The Labyrinth of Solitude

Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1950

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Individual and Collective Experiences of the “Dialectic of Solitude”

According to Paz, a “dialectic of solitude” characterizes all human experience. It appears both in each individual life, as well as in the collective life of peoples or nations. It follows then that this dialectic shapes all human history and culture. In each of these spheres, human beings experience the sometimes painful and alienating experience of solitude and seek to realize some form of communion that will transcend this solitude.

The experience of solitude is a fundamental feature of human existence, insofar as we are self-conscious beings who can reflect on our own thought and actions (9). The experience of our solitude implies the loss of a state of unity and belonging that Paz calls “communion.” At the same time, the solitude signals the loss of communion, it gives rise to a hope that communion might be restored. Because solitude gives rise to the hope to regain lost communion in Paz’s view, it is “dialectical” in nature; one idea or experience necessarily gives rise to the other. “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” (196).

This solitary dimension manifests itself in different ways during different periods of life. It begins with our expulsion from the womb; experiencing the painful separation from the body of the mother, the child seeks communion through tears, affection, and imaginative play (202). Adolescents are no longer satisfied by childhood play and fantasies, but they have not yet found a path toward re-establishing communion with the world. As a result, their experience of solitude is intense, Paz claims (9). Traditionally, one achieves maturity by realizing communion through work and shared ideals, but also by preserving in one’s inner life some measure of solitude. Paz’s analysis suggests that maturity or adulthood should result in a synthesis of the dialectical opposites communion and solitude.

This dialectic functions on a collective level as well and, furthermore, that the apparently developmental phases with which Paz characterizes our most intimate acquaintance with the dialectic of solitude can be generalized to the experiences of nations, peoples, or cultures. As he states early in the book, “Much the same thing” as occurs in adolescent reflection “happens to nations and peoples at a certain critical moment in their development. They ask themselves: What are we, and how can we fulfill our obligations to ourselves as we are?” (9). The answers to these questions—which arise from a collective experience of solitude—constitute the “genius” of a people, Paz claims.

In the case of Mexico, the collective experience of solitude seems to reflect a marginal place in the world economic and political systems of the mid-twentieth century (193), as well as its hybrid ethnic and cultural makeup (168-169).

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 (169).

Without a clear cultural inheritance, Mexico has continually sought a form of communal identity—hence “communion”—by wearing the values of other cultures like masks.

The Place of Colonial Violence in the Search for Mexican Identity

Historically, Paz claims, the Mexican people have struggled to articulate an authentic, shared identity. This process begins with the violence of the Spanish conquest. By invoking the language of sexual violation and maternity, and paternity, Paz connects his analysis of Mexico’s collective memory of colonial violence to the universal, individual experience of the dialectic of solitude.

Violence in name of empire was not alien to pre-Colombian Mesoamerica. As Paz notes, the Aztec Empire had steadily expanded in the years prior to the Spanish Conquest, absorbing surrounding cultures into its political and religious system (89-92). While a generally homogeneous culture existed in the region, Aztec theocracy had a “universal” vision that would integrate the various peoples of Mesoamerica into a single community, ordained and protected by the Aztec gods. Paz’s narration of the Spanish Conquest suggests that Spanish Conquest differed from the previous Aztec Conquest in a significant respect: while the Aztecs had worked toward consolidating a homogenous Mesoamerican culture within their empire, the Spanish imposed a culture that was radically different from those of the indigenous people they ruled. When they arrived, the Spanish were seen as divine messengers of a new world order, the definitive end of the Aztec world and, by extension, the wider indigenous culture of Mesoamerica. The indigenous peoples experienced a collective solitude, a separation from the metaphorical “mother” of their culture. They were, in a sense, cultural “orphans” (96).

Not unlike Aztec imperialism however, the Spanish Catholicism reflected a commitment to a “universal” vision. For the Catholics, this was the universal sacramental community of the Church—a community which the surviving indigenous peoples would join. While the indigenous peoples found themselves at the bottom of a brutal racial hierarchy, the Catholicism of Spain “gave them back a sense of their place on earth,” Paz says (102).

