, chant, and purl incomprehensible litanies. Paz now walks 
through the gate and roams the complex. The decaying architecture 
adopts the exuberant forms of a lush jungle. The facades are inhabited 
by stony chimeras and fabulous creatures, merging with the scrollwork 
and liana-like columns. All seems to be intertwined like flourishing 
ornate letters on a book page. But all is crumbling down, high and 
low; the linguistic architecture is decomposing. In between the pariahs 
are dwelling, with loamy faces: figures of clay coalesced with the dry 
soil. The ruins are inhabited as well by ascetic wanderers, the Sādhus, 
and monkeys. They gaze at Paz with their animal faces, with both curi-
osity and indifference. With a long stick, Paz pushes his way through 
the hordes.
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11
One of the key metaphors of the text, which appears time and again, 
is to write as to walk: to pace, set step after step, letters and words one 
after another. Paz, however, does not arrive anywhere, and does not 
manage to establish a final meaning of his writing: instead, he loses 
himself treading devious paths, going astray. Poetry, the visionary lan-
guage, remains a chimera itself. And so, Paz writes pondering:
As I began these pages, I decided to follow literally the metaphor of the title of 
the collection that they were intended for, the Paths of Creation, and to write, 
to describe a text that was really a path and that could be read and followed as 
such. As I wrote, the path to Galta grew blurred or else I lost my bearings and 
went astray in the trackless wilds. Again and again, I was obliged to return to 
the starting point. Instead of advancing, the text circled about itself. (Paz, The 
Monkey 157)1
As the objective keeps eluding, the text withholds any external ref-
erence. On the contrary, it appears that writing obtains its meaning 
through the oblivion of meaning:
The best thing to do will be to choose the path to Galta, traverse it again 
(invent it as I traverse it), and without realizing it, almost imperceptibly, go to 
the end—without being concerned about what “going to the end” means or 
what I meant when I wrote that phrase. … I wasn’t asking myself questions: 
I was walking, merely walking, with no fixed itinerary in mind. I was simply 
setting forth to meet … what? I didn’t know at the time and I still don’t know. 
Perhaps that is why I wrote “going to the end”: in order to find out, in order 
to discover what there is after the end. A verbal trap; after the end there is 
nothing, since if there were something, the end would not be the end. None-
theless, we are always setting forth to meet … But the end is the refutation 
and the condemnation of the path: at the end the path dissolves, the meeting 
fades away to nothingness. And the end—it too fades away to nothingness. 
(Paz, The Monkey 1f.)2
1 “Al comenzar estas páginas decidí seguir literalmente la metáfora del título de 
la colección a que están destinadas, Los Caminos de la Creación, y escribir, trazar un 
texto que fuese efectivamente un camino y que pudiese ser leído, recorrido como tal. 
A medida que escribía, el camino de Galta se borraba o yo me desviaba y perdía en sus 
vericuetos. Una y otra vez tenía que volver al punto del comienzo. En lugar de avanzar, 
el texto giraba sobre sí mismo.” (Paz, El mono 137f.)
2 “Lo mejor será escoger el camino de Galta, recorrerlo de nuevo (inventarlo a 
medida que lo recorro) y sin darme cuenta, casi insensiblemente, ir hasta el fin—sin 
preocuparme por saber qué quiere decir “ir hasta el fin” ni qué es lo que yo he querido 
decir al escribir esta frase. … No me hacía preguntas: caminaba, nada más caminaba, 
sin rumbo fijo. Iba al encuentro… ¿de qué iba al encuentro? Entonces no lo sabía y 
no lo sé ahora. Tal vez por eso escribí “ir hasta el fin”: para saberlo, para saber qué hay 
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Although the wanderer of the jungle of signs loses his way, he needs 
to predetermine an aim, because journey and target mutually depend 
on one another. The path of prose, sinuous and tedious, as well as the 
relieving and spontaneous vision of poetry; the analytical discursive-
ness as well as the instantaneous epiphany of a metaphysical whole-
ness, the human as well as the divine grammar. Analytical, disinte-
grating text and integrating figure, both are part of the production of 
language and meaning, symbolized at Paz by the geometric shapes of 
line and circle. Paz unites them in an erotic sense into another, deeply 
paradoxical symbol: the monogram, the mono gramático, the monkey 
grammarian Hanumān.
