PazPolitics

In this essay [1], I situate El mono gramático alongside Édouard Glissant's Poetics of
Relation, and all of those texts (both literary and scholarly) in which, as Glissant would say,
"errantry and Relation are at play" (21). My purpose for doing so is not to trace the
genealogy of Paz's text. Nor do I propose to claim that El mono gramático is either a
precursor or a prime example of what one might call "literature of relation." Rather, I situate
Paz's text in the context of Glissant's poetics of relation in order to more closely examine one
of the most problematic issues that Glissant's poetics raises but leaves unresolved, namely,
the politics of writing under the aegis of relation.

According to Glissant, the poetics of relation "presupposes no ideological stability" (32). In
other words, what texts of relation have in common with one another is not a similar political,
ethical, or aesthetic design, but the fact that they are all "latent, open, multilingual in
intention, [and] directly in contact with everything possible" (32). This is not to suggest that
the poetics of relation is either apolitical, or politically ambiguous. On the contrary, it
endeavors to be resolutely progressive. If it accommodates or generates ideologically
contradictory elements, it is because this poetics fully embraces the contingency of relation.
As Glissant points out, the elements of literature of relation "do not add up to anything clear-
cut or easily perceptible with any certainty. The relinked (relayed), the related, cannot be
combined conclusively" (173).

But, surely, Glissant would not invest his faith in relation if he did not believe that it is
intrinsically a major catalyst of social, cultural, and political change. His underlying
assumption is that the whole of this poetics is supposed to be greater, and more ideologically
sound, than the sum of its parts. Because of this, he maintains a celebratory tone of the
endless virtues of relation throughout his essay, and fails or refuses to adopt a more critical
position toward it. In his dualistic analysis, he reserves all the hard punches for anything
that opposes relation and its many relatives (errantry, donner avec, écho-monde, expanse,
creolization, repetition, difference, contingency, opacity, etc.). My reading of El mono
gramático is intended to show that it is crucial to maintain a more critical attitude toward
texts that one way or another fit into, or participate in a poetics of relation.

Glissant's argument for multi-genre, multilingual, multicultural, trans-disciplinary, and anti-
disciplinary writing in Poetics of Relation is most welcome. However, one cannot pretend
that this strategy is in and of itself politically progressive and unproblematic. El mono
gramático is a case in point. While this text successfully crosses many disciplinary and
cultural borders, and effectively transgresses a number of key customary distinctions (such
as that between literature, criticism, and theory), the way that the narrator craftily
cannibalizes, suppresses, and even silences the discourses and voices of his many
interlocutors is essentially totalitarian in spirit. Paz's text shows that the mere fact that a
poet's word is driven by relation, that it negates every metropolis (geopolitical, disciplinary,
epistemological), or that it roams freely around the world following every conceivable
trajectory (from center to center, from center to periphery, from periphery to center, from
periphery to periphery) does not necessarily imply that that word will oppose what Glissant
calls "the totalitarianism of any monolingual intent" (19). In a dictator's domain, errantry
and relation can also be allowed to take place, but only when they are thoroughly and
constantly checked. This hardly has the emancipatory effect that Glissant implies poetics of
relation possesses inherently.

1

In Poetics of Relation Glissant makes one of the most compelling arguments for the
significance and value in poetry of recent years. His text points in the right direction as to
how to go about reconnecting the two orders of knowledge (the poetic and the scientific),
which modern hegemonic accounts of Western reason have portrayed as belonging to two
entirely different, and intrinsically incompatible realms. His fundamental proposition is that
all peoples, cultural traditions, and spheres of knowledge should enter into relation. A poet
of relation (i.e., one who practices "the thinking of errantry"), as Glissant points out,
"conceives of totality but willingly renounces any claims to sum it up or to possess it" (21).
Relation is thus simultaneously an ethical, aesthetic, political, and epistemological project
that is at odds with traditional hegemonic conceptions of thinking (i.e., those that define it as
an essentially calculating, synthesizing, ap-prehending, or com-prehending endeavor).[2]

According to Glissant, relation realizes itself by way of "the other of Thought" (154). The
latter alludes to poetic thought, which has been regarded, throughout the history of Western
philosophy, as being incompatible with and beyond the domain of "pure" logical reasoning.
Glissant proposes that "the other of Thought" is ineffectual without "thought of the Other"
(154). The latter basically means engaging with those with whom, because of racial, gender,
sexuality, class, linguistic, and/or religious prejudices, the writer does not usually engage. It
implies being guided by the ethics of relation, which is first and foremost a transformational
ethics.