Indigenous people’s collective experience of “solitude” (precipitated by the conquest) shapes their appropriation of Catholicism. As “orphans” they seek a new mother. The Virgin of Guadalupe serves this purpose, replacing earlier interpretations of the feminine divine which had focused on fertility: “The situation has changed: the worshipers do not try to make sure of their harvests but to find a mother’s lap” (85). At the same time, the violence of the Spanish Conquistador gives him the significance of a cruel, domineering, withdrawn “father,” the template for the Mexican macho (82). The collective experience of solitude is thus interpreted, in an unconscious gesture of Mexican culture, in terms drawn from the dialectic of solitude as it plays out in individual life beginning with the trauma of birth and separation from the other.

The very birth of the Mexican nation begins to appear as though an act of sexual violence, of rape and domination. It is the violation of the mother, la chigada, by a foreign force, el chignon, Spanish conquistador, the macho: “The question of origins, then, is the central secret of our anguish” (80). The hybridity of Mexican identity, beginning with the real “flesh and blood violation” of indigenous women by Spanish men and extending to every realm of culture, is thus a source of guilt, as if Mexicans are guilty for being born, Paz claims (80). Throughout their history, Mexicans have attempted to deny this hybridity and the violence that spawned it by collectively appropriating various universalizing systems of thought from other cultures, such as Catholicism, liberalism, and Positivism. The Mexican people have worn these like masks to protect themselves from the world and from their own ambivalence toward their violent colonial origins.

The Function of Myth and Its Place in the Modern World

Across all human cultures, Paz claims, we discover myths which narrate the dialectic of solitude (205-06). In this capacity, one of the essential functions of myths in human life is to express the universal hope that the alienation and suffering associated with solitude might be overcome in a final restoration of communion. This restoration involves rituals and stories, which seem to arrest the flow of ordinary time and suggest that the lives of human beings take on an eternal or cosmic significance in relation to a transcendent reality. The modern world still retains myths and might awaken its myth-making power.

While secular modernity tends to interpret itself as though it has overcome myths, this is not straightforwardly true, Paz argues: Modern life carries traces of its mythic past and harbors its own mythic fears and hopes. Paz’s final remarks in The Labyrinth of Solitude suggest that myth may have a role to play in the replacement of the spiritually vacuous modern world and its pervasive, pathological solitude.

In traditional societies, which Paz calls “primitive,” the expression of this dialectic was simple: the mythic representation of an original, unified community promised communion both in the life of the community and the collective memory of the dead. Travail, struggle (and also adventure) took the basic shape of expulsion and reunion, withdrawal and return, condemnation to solitude and redemption through communion. With the dissolution of these traditional societies, this mythic pattern was writ large in religions of redemption which told of suffering saviors (e.g., Dionysus, Christ) who would restore a golden age (206-07). Solitude becomes interpreted as sin, and communion can only be won through effort.

Solitude connects with being “cast out” from a greater body to which we once belonged (the mother or the primal community). In a sense, it is a desire to find a place for one’s self, typically identified in mythology with the center of the world. The mythic form of the “labyrinth” corresponds to this quest; it represents an expulsion from the center and a struggle to return to it. “Mythological time” expresses the unity of finite life and eternity; it is “impregnated” with the details of our lives, but it transcends them. Paz uses the example of the Catholic mass: when the bread and wine are consecrated, Christ is present here, now. When we consume the host, we participate in his saving death and resurrection. It is not a mere remembrance, but a living occurrence. The Mexican fiesta fulfills such a function, Paz claims. Ritual, poetry, fiestas: these open the door to communion, Paz claims, if only for a moment (211).

Contemporary humanity has rationalized myths, but still makes use of them. Many mythic forms prefigure modern ideas, and many modern ideas retain traces of the myths that precede them. Modern utopianism and political pomp are all an expression of a mythic desire for the return of the golden age. The pervasive myth of today is that the “sterile” an empty bourgeois world will destroy itself or be destroyed with a new form of “creative participation.” Modern human beings believe that they see the world and themselves with clear eyes, fully “awake.” In reality, Paz claims, “this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.” When we emerge from this maze, Paz writes, perhaps we will see that this “wakefulness” has been a horrible nightmare, “and then, perhaps, we will begin to dream once more with our eyes closed” (212). Paz’s final comments raise the question about the future of myth. If humanity could disabuse itself of the notion that it has finally overcome the need for myth, could we break out of the nightmarish “maze” of reason—with its endless dead ends and torturous solitude—into a view of our existence as a single labyrinthine path from solitude to a restored communion?