Hanumān: a monkey/a gramma of language, of its dynamism and its endless 
production of phonetic and semantic creations. An ideogram of the poet, the 
master/servant of universal metamorphosis: an imitative simian, an artist of 
repetitions, he is the Aristotelian animal that copies from nature but at the 
same time he is the semantic seed, the bomb-seed that is buried in the verbal 
subsoil and that will never turn into the plant that its sower anticipates, but 
into another, one forever different. The sexual fruits and the carnivorous flow-
ers of otherness sprout from the single stem of identity. (Paz, The Monkey 131)3
The text El mono gramático itself is a monogram: a figure, composed of 
letters which refer to nothing else than themselves. A monogram means 
just itself: identity. A token for an absolute transparency of language 
and thus, a symbol of the vision of poetry understood as reconciliation 
of name and object, representation and reality, sign and Being.
Paz stages two possible perspectives on language: on the one hand, 
the metaphorical, subjected to the law of displacement and Derridean 
différance, and the symbolic on the other. Both elements, however, do 
not melt, but remain rather in suspenseful conflict. This conflict, genu-
ine expression of Modernity finds its form in the essayistic utterance. 
detrás del fin. Una trampa verbal; después del fin no hay nada pues si algo hubiese, 
no sería fin. Y, no obstante, siempre caminamos al encuentro de … Pero el fin es la 
refutación y la condenación del camino: al fin el camino se disuelve, el encuentro se 
disipa. Y el fin—también se disipa.” (Paz, El mono 11f.)
3 “Hanumān: mono/grama del lenguaje, de su dinamismo y de su incesante pro-
ducción de invenciones fonéticas y semánticas. Ideograma del poeta, señor/servidor de 
la metamorfosis universal: simio imitador, artista de las repeticiones, es el animal ari-
stotélico que copia del natural pero asimismo es la semilla semántica, la semilla-bomba 
enterrada en el subsuelo verbal y que nunca se convertirá en la planta que espera su 
sembrador, sino en la otra, siempre otra. Los frutos sexuales y las flores carnívoras de la 
alteridad brotan del tallo único de la identidad.” (Paz, El mono 113)
Veit Lindner:     Text, Figure, Monogram
13
The essayistic mode yields imagery of ambivalence and difficult com-
promise and some of it can be studied in Octavio Paz’s metareflection 
on essayistic writing: El mono gramático.
What I consider to be essayistic is, thus, a paradox: a way undertaken 
and full of detours, of skepticism, of distrust and reservation about any 
discourse of truth, led, however, by a deep impetus and the longing for 
an integrated understanding of the world as an entirety, and for reflect-
ing and locating oneself in the world. Michel de Montaigne stated his 
famous question: “Que sçay-je?,” “What do I know and what am I able 
to know?” Proceeding from this question, “the essayistic” strives for an 
expression of totality, and for a wholeness in self-experience.
As Jacques Derrida said in an interview with Derek Attridge in 
Laguna Beach 1989, the impulse for his writing came from a desire for 
expressing simply everything, a desire for confidences or confessions: 
“What I should be tempted to denounce as a lure—i.e., totalization or 
gathering up—isn’t this what keeps me going? The idea of an internal 
polylogue […] was first of all the adolescent dream of keeping a trace of 
all the voices which were traversing me …” (Derrida and Attridge 34). 
This polyphonic symphony or preposterous synaesthetic glossolalia is 
what Octavio Paz experiences on his way to Galta, the way to poetry 
and to himself: a cacophonic rather than symphonic mélange of chants, 
prayers, scents, colors, forms, and monkey bellows. It is the genuine 
essayistic mode of writing, which is practiced by Paz, essaying to reg-
ister and put into order all the polylogue roaming the inner self—in 
order to perceive oneself, the I, as a coherent and conclusive shape or 
Gestalt. However, as Derrida argues, our discursive means are never 
sufficient for such a project and so this object is always unmet. Only 
the yearning for wholeness, totality, and for the not yet said remains. It 
is the desire for the missing absolute aesthetic sensation, which can be 
translated in geometrical symbolism as the roundness of a replete form. 