In the domain of relation, "thought of the Other" changes writing. But "thought of the
Other" does not occur due to the writer’s generosity, or sense of moral duty. The writer acts
in his or her own self-interest, driven by an aesthetic impulse. In Glissant's view,

[Victor] Segalen's crucial idea was that encountering the Other superactivates poetic imagination and
understanding. Of course, from that moment on there could be no question of hierarchy in pursuit of
relations with the other. [. . .] Segalen does not merely describe recognition of the other as a moral
obligation (which would be a banality), but he considers it an aesthetic constituent, the first edict of a
real poetics of Relation. (29)

The act of encountering the others[3] fully awakens the "world's poetic force" that lies half-
dormant within the writer. But this encounter is in itself sterile, in terms of a poetics of
relation, if it does not lead the writer to recognize, that is, to engage, with the others.
Recognition of the others, as Glissant indicates, is the defining factor in the unfolding of a
genuine poetics of relation. Therefore, what ultimately matters is how the writer engages
with the others in and outside the text, and whether or not his or her writing is transformed
as a result of such engagement.

In my critique of El mono gramático, I will concentrate on exploring what Glissant calls "the
first edict of a real poetics of relation," that is, the question of "recognition of the other"
(Poetics of Relation 29). This particular question has been crucial for the development of the
three "trajectories" that the poetics of relation has followed during its history: the one that
goes "from the Center toward the peripheries," the one that goes "from peripheries toward
the Center," and the one in which "the poet's word leads from periphery to periphery" (39).
According to Glissant, in the third mode of poetics of relation the notion of "trajectory," and
the distinction between "center" and "periphery" are abolished (29). However, contrary to
what one might hope or expect, the hegemony that the authorial voice exercises over the
voices of the others in the text is not questioned, problematized, interrupted, or reversed in
the literature of relation. In the case of El mono gramático, for example, a text that takes all
three "trajectories" with equal familiarity and ease, the hierarchy that is established between
the voice of the narrator and the oral and written narratives of "the others" in the text is
unmistakable. The narrator exerts tight hegemonic control over these voices. Therefore,
even when moving from periphery to periphery, and putting one's text in the presence of
others, an engagement with others, and reflection on that engagement, are not guaranteed
in the literature of relation.

Below, I will first provide a brief description of Paz's El mono gramático to familiarize the
reader with its multiple genre techniques of exploring questions of language and thought.
Secondly, I will explore Paz's politics of writing at the dialogical level by examining the
relationships between the different voices and discourses that appear in the text. Thirdly, I
will put Paz's text into an historical context in order to examine the general political scope of
the text. This will allow me to show that Paz's text is poetic, philosophical, and political. At
the same time, I will show how these different tasks of the text are intimately bound to his
choices in employing a multiplicity of speaking voices without ever ceding space to those
voices that are frozen at the enchanted margins of the author's single-minded purpose.
Language, and its contingent unruliness, is itself at the heart of Paz's struggle with words,
voices, and discourses in this text. These insights will help me analyze both the logical and
political implications of Paz's discourse on language. From this analysis, I will present a
critique of the ways in which Paz's deployment of different speaking voices and writing
techniques ultimately desires to disenchant the world in the manner of philosophers and
critics, as opposed to re-enchanting the world in the manner of poets.

2

El mono gramático is a tale of errantry, and a poem of relation. It tells the story of a wayfarer
who strays outside the beaten path and strolls aimlessly in Galta (India), and of a writer who
plunges freely into the fathomless opacities of language that he chances upon in his
Cambridge (England) writing exercise. El mono gramático brings into relation a variety of
poems, myths, theories, paintings, photographs, experiences, fantasies, etc. without
submitting them to the "genetic" test of filiation, and without processing them in the
dialectical mill. Rather, each of its heterogeneous elements diffracts and changes as it
enters into relation with the others.

