Approximations to the function of pleasure in Julio Torri’s short essay

Abstract

The present essay will examine the ways in which the Mexican essayist Julio Torri, without compromising his aesthetic propensity towards brevity, playfulness, and hermetic language reminiscent of prose poems, remains faithful to an anti-elitist project in favor of his readers, which consists of giving them the opportunity to enjoy what is written and read. I will argue that the concept of pleasure in Torri’s texts acts as a productive category from which to analyze and value the essay form. This study will focus on Torri’s first book, Ensayos y poemas (1917), analyzing three different approximations to pleasure in the writer’s short essays: 1) pleasure as epigraph, 2) pleasure as contradiction, and 3) pleasure as “what is not said,” or, as Torri would say, as “sterility”.