Yet, this roundness is unachievable by lining up letters and following 
the road of writing.
Intransitive writing
“Galta is not here: it is awaiting me at the end of this phrase.” (Paz, The 
Monkey 11) The end of the sentence does not occur, the satisfaction in 
meaning is not granted but remains an empty space. And so, the spiri-
tual Galta can only be experienced as wreckage and ruins—intuitions of 
splendor in a mayhem of tortuous figures, colors, noises, reminiscence 
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14
and traces. Paz draws a crushed aesthetics—or an aesthetics of the ever 
crushed, fractional and broken. Now, this experience could very well 
lead to the abandonment of writing. But instead Paz keeps on writing: 
“Nonetheless, we are always setting forth to meet …, even if we know 
that there is nothing, or no one, awaiting us.” (Paz, The Monkey 2) The 
objective of reaching an absolute transcendence and the sensation of 
unity with oneself would imply death and would put an end to human 
communication which can only continue following the idea of not hav-
ing said it all, of not having yet hit home: “But the end is the refutation 
and the condemnation of the path.” (2) And so, the only meaning Paz’s 
text develops is, strictly speaking, the monogram; the text refers only to 
itself, to the path, the search for meaning, to Paz’s writing of the text.
With Roland Barthes we could regard this mode of writing as intran-
sitive (écrire, verbe intransitif?), that is, writing not yet about, but writ-
ing in itself. This form of écriture which Barthes considers the modern 
writing par excellence, affects the writer himself. Hayden White, follow-
ing Barthes refers to it as a “writing in the middle voice” (cf. White): 
Barthes is pointing towards diathesis or grammatical voice which in 
Greek grammar includes, besides active and passive, a “middle voice.” 
It indicates that the subject is affected by his action and denotes thus 
an inner participation or involvement of the subject: “To write is today 
to make oneself the center of the action of speech, it is to effect writing 
by affecting oneself, to make action and affection coincide, to leave the 
scriptor inside the writing—not as a psychological subject […] but as 
agent of the action.” (Barthes, “To Write” 18) Regarding the context 
of a self-referencial écriture, this means that a subject does not yet write 
about itself, but it simply writes itself. This constitutes a performative act: 
the writer does not live but in and through the act of writing. Writing 
is considered a performative act of self-authoring. In Michel Foucault 
words, it is “etho-poetic,” that means, it enables individuals “to ques-
tion their own conduct, to watch over and give shape to it, and to shape 
themselves as ethical subjects.” (Foucault 13) This is reflected in Paz’s 
mono gramático. The search for the vision of poetry, for an absolute 
meaning and the road of the I towards an inner self is the road itself, the 
quest itself. To write oneself is to be in pursuit of an objective and going 
intentionally astray—a main characteristics of “the essayistic.”
At this point it may be fruitful to turn to Michel Foucault, who 
in his History of Sexuality traces the tradition of writing oneself back 
to late antiquity. Foucault refers to it as the culture of oneself, of car-
ing for oneself. This souci de soi has to be thought of as a practice of 
generally turning towards oneself—an ascesis. Ascesis has the meaning 
Veit Lindner:     Text, Figure, Monogram
15
of practicing several techniques which are supposed to contribute to 
transformation and reshaping. By means of these self-practices (pra-
tiques de soi même), the subject is supposed to act upon itself and create 
the ethical being as an aesthetic existence. Thus, it is about an aesthetic 
self-formation by means of control, exercise, and effort for and towards 
oneself. These measures aim to enable the subject to not merely absorb 
all surroundings without control and distinction, but rather to appro-
priate it by bringing it into harmony with one’s substance (Foucault 
25–32). Following the stoic idea of freedom, the ideal consists of not 
surrendering oneself to external control. Being familiar with oneself, 
again, means to be free from external affects, to keep one’s indepen-
dence and thus to substantiate the ethic-aesthetic materialization of 
one’s existence and fate.
In “the essayistic,” and this may count for all modern moralist liter-
ture, the objective of “being oneself” is deeply questionable. Any close 
look at this being oneself reveals the polylogue and the unfamiliar as 
one’s inherent substance: the amorphous, protean and monstrous I, 
which is never itself. “The essayistic” clings to formlessness; not only 
does its text structure consist of heterogeneous figures of anecdotes, 
quotes and other fragments, but also does the writer in search of him-
self find nothing but the recognition of his own deeply disjointed tex-
ture. This recognition feeds both: disenchantment and fascination. 