El mono gramático is inspired by the ethos of reconciliation. It brings into relation, with the
intention of harmonizing, Galta and Cambridge, Valmiki and Wittgenstein, Hanuman and
the Darwinian homo sapiens, visual and written texts, poetry and philosophy, myth, and
criticism.[4] This text assembles an intricate variety of divergent and seemingly antithetical
elements, creating a polyphony of images, words, concepts, textures, and sounds that do not
resolve into an organic whole, but that form what Glissant would call an "écho-monde."[5]
El mono gramático constitutes a composite unity that is attained by way of counterpoint,
contrast, fragmentation, discontinuity, dissonance, and repetition. Similar to what Theodor
Adorno says of Arnold Schoenberg's music, one might also say that "[w]hile all its elements
interpenetrate, they also remain distinct, and the unity comes into being only through the
function each of them has by virtue of which it influences the others" (129).

But, in spite of the text's multiple genre technique, there are two unifying forces that connect
its heterogeneous pieces into an artistically coherent, but politically problematic whole. The
first one is the underlying theme of the narrative. Although Paz explores a myriad of topics,
his text can be best described as a meditation on language. Each narration gradually
becomes, implicitly and explicitly, a thinking experience with language. Together the
narrations become a reflection on the meaning of words and expressions, on the relationship
between words and things, on the being of words and things, and on the acts of naming,
poetizing, thinking, writing, and reading.

The second unifying force of the text is the direct authorial voice of the narrator. In fact, he is
the only speaking voice in the text. He interprets, translates, shapes, and suppresses the
voices of the different characters that he encounters throughout his writing journey. For
instance, the narrator’s discourse on language echoes the arguments of a variety of authors
(poets, philosophers, linguists, anthropologists) whose identity and discourse remains veiled
in the text, even though it is clear that he is having an “interior dialogue" with them. The
texts from which the narrator gleans his stories are not directly cited (except in the titles in
some cases). Secondly, none of the characters whose stories are retold in the text has a
voice. The reader's only knowledge of the stories from which Paz's narrations are drawn is
derived solely through his lyrical interpretation. A similar situation occurs with the many
people who the narrator encounters in his strolls along the path of Galta. To be sure, Paz is
unable to record their words, or engage them in dialogue, due to his inability to speak their
language. Nonetheless, he frequently interprets their words, and even utilizes them as
source of philosophical speculation. Moreover, he systematically refuses to have any form of
exchange with anyone, even though he is constantly being addressed by people and,
sometimes, even invited by some to join them and participate in their festivities.
Significantly, the only person with whom he wishes to speak is a sadhu, a Hindu mendicant
ascetic who cultivates the art of silence. Finally, although we know that, as Jason Wilson
remarks, "on a realistic level Paz writes about a journey that he and his wife made to visit the
ruins of Galta" (130-31), her presence in the text is only acknowledged in the dedication, and
in a picture of her that is included in the text.

The narrator thus appears in the text as the sole possessor of the word. His monological
discourse problematically incorporates the multiplicity of voices that are present in the text,
and creates a seemingly unitary and undisputed discourse. Of course, if one accepts
Bakhtin's contention that the fundamental characteristic of all works of poetry is precisely
the presence of "a unitary and indisputable discourse," there would be no reason to single
out Paz's text and present his essentially totalitarian discourse as politically significant (The
Dialogical Imagination 286).[6] However, Paz's text is more than straightforward poetry. It
is prose poetry. Thus, one should be clear that, as Jonathan Monroe argues, prose poetry
breaks with the so-called unitary and indisputable model of language in the poem. As
Monroe explains "one major aspect of the prose poem's literary historical importance is
precisely that in shifting poetry's locus of struggle from verse to prose, the genre dramatizes
and thematizes the lyric's repression of its own dialogicity, and opens poetry onto a more
intense dialogical interaction with other modes of discourse" (35).

Paz goes against the historical grain of prose poetry, and instead uses the voice of the
narrator to systematically repress the voices of the different characters that appear in the
text, ostensibly in the interest of the text's aesthetic and ideological cohesiveness.
Nevertheless, the repression of dialogicity in El mono gramático should be read as an
implicit political move to exert ideological hegemony over the heterogeneous voices and
discourses that coalesce in the text. Below I will explore this point in a close reading of how
Paz's text ignores the social-historical grounding of the world he chooses to occupy and
recreate. To do this, I will first need to give the reader a sense of the place in which Paz's
text takes place.

