The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz:

The philosophy behind the Mexican psyche

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City in 1914 to a family deeply involved in politics, literature, and journalism. Paz began to immerse himself in writing about cultural and political issues at a very early age. He had attended a Roman Catholic school as a child and later studied at the University of Mexico. Paz then turned to writing as an escape from the financial strains his family suffered due to the Mexican Civil War and at age 19, published his first book of poetry, 'Luna silvestre'. Octavio Paz is still read widely by pupils in Mexican secondary schools. He went beyond simply describing Mexico and the Mexicans by helping to construct the understanding that they have of their own sense of personal identity. His service as a Mexican diplomat took him to France where he wrote the renowned essay, 'El laberinto de la soledad', which really analyzed Mexicans people through culture and history.

'The Labyrinth of Solitude' is a collection of essays, most of which are reflections on political history. However, several key sections address the phenomenon of solitude directly. Paz maintained that forms of solitude in a culture originate in a psychological complex of defeat. For the Aztec, this crushing of the spirit began with its own extremely authoritarian rulers, who were overthrown and replaced by the authoritarian Spanish conquerors. They were, in turn, replaced by the authoritarian oligarchies during the Independence period. This process finally culminated in the intimidation by North America (i.e., the United States). The result of this is an oscillation between violent resentment and passivity. The sense of oppression is not, however, a feeling of inferiority, as Paz explained.

Octavio Paz

A sense of inferiority (real or imagined ) might be explained at least partly by the reserve with which the Mexican faces other people. Yet this sense of solitude is greater and more profound than any sense of inferiority. When people sense that they are alone, it does not mean that they feel inferior, but rather that they feel different from others. Also, a sense of inferiority may be an illusion, but solitude is a hard fact. Paz explains that the history of Mexico is a search for historical origins, for the indigenous character and a search for a time before the "catastrophe" of historical time.

The Mexican experience is a sense of "orphanhood, an obscure awareness that we have been torn from a sense of unity with the rest of the universe. It is a flight, a return, and an effort to re-establish the bonds that unite us with the universe."

Paz hinted at the usefulness of myths in exploring this sense of historical loss and alienation. Yet he did not pursue the idea in these essays. We may still extrapolate from his premise about Mexico to an understanding of the cultures of East Asia, or the cultures of Latin America, Islam and Africa in confrontation with the West. Yet that topic is beyond the scope of his book. Paz only wants to describe the Mexican of the present, leaving others to the "genealogy" of culture.

In chapter 2, which is titled "Mexican Masks," Paz argued that Mexicans of all classes and ages present a mask to the world in self-defense, "building a wall of indifference and remoteness between reality and the self; a wall that is no less impenetrable for being invisible. The Mexican is always distanced from the world, from other people and from himself." The result is "hermeticism" (1) and the reaction is justifiable if we consider Mexican history and the kind of society that has been created.

He argued that the harshness and hostility of the environment, obliges people to close in onthemselves (like those plants that survive by storing up liquid within their spiny exteriors). Yet he reasoned that this attitude, legitimate enough in its origins, had become a automatic mechanism.

The resulting solitude is then neither embraced nor refined. It is rather a reaction that oscillates between extremes of defensiveness and aggression, between bravado and "machismo". The virtues of patience and long-suffering coexist with distrust, irony and suspicion.

Among other interesting observations about Mexican culture by Paz in his essays are the following:

* The cult of 'Our Lady of Guadalupe' (2) reflects an extreme aversion to God as Father and authority figure. The Catholic Virgin Mary succeeded Tonantzin, the Aztec goddess, and amalgamated the function of protector of the Indian, the poor, and the suffering.

Labyrinth of Solitude

* The Spanish Conquest was culturally indifferent, representing a double insult of imperialism and unification of races, with Indians 'permitted' reintegration into the religion of the conqueror.