Hope for metaphysical wholeness and appetite for its deconstruction. 
Between these extremely contradictory positions, the subject can just 
consistently reconceptualize and rewrite itself as a makeshift.
The topos of writing oneself at first appears apparent in El mono 
gramático: after having written all night, the poet moves from his place 
behind the window in his Cambridge room. He has created a body of 
signs which he imagines to be the body of his lover: Esplendor, his text, 
with whom he copulates: “The body of Splendor as it divides, disperses, 
dissipates itself in my body as it divides, disperses, dissipates itself in the 
body of Splendor.” (Paz, The Monkey 160)4 Paz has interwoven himself 
through a “poetic performativity” into his text and coalesced beyond 
recognition. Paz’s writing, thus, is hyphologie in the meaning Roland 
Barthes gives the term:
Text means Tissue; but whereas hitherto we have always taken this tissue as a 
product, a ready-made veil, behind which lies, more or less hidden, meaning 
(truth), we are now emphasizing, in the tissue, the generative idea that the 
4 “El cuerpo de Esplendor al repartirse, dispersarse, disiparse en mi cuerpo al repar-
tirse, dispersarse, disiparse en el cuerpo de Esplendor.” (Paz, El mono 139)
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16
text is made, is worked out in a perpetual interweaving; lost in this tissue-this 
texture-the subject unmakes himself, like a spider dissolving in the construc-
tive secretions of its web. Were we fond of neologisms, we might define the 
theory of the text as an hyphology (hyphos is the tissue and the spider’s web). 
(Barthes, Pleasure of the Text 64)
The tentatively onward movement of the text is as well search for the 
aesthetic embodiment of the I as Hanumān and the ideograph of the 
poet. It is no coincidence that in India the monkey is associated with 
poetry that literally becomes corporeal, fleshly. It is an incarnation of 
art in the sense of a bridge between poetic language and its physical 
expression (Dunsmoor 91). And so, the path to Galta is a path as an 
incarnation, the becoming of an aesthetic body: “The path is writing 
and writing is a body and a body is bodies.” (Paz, The Monkey 142)
Full integration, however, fails. The écriture of oneself turns into an 
unwieldy jungle instead of becoming an orderly structure of properly 
placed horizontal lines. The lines and letters become lianas and vines, 
similar to the grotesque figures on the temple facades. The different 
parts of the text-body won’t integrate—or will do so only very fleet-
ingly to form a shapely body who disintegrates again immediately into 
fetishized pieces taking part in a sexual act.
[…] the body is always somewhere beyond the body. On touching it, it divides 
itself (like a text) into portions that are momentary sensations: a sensation that 
is a perception of a thigh, an earlobe, a nipple, a fingernail, a warm patch of 
groin, the hollow in the throat like the beginning of a twilight. The body that 
we embrace is a river of metamorphoses, a continual division, a flowing of 
visions, a quartered body whose pieces scatter, disperse, come back together 
again with the intensity of a flash of lightning hurtling toward a white black 
white fixity. (Paz, The Monkey 142)5
The architecture of the temples and palaces, too, reflects the dream of 
the body of identity turned into stone; the dream of perseverance and 
persistence, whose contours become blurred. The architecture of lan-
guage turns out to be constructions of the Imaginary.
5 „[…] el cuerpo es siempre un más allá del cuerpo. Al palparlo, se reparte (como 
un texto) en porciones que son sensaciones instantáneas: sensación que es percepción 
de un muslo, un lóbulo, un pezón, una uña, un pedazo caliente de la ingle, la nuca 
como el comienzo de un crepúsculo. El cuerpo que abrazamos es un río de metamorfo-
sis, una contínua división, un fluir de visiones, cuerpo descuartizado cuyos pedazos se 
esparcen, se diseminan, se congregan en una intensidad de relámpago que se precipita 
hacia una fijeza blanca, negra, blanca.” (Paz, El mono 125)
Veit Lindner:     Text, Figure, Monogram
17
[…] an architecture contaminated by delirium, stones corroded by desire, sexual 
stalactites of death. Lacking power and above all time … [the princes of Rajas-
than] erected edifices that were not intended to last but to dazzle and fascinate. 