3

Paz begins his Mono gramático writing excursion remembering his walks along the path of
Galta. Galta is the name of a famous gorge located on the summit of a range of hills a few
miles east of the city of Jaipur, India. It is a religious resort with a variety of temples and
pools that devotees and pilgrims visit in significant numbers, especially on Tuesdays, when it
is Hanuman's day, and on weekends. To reach Galta from Jaipur, one takes the road to
Agra. Hanuman temple is located at the bottom of the steep hill where the famous Sun
Portal is located. One may reach the Sun Portal from the temple, but the path of Galta is less
exhausting if one starts it from the opposite end. The path of Galta is paved with stones, and
goes in zigzag up the range. The gorge is populated heavily by black and red-faced
monkeys, as well as cows, goats, and other animals. Since people usually bring food to them,
or buy it from the few vendors that install themselves sparsely along the path, the animals
often follow you, either at a distance or very closely. Sometimes they wait for you to give
them their share and leave contently, but sometimes they snatch the food away from you.

Paz begins his writing journey not with an acknowledgement of this place, but in medias res,
as follows,

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 he querido decir al escribir esa frase. (El mono gramático 11)

Paz's walking excursion takes place mostly around the temple of Hanuman, and along some
marginal segments of the path of Galta. Unlike those who visit Galta for religious reasons, or
to enjoy the natural beauty of its gorge, Paz goes to meditate upon the myriad of things that
he encounters there, including Galta's rugged natural, and deteriorated urban landscape.
In this sense, the place that Paz draws into his text is a place disembodied from its cultural,
social, and political significance.

Cuando caminaba por el sendero de Galta, ya lejos de la carretera, una vez pasado el paraje de los
banianos y los charcos de agua podrida, traspuesto el Portal en ruinas, al penetrar en la plazuela
rodeada de casas desmoronadas, precisamente al comenzar la caminata, tampoco sabía adonde iba ni
me preocupaba saberlo. No me hacía preguntas: caminaba, nada más caminaba, sin rumbo fijo. Iba al
encuentro... (sic) ¿de qué iba al encuentro? Entonces no lo sabía y no lo sé ahora. (11)

Like his strolls in Galta, Paz conceives his writing of El mono gramático as a path that he
traverses in a desultory, non-assiduous manner. The path is both off the road, and off the
main route followed by the wayfarers visiting the area. Unlike them, he neither follows a
mapped out course nor seeks a concrete destination. His sole task is to make the journey
itself, and reach "the end" without much concern or intentness for what is around him.

Paz does not errantly [7] inhabit the social space that his text references. Rather, he
exercises a hegemonic appropriation more similar to what Glissant calls métissage, or a
mixing that aims to domesticate and suppress both difference and the clash of places and
world views that Galta represents and assembles. Galta is a place for contemplative, but
strangely disembodied meditation for Paz. As he crosses the Portal, he seems to access a
different sort of realm where he is capable of disengaging himself from the world. Paz's
meditative concern is not with the spatial or temporal immediacy of his situation, but with
what lies far beyond his field of vision. Galta opens up to him the possibility of reaching a
transcendental realm of knowledge. Paz's Galta is in this sense not a destination in and for
itself:

Cuando caminaba por el sendero de Galta [. . .] caminaba, nada más caminaba, sin rumbo fijo. Iba al
encuentro... (sic) ¿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 detrás del fin. Una trampa verbal; después
del fin no hay nada pues si algo hubiese el fin no sería fin. Y, no obstante, siempre caminamos al
encuentro de..., (sic) aunque sepamos que nada ni nadie nos aguarda. (11)

