The Labyrinth of Solitude

“The pachuco has lost his whole inheritance: language, religion, customs, beliefs. He is left only with a body and a soul with which to confront the elements, defenseless against the stares of everyone. His disguise is a protection, but it also differentiates and isolates him: it both hides him and points him out.” 

The pachuco lives in a state of cultural dislocation, Paz claims, outside of his native culture and in an alien culture that is often hostile. This alien culture intensifies his experience of solitude. To cope with the sense of vulnerability, he wears a “disguise” of extreme, dandyish clothing and behavior. This mask disguises his sense of vulnerability, but it also highlights how different he is from the North American culture that surrounds him. This difference is characteristic of all Mexicans generally, who tend to wear various metaphorical “masks” that simultaneously conceal and reveal something about their identity: both what they are and what they lack or desire to be.

“The pachuco is the prey of society, but instead of hiding he adorns himself to attract the hunter’s attention. Persecution redeems him and breaks his solitude: his salvation depends on becoming a part of the very society he appears to deny.” 

Pachucos living in Los Angeles or other American cities live in a state of alienation from their language and culture which intensifies their sense of existential solitude. Being culturally and often racially different from those around them. they are often the target of bigoted violence. A dialectic emerges: their attempt to affirm their solitude becomes, in an ironic or even perverse twist, the way that they can attain “communion” with the culture in which they live: as the victims of the community’s violence they take on a place or a role within it.

“The history of Mexico is the history of a man seeking is parentage, his origins.”

The figure of the pachuco is emblematic of several more general features of Mexican identity. Among these is the struggle for identity. Paz metaphorizes this search as a seeking to discover one’s parentage or even to return to the womb: Mexicans struggle with how to understand themselves with relation to the colonial violence that brought forth their nation and the various European and indigenous influences that have impacted Mexican history. They share a sense of lost or obscured origins, and long to return to a state in which they had a clear sense of self and of their place in the world.

“The Mexican not only does not open himself up to the outside world, he also refuses to emerge from himself, to ‘let himself go.’” 

The use of various metaphorical masks by Mexican peoples is a central idea of the book, already announced in Paz’s discussion of pachucos and their sense of vulnerability. In Chapter 2, Paz claims that even in Mexico itself, Mexican peoples perceive the world as hostile and dangerous. The masks of ceremony, propriety, and ritual conceal their inner selves and prevent them from being at the mercy of others.

“In a certain sense the history of Mexico, like that of every Mexican, is a struggle between the forms and formulas that have been imposed on us and the explosions with which our individuality avenges itself.” 

The desire to conceal their inner selves from the world, and to thus cling to and protect their “solitude” does not come without a trade-off. Mexicans still feel an urge to express the inner self they conceal and to connect with the world and with others. This leads to moments when Mexicans release the floodgates that have dammed up their feelings and express themselves with explosive emotion, exuberant celebration, or violence. In Mexican history, this occurs in acts of revolution against the forms that constrain the Mexican spirit, for instance, the dictatorial rule of Portofirio Díaz.

“In a world made in man’s image, woman is only a reflection of masculine will and desire.” 

Masks and disguises mediate gender relationships in Mexican culture. Men conceal themselves from others and dominate through aggression and violence, the pose of the “Macho.” Men expect Women to become utterly passive and deny their individuality and be compliant to masculine desire Paz claims.

“At first the pretense is only a fabric of inventions intended to baffle our neighbors, but eventually it becomes a superior—because more artistic—form of reality. Our lies reflect both what we lack and what we desire, both what we are and what we are not and what we would like to be.” 

As in the case of pachuco, the deceptions of Mexicans both conceal and reveal something about themselves. Viewed in a certain light, they express disquiet or anxiety about the disparity between the ideals of Mexican identity and the realities they live. In a sense, this makes the world of deceptions and masks into something richer and deeper than bare reality itself because it infuses Mexican experience with fantasy and artifice.

“It is always difficult to give oneself up; few persons anywhere ever succeed in doing so, and even fewer transcend the possessive stage to know love for what it actually is: a perpetual discovery, an immersion in the waters of reality, and an unending re-creation.”

