The Labyrinth of Solitude

The Labyrinth of Solitude is a nine-part philosophical and historical essay on Mexican identity and culture. Octavio Paz, a famous Mexican poet and career diplomat, began writing The Labyrinth of Solitude during his time as the Mexican ambassador to France in the late 1940s. Originally published in 1951, the first edition of Paz’s work appeared in Spanish under the title El labertino de la soledad, and it is widely considered to be Paz’s masterpiece. This study guide is based on an English translation by Lysander Kemp. It appears in a 1985 collection of Paz’s prose works entitled The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings, published by Grove Press.

Summary

In The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz offers an extended meditation on Mexico’s long struggle to clarify its identity and come to terms with its history through analyses of Mexican-American Youth culture, gender and sexual violence, fiestas, the Spanish Conquest, literature, intersections of indigenous religion and Catholicism, revolutionary politics, intellectual culture, the social and economic challenges of developing nations, and myth. Paz examines these subjects from an existential philosophical perspective.

Both on an individual and collective level, human beings are beset by a recognition of their singularity and alienation—which Paz terms “solitude”—as well as a longing to achieve “communion” by overcoming our solitude and attaining a sense connection to a meaningful whole such as a community, a nation, or a cosmic order. Human experience is characterized by oscillation between these two poles: we withdraw into solitude to protect ourselves from a hostile world, but periodically seek to break out of this solitude and connect with others. This pattern of withdrawal and return, sin and redemption, solitude and communion, is a “dialectic” that is deeply embedded in our myths, Paz claims. The most evocative of these is the myth of the labyrinth: we experience our lives as though we have been expelled from a homeland or a sacred “center” which we might regain through a long and arduous journey.

Mexico’s particular “labyrinth of solitude” is shaped by its difficult colonial past and its marginal position vis-à-vis the great powers of the Cold War. Thus, the Mexican struggle to articulate an authentic sense of identity has become emblematic of the struggle of all marginalized people in the mid-20th century, Paz claims. He concludes by suggesting that humanity must appeal to the power of myth to overcome this sterility, emptiness, and alienation of modern life.