Paz's walks along the path of Galta were filled excitingly with uncertainty, but tainted
disappointingly with expectation or desire for resolution or overcoming. In the first sentence
Paz writes that his aim is to "go to the end" without worrying about the meaning of those
words. The fact that he does not capitalize the first letter of that sentence suggests that his
quest began elsewhere and, therefore, that this writing journey is but a continuation of some
other journey. Perhaps it began in Galta, perhaps not. What is clear is that Paz thinks that
the best way to reach his goal is by choosing the path of Galta that exists in his mind. From
such a premise, he will not, or cannot, give into the place, specificity, and contingency of
Galta. By re-traversing the path of Galta, Paz hopes to reach some already imagined "end"
of that journey. However, as he names this hope and task, Paz also becomes aware of its
meaning and reaches an impasse--the realization of the impossibility of such an end. While
wandering the path of Galta, he could go on without asking or being aware of his intentions.
But, in his writing excursion, he realizes that he cannot designate with an accurate name
that which he is hoping to encounter in order to reach "the end." Paz's reflexive
consciousness takes over and interrupts his unmindful wayfaring and questioning. The
phrase "going to the end," he says, "is a verbal trap." The inattentive relationship with
language that he attempts to establish in this text is soon shattered. If, when he first spelled
out the phrase "going to the end," the latter felt appropriate and transparent, as soon as he
reflects on its meaning he realizes its inefficacy and senselessness.

Paz's writing excursion in El mono gramático is characterized by, on the one hand, an
attempt to give way to the unfolding of language as he makes his way through the text and,
on the other hand, an impossibility of taking his way to "the end" as he tries to work his way
out of the labyrinths of language. The "end" of his journey becomes language itself. Hence,
although at the beginning of his journey he sets forth to meet something that he is unable to
name, and that seems unnameable, from the very outset his quest evolves into a meditation
on language itself.

Therefore, even if throughout this text Paz journeys to a variety of places and meditates upon
a wide variety of topics, the text's underlying object of analysis is nonetheless language. The
same might also be said for many of Paz's poetic works, particularly Blanco.[8] However,
El mono gramático is undeniably a different kind of literary exploration than any of his
previous works, because it develops a more heterogeneous approach to language by
exploring a variety of genres and literary spaces. As José Miguel Oviedo observes, in El
mono gramático "Paz wished to produce a text which would be an intersection of poetry,
narrative and essay, thus putting into practice his famous assertion that poetry is always a
sort of 'critical poetry,' a reflection of itself" (617).

While, as Manuel Durán points out, it is in Blanco where "Paz reaches his highest level as a
philosophical poet" (593), it is in El mono gramático where he reaches his peak as a theorist
of language. To be sure, Paz does not approach language as an analyst who methodically
describes and explains language's properties, or hidden, or intrinsic structure, etc. Unlike
other philosophers and theorists, he does not set out to make a set of propositions that
allegedly explain the elements or principles of language, but, as Heidegger might say, Paz
"lets himself be properly concerned by the claim of language by entering it" (On the Way to
Language 57).

Nevertheless, in his concern for language and its heterogeneity, Paz has difficulty fully
entering and submitting to language as a historically, culturally specific set of practices.
This is because he still wants to control and domesticate the many speech genres, discursive
practices, and cultural traditions that he brings into his text. This he does in order to get lost
in (the abstract concept of) language, but not in the worldviews of the languages and
traditions with which he engages. Putting aside their differences and particularities, Paz
does not embrace the contingency introduced by the clashes of worldviews that these
languages and traditions open up.

4

In order to understand the politics of writing of Paz's text it is important to note not only the
politics that take place on a discursive level within the text, but also those that take place at
the level of the historical moment in which Paz is writing. He wrote El mono gramático in the
Summer of 1970, less than two years after the 1968 student revolutionary movements erupted
throughout the Western hemisphere, including Mexico City. These events affected Paz in a
very direct way. In response to the Tlatelolco massacre, where hundreds of students and
other demonstrators were assassinated by the Mexican armed forces, Paz resigned from his
post as Ambassador of India. In this period, he also wrote Posdata where he analyzed the
1968 movement in Mexico in the context of the modern Mexican political and economic
system.

With this in mind, I wish to propose that this text represents Paz's most ambitious poetic-
philosophical-political project. However, because of its marginally explicit political content,
the latter can only be understood in light of the above historical events. Unlike other political
essays that he wrote fulfilling his role as a public intellectual in Mexico, Paz was fulfilling his
role as a writer when he wrote El mono gramático. As he says in a 1968 speech at the
Colegio de México, "the writer is not the servant of the Church, the State, the Party, the
people, or moral society: [he] is the servant of language. But he really serves [language]
only when he puts it into question. Modern literature is first and foremost criticism of
language" (Pasión crítica 7).