True love means being “penetrated” by another, Paz claims. This means to realize that one is most one’s self when emotionally vulnerable and exposed before one’s lover. This makes genuine love rare, as people tend toward self-preservation and fear this depth of vulnerability and intimacy. This is certainly true in Mexico, given the culture of machismo, which insists that men maintain an image of invulnerability, Paz suggests.

“The dissembler never surrenders or forgets himself, because he would no longer be dissembling if he became one with his image. But this fiction becomes an inseparable—and spurious—part of his nature. He is condemned to play his role through-out life, since the pact between himself and his impersonation cannot be broken except by death and sacrifice. The lie takes command of him and becomes the very foundation of his personality.” 

The people who use machismo, ceremony, ritual, or manners to conceal themselves become lost in the disguise they wear. This reflects a problem of Mexican identity more generally: seeking for a meaningful identity that will connect one to a community or a nation can, paradoxically drive one into a deeper state of solitude and alienation. In such cases, one becomes alienated and concealed even from one’s self.

“In all of these ceremonies—national or local, trade or family—the Mexican opens out. They all give him a chance to reveal himself and to converse with God, country, friends or relations. During these days the silent Mexican whistles, shouts, sings, shoots off fireworks, discharges his pistol in the air. He discharges his soul.” 

Throughout the first two chapters, Paz carefully details the ways that Mexicans attempt to conceal themselves from the world and the people around them. At the same time, he notes that they long for communion, a sense of genuine intimacy with one another, and a sense of belonging in their community and world. This could only be achieved when they drop their “masks” and express their inner lives. This happens in the fiesta, a raucous public festival. For a brief moment, Mexicans allow themselves to express all that is hidden in their ceremony, manners, and masks.

“Therefore the fiesta is not only an excess, a ritual squandering of the goods painfully acquired during the rest of the year; it is a revolt, a sudden immersion in the formless, in pure being. By means of the fiesta society frees itself from the norms it has established. It ridicules its gods, its principles, and its laws it denies its own self. The fiesta is revolution in the most literal sense of the word. In the confusion that it generates, society is dissolved, is drowned, insofar as it is an organism ruled according to certain laws and principles.” 

Contrary to sociological theories, which see festivals as an expression of conspicuous waste or communal gift-giving, Paz interprets them in terms of the existential solitude of the Mexican people and their longing for communion and communication. The fiesta rejects the forms and manners of society and returns it to a formless and intimate mass of feeling and instinct. In this, it is a “revolution”; it suspends or rejects the form of social organization. This anticipates Paz’s description, in Chapter 6, of the Mexican Revolution as an “explosion of reality” without clear ideological direction or principle.

“We oscillate between intimacy and withdrawal, between a fiesta and a wake, without ever truly surrendering ourselves. Our indifference hides life behind a death mask our wild shout rips off this mask and shoots it in to the sky, where it swells, explodes, and falls back into silence and defeat. Either way, the Mexican shuts himself off from the world: from life and death.” 

Despite the explosive, celebratory air of the fiesta, Paz claims that the Mexican does not attain true communion. The fiesta is only a temporary escape from the disguises and the inner solitude they reinforce. Fiesta is a reaction against Mexican anguish and rootlessness, rather than expression of a true communion and sense of cultural and historical rootedness and belonging.

“The chingón is the macho, the male; he rips open the chingada, the female, who is pure passivity […] the relationship between them is violent […] The idea of violence rules darkly over all the meanings of the word, and the dialectic of the ‘closed’ and the ‘open’ thus fulfills itself with an almost ferocious precision.” 

Paz claims that the Mexican curses words chingar, chingón, and chingada, serve as an explosive expression of various tensions within Mexican culture and consciousness. The terms connote violence (especially sexual), thus expressing the combative, hostile view of life that characterizes Mexican culture: one is either the violator or the violated. Not only do these words resonate with the misogynistic culture of Mexican machismo, but they also express Mexican ambivalence toward the racist violence of the colonial past. Mexicans understand their national and ethnic identities as products of both literal rape of indigenous women, and the metaphorical rape of the indigenous world.

