The Labyrinth of Solitude

Paz’s opening chapters involve the identification of a fundamental problem of individual human existence and slowly broadens focus, transitioning from an existential analysis of individual human life to a historically situated “type” (the pachuco), into a discussion of social and sexual relationships in Mexico, and finally the function of the fiesta for larger Mexican communities. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 further broaden the scope of Paz’s analyses. Paz shifts to a more concrete interpretation of Mexican historical events. Over the course of these investigations into colonial violence, religion, and the Mexican Revolution, Paz shows how Mexican history is characterized by the tendencies expounded in the opening chapters. Throughout, Paz engages with ideas drawn from the writings of the nineteenth-century German philosopher and economist Karl Marx, as well as early twentieth-century Austrian physician and founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.

Mexicans retain a certain mystique which both attracts and repels outsiders, according to Paz (65). Like peasants in the eyes of urbanites, or women in the eyes of men, they seem to harbor a secret wisdom or power in virtue of their marginal position. This is only possible due to the relative lack of industrialization in Mexico in the mid-twentieth century. Contemporary workers are marginalized, but they are like cogs in a machine. Evoking Karl Marx, Paz sees this as leading to an “abstraction” of labor and an “alienation” of workers from the products of their labor. Both their activities and products are standardized, and they lose their individuality. When Mexico becomes a fully industrialized nation, its mysterious and alluring contradictions will be resolved through the process of abstraction to which capitalism subjects all life. For the time being, however, Mexicans are not “workers” in the sense of industrial capitalism, due to a lack of overall industrial development in Mexico. They thus retain their contradictory tendencies and share an affinity with all marginalized peoples. It is thus that Mexican malaise is not relegated to the lower classes but affects all Mexican social strata. Like marginalized peoples the world over, Mexicans struggle against an oppressive reality. Rather than a concrete set of racist or classist institutions however, Mexicans struggle against the “internal” enemy of their own historical past, Paz claims.

The Mexican curse chingar serves as an index of this struggle which begins with the “tearing” open of the Mesoamerican world by the Spanish conquistadores. Chingar thus evokes a violation, usually sexual, and summarizes the Mexican view of the world that stems from the cultural memory of coloniality: one is violator or violated, humiliated mother or cruel father. Mexicans are deeply ambivalent, even tortured, by the violent and cruel origins of their nation in the Spanish Conquest: “The question of origins, then, is the central secret of our anguish” (80).

Paz’s use of metaphors of maternity, paternity, and childhood in this connection suggests a parallel between the historical origins of Mexican identity, on the one hand, and the original solitude of human beings (described in Chapter 1 and, later, in Chapter 9) on the other. The “birth” of Mexico is linked to both real and figurative violence and a figurative separation of indigenous peoples from the “mother” of their native culture, Paz suggests. The relative homogeneity of Mesoamerican culture is “torn” or “opened” by the violence of a domineering, aggressive “father” in the form of the Spanish Conquistadores. An important subtext here is the “oedipal” dynamic of mother, father, and child. According to Freud, the mother is the original object of a child’s erotic satisfactions and affection. The father is a competitor for the mother’s attention, and the child begins to develop a violent reaction against him, though it is helpless to act upon these urges. In the end, this process is resolved when the child identifies with the father and internalizes the prohibition of the mother.

In Mexico, popular Catholic piety turns to the comforting “mother” of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Mexican machismo, by contrast, identifies with the father as a cruel, domineering torturer of the mother figure. It is tempting then to extend the Freudian themes implicit in Paz’s reading of Mexican history: colonial violence parallels family violence, even rape, and prevents a resolution of the oedipal conflict. Mexicans understand their “hybrid” identity, a mixture of indigenous and European culture, as reflecting their origins in this violation.

In the centuries that follow, Mexico trades out various ideological “masks” through which it denies its hybridity, attains an authentic identity, and, in the same gesture, realizes a path toward meaningful communion. None of these ultimately succeed. As Paz, details in Chapter 5, Catholicism is the first of these, and it serves to replace the “universal” vision of the Aztec indigenous tradition. Catholicism too offers a universal vision of humanity and its place in the cosmos, but is too dogmatic, ossified, and old to endure as an official ideological standpoint in Mexico. Its form is not adequate to the vitality and dynamism of the greatest spirits of Mexico, such as Sor Juana, whose eventual resignation and melancholy both express the realities of the colonial order and finally condemn it (116).

The anguished longing for communion and the struggle against the inauthenticity of these masks led to a revolution, which parallels the explosive violence and formlessness of the fiesta. Again drawing from Karl Marx—who theorized history was a struggle between the classes that control wealth and those that generate it—Paz claims that Mexico was distinct from other South American nations in that its independence movement was a “class war” from the outset (123). The tensions between liberals, radicals, and conservatives meant that Mexico traded one universalizing mask for another over the years: first liberalism, with its view of the universal rationality of human beings, then positivism, with its view of political life as “survival of the fittest,” according to Darwinian evolutionary principles. When the revolution finally arrived in the early twentieth century, it was a fiesta on a massive scale: Mexico still had no clear ideological direction, but it needed an escape from the fetters of the masks which had driven it into deep, alienating, and stifling solitude. Like the fiesta, the revolution was only a temporary relief from solitude.