For this reason, Paz's criticism of language in this text should be interpreted as an eminently
political endeavor. This is particularly the case given that, according to Paz, the ultimate
political issue throughout history is the "loss of faith in the efficacy of the word." As he
points out in El arco y la lira,

La historia del hombre podría reducirse a la de las relaciones entre las palabras y el pensamiento.
Todo periodo de crisis se inicia o coincide con una crítica del lenguaje. De pronto se pierde la fe en la
eficacia del vocablo [. . .]. Todas las sociedades han atravesado por estas crisis de sus fundamentos
que son, asimismo y sobre todo, crisis del sentido de ciertas palabras. Se olvida con frecuencia que,
como todas las otras creaciones humanas, los Imperios y los Estados están hechos de palabras: son
hechos verbales. (29)

At the heart of Paz's conception of his role as writer is the task of critiquing language.
According to him, critiquing language is an historical act, capable of moving mountains. El
mono gramático can thus be regarded as a political text in that it is an effort to critique
language through poetry. True, in parts of this text the narrator appears to assume the role
of reformer or restorer of the purity and meaning of everyday language. Nonetheless,
overwhelmingly the role he assumes is that of the critic of language. In El mono gramático,
he asserts that it is impossible to reestablish the lost unity of words and things because he
feels language is ultimately and essentially self-referential and, thus, not capable of actually
signifying anything other than itself. But such a conclusion is only possible because he fails,
or refuses, to submit to the contingent, and contradictory historic trajectories and social
relations that are nonetheless present in the myths and languages he evokes and invokes.

The following quote from El mono gramático illustrates vividly the implicit dialogue that
takes place in the text between different conflicting views on language. In this case, the
narrator is placing in dialogue the perspectives of an implied "purist reformer-ruler" of
language, and a "skeptical critic/advisor" (in parentheses).

Deberíamos someter el lenguaje a un régimen de pan y agua, si queremos que no se corrompa y nos
corrompa. (Lo malo es que régimen-de-pan-y-agua es una expresión figurada como lo es la corrupción-
del-lenguaje-y-sus-contagios.) Hay que destejer (otra metáfora) inclusive las frases más simples para
averiguar qué es lo que encierran (más expresiones figuradas) y de qué y cómo están hechas (¿de qué
está hecho el lenguaje? y, sobre todo, ¿está hecho o es algo que perpetuamente se está haciendo?).
Destejer el tejido verbal: la realidad aparecerá. (Dos metáforas). (25-26)

The main text in this quote suggests the utterances of a "naïve" ruler who wants to carry out
a reform to purify language. The comments in parentheses voice the words of a skeptical
critic/advisor who puts in evidence the inherent figurative nature of language. However,
ultimately the "critic" prevails over the "ruler." Instead of a reform of language, the text
deconstructs language, shows the impossibility of pure representation of things, and the
impossibility of the existence of things outside language.

El mono gramático thus undertakes a poetic-philosophical-political critique of language.
Paz's ultimate political task is to find out whether it is at all possible to rely upon language as
a genuinely revolutionary practice in the writing of poetry. His quest is to ask whether one
can use language as a means to endow things with their actual being. Not surprisingly, Paz
finds it impossible to attain such a utopian condition in any lasting way. Language to him is
fundamentally incapable of disclosing things in themselves. According to him, the true
identity and unity of words and things is the forbidden fruit of human language. Identity and
unity of words and things are qualities that only divine languages possess.

Nevertheless, instead of turning away from the goal of disclosing the actuality of things, Paz
earnestly invests his faith in the idea that poetry ought to effect a critique of everyday
language in order to disclose for an instant the "true" being of things. This is an anti-
historical move, a move that Glissant (for one) would emphatically disapprove of due to its
tendency to deny and suppress the heterogeneity and contingency of the world around us.
Such a move can only appeal to some universal truth; a truth that crushes the contingent,
contradictory worldviews, and experiences of language one necessarily encounters in the
practice of speaking and listening.