Illusionist castles that instead of vanishing in this air rest on water: architecture 
transformed into a mere geometric pattern of reflections floating on the surface 
of a pool, dissipated by the slightest breath of air. (Paz, The Monkey 105)6
Ascesis and text practice
Octavio Paz interprets the effort for himself, the essay of coming to 
himself as an intention of coming to his own language; a language he 
really owns and controls. This intention is ascesis, spiritual exercise in 
language. The exuberant erotic copulation of the signs leads to chaos, 
destruction of sense. He who does not restrain the pleasure of language 
is going to be dominated by language. For Paz, to be in possession of 
oneself, however, is to possess one’s own language, to appropriate it 
truly. However, the intention fails again. The human being remains 
in this most precarious state: not only does he dominate language, but 
is in turn dominated by it. He remains sub-iectum to a language unfa-
miliar and incomprehensible, running the risk of being pulverised and 
torn away due to its movements of displacement. And so, Paz discovers 
on a half-blurred mural painting in the Galta palace the genotext or 
uncontrollable primordial basis of language: sheer monstrosity because 
there is no form to enforce upon it: “fairytale mountains where wild 
beasts, anchorites, and marvels abound, in front of them there rises and 
falls, swells with pride and humbles itself, a mountain that creates and 
destroys itself, a sea shaken with violent spasms, impotent and boiling 
with monsters and abominations …” (Paz, The Monkey 32)7
What Paz describes as a violent sea full of monsters corresponds to 
what Julia Kristeva refers to as “semiotic chora.” This is the rhythmic 
and tonal dimension within the signifying process; the prosody of lan-
guage and its physical, sensual and erotic implications that subliminally 
6 “[…] arquitectura contaminada por el delirio, piedras corroídas por el deseo, 
estalactitas sexuales de la muerte. Faltos de poder y sobre todo de tiempo … los prín-
cipes de Rajastan levantaron edificios que no estaban hechos para durar sino para 
deslumbrar y fascinar. Ilusionismo de castillos que en lugar de disiparse en el aire se 
asentaban en el agua: la arquitectura convertida en una geometría de reflejos flotando 
sobre un estanque y que el menor soplo del aire disipa.” (Paz, El mono 95)
7 “montañas de cuento, ricas en fieras, ascetas y prodigios, frente a ellas cae y se 
levanta, se yergue y se humilla, montaña que se hace y deshace, un mar convulso, 
impotente e hirviente de monstruos y abominaciones …” (Paz, El mono 36)
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18
shape the trajectories of meaning. Kristeva distinguishes the “symbolic” 
and the “semiotic” as two modalities of the process of meaning-making 
that are intertwined. Thereby the “symbolic” means the subject as well 
as the fixed sense and denotative function of language. The “semiotic” 
with its kinetic drive-energy undermines all settings. Both modalities 
take part in a “subject process” in which the “symbolic” relies on the 
punctual but unstable positing of ego through the interventions of the 
“semiotic.” It is precisely the connection of subject- and language pro-
cess that provides valuable insights to an analysis of the “essayistic.” 
What Kristeva wants to stress is, that there is no such unitary subjectiv-
ity independent from contradictory drives, which in turn are not sepa-
rable from linguistic experience situated even before the establishing of 
concepts and meaning. There is no other possibility to form the subject 
than in an agonistic rhythm of trial and rejection. The essayistic shapes 
the writing subject in a way Kristeva describes the signifying practice of 
text, or “text-practice”: “The text is able to explore the mechanism in 
its heterogeneity because it is a practice which pulverizes unity, mak-
ing it a process that posits and displaces thesis.” (Kristeva 208) Equally 
the text-subject is in an ongoing process of remodeling through the 
modalities of language: “This subject moves through the linguistic net-
work and uses it to indicate […] that the linguistic network does not 
represent something real posited in advance and forever detached from 
instinctual process but rather that it experiments with or practices the 
objective process by submerging in it and emerging from it through the 
drives.” (126)
The writing subject Octavio Paz finds and loses himself in the lin-
guistic texture of the monkey grammarian revealing the semiotic motil-
ity which it constitutes and thus, takes a look beyond representation. 