* Influential intellectual forces in Mexico were 'Juana Ines de la Cruz', the "melancholy recluse who smiles and keeps silent," the illegitimate, self-taught, outspoken nun, and the Spanish poet Gongora's "Solitudes," a collection of poems. (Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was a self-taught scholar, poet of the Baroque school and nun)

* The Independence movement, with its Enlightenment principles and ideology of positivism (3) and secularism, merely solidified the power of the ruling Spanish oligarchy against the Indians, while the 1910 Revolution represented the opposite of ideology, centralization, and power with its call for restoration of land to the Indian.

* Chapter 9, titled "The Dialectic of Solitude," is a philosophical essay that stands alone. No particular reference to Mexico is necessary. Paz here taps the universal character of solitude, the universal situation of human beings in the labyrinth that can only be transcended with a dialectic, a reasoning about our existence.

Paz said that solitude, the feeling and knowledge that one is alone, alienated from the world and oneself, is not an exclusively Mexican characteristic. All people, at some moment in their lives, feel themselves to be alone. Human beings maintain the contradiction of self-awareness and the longing to escape from the self. The longing of everyone is to discover "at the exit from the labyrinth of solitude ... reunion, plenty, harmony with the world." Yet if birth, plunging us into the solitude of life, is not the source of union, is death? We are compelled to return from the exile of life, "to descend to the creative womb from which we were cast out." Yet we do not know what lies beyond death.

For Octavio Paz, society represented the same dualism. It presumes to be indivisible and whole, but cannot satisfy the dualism of order versus instability, the dualism of "good and evil, permission and taboo, the ideal and the real, the rational and the irrational, beauty and ugliness, poverty and wealth, innocence and knowledge, imagination and reason." The movement of society to reconcile these opposites represents the historical events we know and the events that never had a chance to materialise.

Paz argues that the reconciliation (of thesis and antithesis) can only occur with the dialectic of solitude, guided by love. Love is a distinctly non-social phenomenon, relegated to the emotions of the individual. So, too, is solitude.

The child and young person must discover in their solitude a sense of feeling, of heroism and sacrifice, argues Paz. Youth must be open to the world in uniting personal consciousness with time and history, past and future, myth, saints, redeemers, poetry. Youth is a period of solitude and withdrawal, well described as a preparation and study in all the great sages from Plato to Paul, to Buddha, to Muhammad, to Dante. We live in solitude to purify ourselves, then return to society.

This expectation depends on the receptivity of society, where solitude is not seen as a prison, a punishment for sin, or mal-adaption to the world.

Labyrinth of Solitude 2

We long for a lost place, and that place has been displaced by our present world, by society itself. Cast out of this place into the center of the world, the mythical place of origin, we contrive new ones to symbolize or prefigure the lost one; be it Jerusalem, Mecca, Rome or the Aztec Mictlan. Contemporary society has rationalized the myths but has been unable to destroy them because they resonate deeply within the human psyche. The substitutes of utopia, wealth, politics, and technology are too sterile to quench the soul's thirst for meaning.

Awards accorded to Paz include an honorary doctorate at Harvard in 1980, the most coveted honour in the Hispanic world, the Cervantes award, in 1981, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Paz has demonstrated his capacity of thought and his ability as a writer brilliantly through this collection of influential essays.

He was also a key figure in the development of the Boom novels that have been studied in this column, due to his influence upon early Boom writers.

(1) Hermeticism or the Western Hermetic Tradition is a set of philosophical and religious beliefs based primarily upon the Hellenistic Egyptian pseudepigraphical writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus who is the representation of the conflation of the Egyptian god Thoth with the Greek Hermess and powerful poetry.

(2) Our Lady of Guadalupe (Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe) is a celebrated Catholic icon of the Virgin Mary also known as the Virgin of Guadalupe

(3) A doctrine that states that the only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge, and that such knowledge can only come from positive affirmation of theories through strict scientific method, refusing every form of metaphysics.