Instead of turning away from truth as universal and language as representation, Paz insists
that:

El poeta no es el que nombra las cosas, sino el que disuelve sus nombres, el que descubre que las
cosas no tienen nombre y que los nombres con que las llamamos no son suyos. La crítica del paraíso se
llama lenguaje: abolición de los nombres propios; la crítica del lenguaje se llama poesía: los nombres
se adelgazan hasta la transparencia, la evaporación. En el primer caso, el mundo se vuelve lenguaje;
en el segundo, el lenguaje se convierte en mundo. Gracias al poeta el mundo se queda sin nombres.
Entonces, por un instante, podemos verlo tal cual es--en azul adorable. Y esa visión nos abate, nos
enloquece; si las cosas son pero no tienen nombre: sobre la tierra no hay medida alguna. (96-97;
emphasis in the original)

In this way, Paz regards the poet as a larger-than-life mythological figure who single
handedly destroys appearances, and restores for an instant the "true" nature of things. The
political task of poetry for Paz is, thus, to critique language and overcome language's reified
state in order to present things as they "truly" are. However, such an unveiling of "the true
nature of things," as Paz realizes, does not make us at home in the world; rather, it imposes
upon us a home that incarcerates. Although Paz's momentary truth-disclosing is supposed
to be a liberating act, his approach does not set anyone free. In fact, it re-delivers us into the
clutches of universal thought. It binds us to a repressive regime that refuses the multiplicity
of language experiences we undergo simultaneously as we inhabit multiple and varyingly
constructed worlds--worlds constructed in place-history-specific languages that make things
and concepts particular and peculiar, and never universal and knowable.

Paz's meditations on language in El mono gramático ultimately disclose a poetics of despair
that radically relativizes the critical endeavor to the point of making it radically uncritical.
Politically speaking, Paz's poetics become a mock subversiveness that leaves the world
utterly unchanged. If the task of poetry is to dissolve the world's names, and if things can
exist outside of languages, histories, and their differential metaphors, then the task of
dissolving the names of things undertaken in poetry can have no other effect in the "real"
world than to re-inscribe a universality that represses and crushes.

In the attempt to overcome the reification of language by making language the object of
criticism, Paz reifies language once more. Ultimately, by aiming to momentarily disenchant
the world of its metaphors and language, splitting away words from "truth" and "actuality,"
Paz strips his critical practice of its social and historical component and inadvertently places
criticism at the service of the status quo. In Paz's poetics, language is made artificially
autonomous from its social and historical processes. However, language is first and foremost
a means of symbolic exchange between human beings in order to construct and negotiate
the worlds in which we live. Therefore, Paz's treatment of language as a relation between
words is a reactionary attempt to divest language of its home(s) in its many worlds (the
worlds of human beings).

To conclude, Paz's meditation on language is a quest for an "originary," unhistorical
language that restores to human language its ability to present the world as it "is" in
actuality. According to him, the task of poetry is precisely to accomplish this endeavor
through a critique of language. Paz claims that, at its best, poetry can fulfill this mission, but
only for a fleeting epiphanic moment. Paz's poetics assigns the poet the mission of
disenchanting the world from the spell of history in a single-handed stroke. The poet thus
assumes the role of mythological figure who, like the monkey God Hanuman, fights and kills
the Rakshasas, the Gandharvas, and the Kalanemis that make human language an opaque
and petrified being. However, in advocating this mythological-heroic role for the poet, Paz
effaces the historical and social-collective content and form of language. By treating
language as an autonomous entity that poets can "dissolve," Paz attempts to restore
language's mythical transparency, as well as its primordial unity without regard for its
embedment in the social and historical world. In this manner, Paz implies that the crisis of
language, i.e., the devaluation of the meaning of words like freedom, democracy, justice,
revolution, utopia, truth, etc. in the contemporary world is somehow independent from the
historical and social processes that have endowed this crisis.

The result of Paz's language politics in El mono gramático is the establishment of a
Republic (definitely not an imagined community, or heterotopy) where the poet occupies the
top of the social pyramid, and where his is the only voice that will be allowed to speak. In
Paz's quest for a "transparent" language he, the poet-king, silences the voices of everyone
else gathered into the Republic for the sake of the poetic beauty and harmonious resonance
of the text. In this way, Paz's chosen language experience cannibalizes the discourses of the
others in order to present a unitary text where free reign can be given to the contemplation of
language--as if language no longer came from and spoke for specific places in the world.

Notes

[1] This essay is a revised version of chapter four of my Ph.D. thesis. I want to especially
thank Sandra Comstock for her numerous suggestions. Her insightful comments helped me
push further my critique of Paz's writing and language politics.