As Kristeva substantiates the subject has to carry out the practice in 
order to understand it by giving up any meta-position. This includes 
the “destruction of sign and representation, and hence of narrative and 
metalanguage.” (Kristeva 103) In accordance with the specifications 
Kristeva gives of text-practice, Octavio Paz cannot relate autobiograph-
ically anymore but is scattered by text. However, the ruins of the sub-
ject provide an unstable home: “You are is I am; I am is you are: you 
are is I. Demolitions: I stretch out full length atop my triturations, I 
inhabit my demolitions.” (Paz, The Monkey 37)8
In El mono gramático, Paz does not gain full command of his lan-
guage and remains subject to this linguistic drive-energy which is the 
8 “Es eres soy: soy es eres: eres es soy. Demoliciones: me tiendo sobre mis tritu-
raiones, yo habito mis demoliciones.” (Paz, El mono 40)
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19
“semiotic chora.” Instead, he focuses on the intent, the struggle for the 
ability to speak and to obtain meaning from speaking—the struggle 
for being the author of himself. Two perspectives on language emerge 
from it. On the one hand, the perspective of the figure as a scene where 
transcendence takes place. On the other hand, the perspective of text: 
the arena of tissue and textures, of interweaving, of displacement and 
alterity, and the site of iteration of labyrinthian references—différance 
and iterabilité.
These two perspectives cannot be separated from one another as they 
are closely intertwined. That way, the referentiality of language appears 
always unsound, and meaning is always transient and provisional. Man 
who wants to grasp meaning by means of language becomes entangled 
in a jungle of signs. The prefigured, imaginary object crumbles away 
as it is on the tip of the tongue. “Plethora becomes hecatomb: signs 
devour signs. The thicket is reduced to a desert, the babble to silence. 
Decayed alphabets, burned writings, verbal debris. Ashes.” (Paz, The 
Monkey 35)
The principle of displacement erodes and caves meaning as equally 
the absolute meaning of the monogram. So the abundance of meaning 
is in constant danger of turning into its opposite: hollowness, absur-
dity, wordlessness, and silence. However, this silence allows for new 
possibilities and new intents of establishing meaning: “Ashes. Inchoate 
languages, larvae, fetuses, abortions. A thicket.” (35)9
The monogram oscillates between these two perspectives. It is true 
transcendence of meaning, but equally imago, illusion: a figure of the 
ephemeral human construction of meaning. The monogram, as the 
book El mono gramático, is for Paz a symbol of ambivalent modern 
critique of language. Language, on the one hand, provides integrated 
and meaningful figures, but on the other hand, it is soaked with the 
textual component which fails meaning. Language is a scene where 
transcendence can occur, but it is also soiled with historic discursivity. 
However, the most historic, the most discursive language still refers 
to inner figurativeness and to all-encompassing images. This startling 
experience is what we receive from the reading of the mono gramático. 
Every intent of metaphysical thinking is subject to skepticism, yet at 
the same time, every form of criticism and self-criticism is steeped in a 
metaphysical ideal.
9 “Los signos se comen a los signos. Maleza se convierte en desierto, algarabía en 
silencio: arenales de letras. Alfabetos podridos, escrituras quemadas, detritos verbales. 
Cenizas. Idiomas nacientes, larvas, fetos, abortos. Maleza.” (Paz, El mono 39)
PKn, letnik 46, št. 2, Ljubljana, avgust 2023
20
In this ambivalence, Paz’s monogram remains broken in itself, 
unstable and oddly hollow. The monogram seems to be just an empty 
space: dwelling for monstrosities as of benedictory gods. Thus, the 
image of the monkey grammarian is equally ambivalent: not only is 
he a holy animal, poet, eroticised body, master of the Vedic rhymes, 
but also Darwinian anthropoid ape: profane animal without language, 
which masturbates senselessly, scratches its rear and answers the idea of 
a divine language by wild bellows and shrieks.