“Just as an Aztec pyramid often covers an older structure, so this theological unification affected only the surface of Aztec consciousness, leaving the primitive beliefs intact. The situation prefigured the introduction of Catholicism, which is also a religion superimposed upon an original and still living religious base. Everything was prepared for Spanish domination.” 

The Aztec Empire was theocratic and attempted to assimilate conquered peoples by interpreting religious beliefs and practices of the conquered in terms of the Aztec religious system, Paz notes. The Aztecs imposed their beliefs over local religions while leaving the everyday beliefs and practices largely intact. A similar process occurred when the Spanish imposed Catholicism on indigenous people. Indigenous populations interpreted the forms of Catholicism in terms of their own traditions, thus allowing traces of their religion to survive even to the present day.

“With the introduction of Positivist philosophy the nation broke its last links with the past. The Conquest destroyed temples but the colonial world built others. The Reform denied tradition but offered us a universal image of man. Positivism gave us nothing at all. Instead, it revealed the principles of liberalism in all their nakedness, as lovely but inapplicable words.” 

Just as individual Mexicans don masks to protect themselves from a hostile world and to conceal their uncertainty about their identity, so also the nation itself wears masks, Paz suggests. Some are more spiritually fulfilling than others, however. During the dictatorship of Portofirio Díaz, Mexico adopted the Positivism of the French sociologist August Comte as its official guiding philosophy. Positivism treated social and political life like mere biology, thus seeking to govern and justify social hierarchy according to the ideas of natural selection and struggle. Unlike Catholicism or liberalism then, positivism offered no sense of humanity’s place in the cosmos, no hope for a better future (in this world or the next).

“Our Revolution is the other face of Mexico, ignored by the Reform and humbled by the dictatorship. It is not the face of courtesy, of dissimulation, of form imposed by means of lies and mutilations; it is the brutal resplendent face of death and fiestas, of gossip and gunfire, of celebration and love (which is rape and pistol shots). The Revolution has hardly any ideas. It is an explosion of reality: a return to communion, an upsetting of old institutions, a releasing of many ferocious, tender and noble feelings that had been hidden by our fear of being. And with whom does Mexico commune in this bloody fiesta? With herself, with her own being. Mexico dares to exist, to be. The revolutionary explosion is a prodigious fiesta in which the Mexican, drunk with his own self, is aware at last, in a mortal embrace, of his fellow Mexican.” 

Here, Paz further develops the association of fiesta with social and political revolution. In rejecting the stifling positivism and dictatorial control of Portofirio Díaz, Mexican revolutionaries rejected the masks and disguises of the official culture and attempted to realize a truer, more authentic Mexican identity. In the end, this was a welling up of repressed will and emotion rather than ideas, however. Like the fiesta, the Revolution was a temporary return to formlessness which was not motivated by an anything beyond an urge toward explosive self-expression.

“We have never succeeded in creating a form that would express our individuality. As a result, ‘Mexicanism’ has never been identifiable with any specific form or tendency: it has always veered from one universal project to another, all of them foreign to our nature and all of them useless in our present crisis. Mexicanism is a way of not being ourselves, a way of life that is not our own.” 

The Revolution was a rejection of dictatorship and an expression of the Mexican people’s desire to be themselves, but the Revolution had no clear idea of who or what Mexico should be. In the wake of the Revolution, Paz claims, it became clear to Mexican intellectuals like Samuel Ramos that Mexico had never attained cultural forms and institutions which expressed both universal values and its own historical specificity and individuality. Rather, it had tried on the values and cultures of other peoples like so many masks.

“We were objects before, but we have begun to see ourselves as agents of historical change, and our acts and omissions affect the great powers. The image of the present-day world as a struggle between two giants, with the rest of us as their friends, supporters, servants and followers, is very superficial. The background—and indeed the very substance—of contemporary history is the revolutionary wave that is whelming up in the peripheral countries.” 