[2] Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper,
1968) 113-71.

[3] Even though Glissant uses the term "the other," I prefer to say "the others" because this
term acknowledges the multiplicity and complexity of those who are regarded as being
different from the hegemonic Western self. Moreover, in the particular case of El mono
gramático "the others" include not only people from Galta, but also a good number of white,
male, European intellectual icons, such as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Lévi-Strauss.

[4] Manuel Ulacia, El árbol milenario: Un recorrido por la obra de Octavio Paz (Barcelona:
Galaxia Gutenberg, 1999) 365-87.

[5] As Glissant points out, "William Faulkner's work, Bob Marley's song, and the theories of
Benoit Mandelbrot are all échos-monde. Wilfredo Lam's painting (flowing together), or that
of Roberto Matta (tearing apart); the architecture of Chicago and just as easily the
shantytowns of Rio or Caracas; Ezra Pound's Cantos, but also the marching of
schoolchildren in Soweto are échos-monde. Finnegan's Wake was an écho-monde that was
prophetic and consequently absolute (without admission into the real)" (Poetics of Relation
93).

[6] According to Bakhtin, "The world of poetry, no matter how many contradictions and
insoluble conflicts the poet develops within it, is always illumined by one unitary and
indisputable discourse" (The Dialogical Imagination 286).

[7] In Glissant's sense of a Creole practice of errantry, or dwelling in strange lands and with
strange languages.

[8] According to Manuel Durán, "Ultimately Paz as a poet is a master of language, yet one
who recognizes that language is also our shaper and ruler [. . .]. It is through language that
Paz faces the world, sees the world as a unity, confronts the diversities of culture, and
explains their apparent oppositions and contradictions, their conjunctions and disjunctions,
as different responses to the same identical question" (592).

Works cited

Adorno, Theodor W. Sound Figures. Trans. Rodney Livingston. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford UP,
1999.

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Carlyl Emerson.   Ed.
Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.

Durán, Manuel. "Octavio Paz: The Poet as Philosopher." World Literature Today 56.4
(Autumn 1982): 591-594.

Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1997.

Heidegger, Martin. On the Way to Language. Trans. Peter D. Hertz. NY: Harper, 1971.

Monroe, Jonathan. A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell UP, 1987.

Oviedo, José Miguel. "Return to the Beginning: Paz in His Recent Poetry." World
Literature Today 56.4 (Autumn 1982): 612-618.

Paz, Octavio. El arco y la lira: El poema. La revelación poética. Poesía e historia. 3rd ed.
México: FCE, 1986.

---. El mono gramático. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1974.

---. Pasión crítica. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1985.

---. Posdata. México: Siglo XXI, 1970.

Ulacia, Manuel. El árbol milenario: Un recorrido por la obra de Octavio Paz. Barcelona:
Galaxia Gutenberg, 1999.

Wilson, Jason. Octavio Paz. Boston, MA: Twayne, 1986.



			Print this article


	Discuss this article

	See previous comments



	Hugo Moreno is currently Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Western Ontario. From 2001 until May of 2006 he taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His area of research is the relationship between literature and philosophy in the Hispanic world.

	How to cite this article: Moreno, Hugo. "The Politics of Writing in Octavio Paz's El mono gramático". Dissidences. Hispanic Journal of Theory and Criticism. On line. Internet: 15/09/06 (http://www.dissidences/ PazPolitics.html)

		"El mono gramático is inspired by the ethos of reconciliation. It brings into relation, with the intention of harmonizing, Galta and Cambridge, Valmiki and Wittgenstein, Hanuman and the Darwinian homo sapiens, visual and written texts, poetry and philosophy, myth, and criticism. This text assembles an intricate variety of divergent and seemingly antithetical elements, creating a polyphony of images, words, concepts, textures, and sounds that do not resolve into an organic whole, but that form what Glissant would call an écho-monde"

"Nevertheless, instead of turning away from the goal of disclosing the actuality of things, Paz earnestly invests his faith in the idea that poetry ought to effect a critique of everyday language in order to disclose for an instant the "true" being of things. This is an anti-historical move, a move that Glissant (for one) would emphatically disapprove of due to its tendency to deny and suppress the heterogeneity and contingency of the world around us"