Hanumān is merely human, but also a divine creator; and Galta, 
ideational scene of transcendence, remains in an uncertain status 
between the two poles: either to be overgrown by a jungle of vivid signs 
ultimately incomprehensible to human beings or to be absorbed by a 
desert of a dried-out object- and communication language. The mod-
ern poet is torn between these poles. He has to find difficult and fragile 
compromises between a wild glossolalia of a monstrous language, and 
silence. Paz traces one of these compromises in El mono gramático, fol-
lowing the line from the preface to his volume of poetry Libertad bajo 
palabra: “Contra el silencio y el bullicio invento la Palabra.”10
Between poetic vision and prosaic chatter lies the deliberate, well-
chosen word as a bridge and delicate compromise. The experience of 
transcendence either won’t occur or only very fleetingly. The very frus-
tration of the intent, however, is vital. Knowing that every attempt 
is going to fail leads by no means to despair, but originates an eth-
ics and aesthetics of essay: to a resilient individual trained on dealing 
with risky makeshifts impossible to ensconce in. Paz’s poetics is there-
fore one of failure, revision and new beginning; of running in circles 
or, as Heidegger states it, of Kreisgang which he describes as “Fest des 
Denkens”—feast of thinking (Heidegger 3).
To the critical mind of modernity, circuiting routes and returns are 
more important than road and destination. Continual reflection and 
going astray provides not only the possibility of contemplating the con-
tingency of reality and the incommensurability of language, but also 
sets the scene for making the truthful experience of failure and, more 
importantly, of relating oneself to it and of reflecting oneself within 
this experience. The intent of experiencing transcendence through lin-
guistic construction is an indispensable detour, because only the experi-
ence of seeing it frustrated allows for a critical writing which integrates 
visionary sensation and a reflective approach. As Paz writes in El mono 
gramático: “Each attempt I make ends up the same way: … We proceed 
10 Transl.: “Against the silence and uproar I invent the Word.”
Veit Lindner:     Text, Figure, Monogram
21
from a search for meaning to its destruction in order that a reality may 
appear, a reality which in turn disappears.” (Paz, The Monkey 134)11
On the road towards transcendence Paz’s suspenseful essayistic 
word models and shapes itself as a compromise, very aware, however, 
of the impossibility of finally resolving the conflict between poetry and 
prose, literature and critique, literary form and monstrosity, between 
human and divine expression.
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11 “Cada tentativa termina en lo mismo: … Vamos de la búsqueda del sentido a 
su abolición para que surja una realidad que, a su vez, se disipa.” (Paz, El mono 117)
PKn, letnik 46, št. 2, Ljubljana, avgust 2023
22
Besedilo, figura, monogram: Utelešenje Jaza v 
esejistični pisavi Octavia Paza in njegovem El 
mono gramático
Ključne besede: mehiška književnost / Paz, Octavio / literarne zvrsti / esej / esejističnost / 
askeza / monogram
S sklicevanjem na El mono gramático Octavia Paza, ki velja za eno najkom-
pleksnejših del tega mehiškega Nobelovega nagrajenca iz leta 1990, začrtamo 
značilnosti »esejističnega« kot pristnega modernističnega načina pisanja. S tem 
ko uprizarja ambivalentne in nestabilne figure »esejističnega«, se delo izmika 
klasifikaciji ter na splošno opisuje namene oblikovanja, prav posebej pa daje 
estetsko obliko subjektu pisanja. Upanje na dosledno samooblikovanje poga-
nja poglobljen metafizični ideal, ki pa se znova in znova razblinja. Prek lika 
hindujskega opičjega boga Hanumāna, opičjega slovničarja, se Octavio Paz 
sprehaja po tanki meji »pisanja samega sebe« med slikovnim in integralnim 
utelešenjem jaza ter razpadajočo analitično diskurzivnostjo. »Esejistično« se 
razkrije v etosu in estetiki prizadevanja, ki subjekt prisili h kompromisu, a ki 
zastane v neizpolnjenem stremljenju, za vedno uničeno in nepopolno. Proce-
sualno se realizira kot askeza v intranzitivnem pisanju in opisuje samokritično 
in performativno besedilno prakso.
1.01 Izvirni znanstveni članek / Original scientific article
UDK 821.134.2(720).09-4Paz O.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3986/pkn.v46.i2.01