According to Paz, Mexico shares its sense of intense solitude and confused identity with the rest of the “developing” world. In the present day, these nations are discovering that they are more than adjuncts to the USA and the USSR, but as actors on the historical stage with their own powers and destinies. This realization is the most crucial of the current historical moment, Paz claims. He suggests that the developing world might come to draw upon their shared experiences of marginalization to form a new community of the poor and dispossessed that would challenge the hegemony of the great Cold War powers.

“Solitude is both a sentence and an expiation. It is a punishment but it is also a promise that our exile will end. All human life is pervaded by this dialectic.”

Human life is characterized by dualisms: anguish and joy, abandonment and belonging, desire and satisfaction, Paz argues. In popular language, solitude is identified with suffering, while communion reflects a sense of belonging and wholeness. The typically painful experience of solitude implies a lost state of communion, plenitude, and satisfaction that might be regained. In this, Paz identifies a dialectical relationship: solitude implies the reality of communion. The reality of solitude and the longing for communion are the fundamental facts of the human condition, Paz claims.

“Defending love has always been a dangerous, antisocial activity. Now it is even beginning to be revolutionary. The problem of love in our world reveals how the dialectic of solitude, in its deepest manifestation is frustrated by society. Our social life prevents almost every possibility of achieving true erotic communion.”

In the second chapter, Paz notes how difficult genuine erotic love can be for Mexicans as a result of the misogynistic culture of machismo. In this quote, he returns to this theme, but broadens his scope. Erotic union is one of the only places we might experience communion in the modern world, but across human cultures, the institutionalization of love and sexual relationships make true intimacy—and the communion it might facilitate—difficult and rare. Marriage, because of the interposition of various cultural expectations, is rarely the highest realization of love, but merely a means to propagate the species and thus, society. Thus, love which rejects conventions and mores is “antisocial” and might indicate a path toward a different form of community.

“Work, the only modern god, is no longer creative. It is endless, infinite work, corresponding to the inconclusive life of modern society. And the solitude it engenders—the random solitude of hotels, offices, shops and movie theatres—is not a test that strengthens the soul, a necessary purgatory. It is utter damnation, mirroring a world without exit.” 

Children attempt to re-establish communion with the world through fantasy and play. Adolescents are keenly aware of their solitude as these fantasies lose their efficacy. Adults re-establish a degree of communion through shared endeavors, commitment to ideals, and work. Modern life has alienated people from the values that animate work and the fruits of their labor, making solitude a pervasive spiritual malady. Traditional paths to communion and community have been dissolved and replaced with consumer products. Rather than a temporary state, solitude has become the ultimate and continual condition of the modern human being.

“Several related ideas make the labyrinth one of the most fertile and meaningful mythical symbols: the talisman or other objects, capable of restoring health or freedom to the people, at the center of a sacred area; the hero or saint who, after doing penance and performing the rites of expiation, enters the labyrinth or enchanted palace; and the hero’s return either to save or redeem his city or to found a new one.” 

Paz interprets the history of myths as exhibiting the dialectic of solitude: the loss of the primal home or community implies the promise of a restoration and a return to wholeness. The labyrinth is a privileged image of this quest, for Paz. All paths direct one toward a center, where one might regain communion. This point serves as the central metaphor for human existence and the historical travails of the Mexican people as they search for an authentic, shared identity.

“Man, the prisoner of succession, breaks out of his invisible jail and enters living time: his subjective life becomes identical with exterior time, because this has ceased to be a spatial measurement and has changed into a source, a spring, in the absolute present, endlessly re-creating itself. Myths and fiestas, whether secular or religious, permit man to emerge from his solitude and become one with creation. Therefore myth—disguised, obscure, hidden—reappears in almost all our acts and intervenes decisively in our history: it opens the doors of communion.”

Myth and ritual seek to return us to a state of communion, to transcend the solitude that is the fate of any self-conscious being, in Paz’s view. This involves seeing our own finite lives integrated into a greater reality. An example of this that Paz describes is the Catholic Eucharist, which does not merely represent the incarnation and redeeming sacrifice of Christ, but is said to repeat it and bring the eternal and the finite into contact through the performance of the sacrament. Traces of mythic consciousness remain within the rationalized forms of modern life.