The Labyrinth of Solitude

The opening chapters of The Labyrinth of Solitude articulate the basic philosophical problems that motivate the text and quickly transition into analyses of Mexican culture in accordance with those problems. That Paz wrote this work while serving as a cultural attaché in Paris is not an insignificant philosophical standpoint of the text, which is clearly influenced by French existentialism. The existentialists, in conversation with post-Hegelian philosophy and Heideggerian phenomenology, favored questions regarding one’s concrete existence and historical agency over metaphysical speculation or epistemological puzzles. Familiar ideas from Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, with whom Paz was acquainted, feature prominently in the text.

The basic issue of the text is the existential condition of human beings: We are fundamentally “alone” and seek ways to attain communion with others and the world. Culture is defined in these existential terms, for Paz, as it is constituted by the various personal, social, religious, and artistic strategies for coping with the tension between our inalienable solitude and our longing for communion: “Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, transparent wall—that of our consciousness—between the world and ourselves” (9). In recognizing our own thoughts and motivations, we judge ourselves to be distinct from the world and from others around us. By definition, self-consciousness entails a privileged and singular access to itself. Cursory empirical reflection bears out Paz’s analysis: Our capacity for deception or self-concealment seems to confirm this existential fact.

Adolescence is a period of intensified solitude, Paz suggests. The adolescent is struck by an existential quandary: Their blossoming maturity robs them of earlier mechanisms by which they attained momentary communion (e.g., play, imagination, intimate parental affection), and in so doing imposes the task of defining themselves (9). This point identifies a literal phase of human development in Paz’s work, but it also serves a broader metaphorical purpose at the level of historical reflection, as Paz claims that similar crises of solitude and self-definition occur for entire peoples or nations.

This articulation of the existential situation of human beings and communities resonates strongly with the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre famously articulated a unifying theme of existentialism in an October 1945 lecture entitled “Existentialism is a Humanism”: rather than having a fixed essence which defines us, human beings must struggle throughout their lives to define themselves and the meaning of their lives through the projects and ideals to which they commit themselves. This basic existentialist standpoint is operative in the task of self-definition that occurs in confrontation with existential solitude for Paz.

Paz’s treatment of the pachuco constitutes the first application of this existential approach for the purposes of an analysis of culture and history. Several important and persistent themes appear in these reflections. The pacuhco, living in North American cities, is an “orphan” of sorts, who has lost his connection to the “mother” of a native culture. Like the “adolescent” who can neither turn to a mother for comfort, nor yet identify with the surrounding world, the pachuco negates both his native culture and the North American culture that surrounds him; this leads the pachuco to the use of “masks”—in particular, extreme clothing and behavior—which distance him from the world and preserve his solitude as a refuge of sorts. In accordance with the rhetoric of childhood, adolescence, and maturity, the pachuco might be seen, in Paz’s terms, as a phase of “arrested development” in popular culture. One might see the pachuco’s sense of alienation and use of “masks” as emblematic of Mexico’s marginalized situation within the geopolitical and economic order of the Cold War, its appropriation of foreign cultural traditions like “masks” in the preceding century, and the cultural “orphanhood” of indigenous peoples resulting from the Spanish Conquest hundreds of years earlier.

Paz further develops the theme of masks in the second chapter. Mexicans, through a history of colonial domination and marginalization, have come to view the world as hostile and dangerous. Machismo, a form of extreme and aggressive masculinity, is a response to this view. The macho attempts to become invulnerable and to assert his will in the world. On one hand, this suggests a strategy of self-protection. On the other, the violence and domineering attitude of macho seems to reflect a desire for communion, in Paz’s terms. The macho is at one with a world that is violent and hostile by becoming violent and hostile.

If men are defined by the masks of machismo, this is no less true of women, but in the reverse. Men expect passivity and compliance of women, who men judge to have no inner life or individuality apart from their relationship to men. This view clearly draws on the early “second-wave” feminism of Simone de Beauvoir, the French existentialist and social theorist. Beauvoir famously argued in her 1949 book The Second Sex that the idea of “woman,” as it functioned within Western culture, was defined only in relation to men and men’s interests. Paz’s claim that “In a world made in man’s image, woman is only a reflection of masculine will and desire” (35) echoes Beauvoir’s view. Mexicans’ view of life as a violent struggle, and one can either be the violator or the violated, is an idea Paz returns to in subsequent analyses.

Paz’s analysis of the fiesta connects the interplay of solitude and communion to mortality to death, both literal and figurative. It also prefigures Paz’s account of the Mexican Revolution. The fiesta is a release of tension and a fleeting form of communion. In losing their heads and rejecting social mores during the frenzy of the fiesta, Mexicans experience a simulacrum of death and thus a loss of the very finite form of life and sociality that alienates them and intensifies their solitude. The fiesta is a social formlessness as well, as it is characterized by a suspension of normal social niceties in favor of intoxication, revelry, and sometimes real violence. This social formlessness is without aim; it is merely an explosion of repressed energy, in much the same way that the Mexican Revolution, Paz argues later in the book, is merely a rejection of the extant order with no clear ideological direction. This point echoes the indetermination of the adolescent sense of self and the pachuco’s negation of the world around him that Paz describes in Chapter 1. Mexicans suffer the burden of solitude and long for communion, but they are without authentic cultural touchstones to realize the latter and alleviate the former.