El laberinto de la soledad [The Labyrinth of Solitude] (henceforth, Laberinto) was first published in 1950 and is Mexican author Octavio Paz’s most acclaimed and commented upon work. The text has been described as a hybrid work (Stanton 2001: 210), eluding easy classification as it oscillates between epic essay, historical narrative, poetry and psycho-sociological rumination. Perhaps this can be largely explained by Laberinto’s broad scope, touching on folklore, history, myth, politics and psychology. All of these disciplines are linked to the central subject of identity and what it meant to be Mexican in the post-Revolutionary era of the 1940s, when Paz was composing Laberinto. However, despite the experimental style and the author’s wish to deconstruct certain myths of national identity, Paz in his authoritative narration of Laberinto actually enshrined these myths as a definitive guide to Mexican identity.

On the question of genre, some critics, such as Anthony Stanton and Richard Morse, have argued that Laberinto’s multi-disciplinarity results from covering a subject as vast and complex as that of identity, which cannot be contained within traditional genre definitions, such as the novel or poetry (2001: 221, 1996: 52 and 65). In particular, the dialectic of Mexican hybrid identity which Paz was focusing on resisted being aligned to one genre. So, in order to assess the subject adequately it was necessary to integrate genres such as poetry, myth, history and psychology. Labyrinthine in both name and nature, the style of the text disturbed some of Paz’s contemporaries. As Stanton writes, “the unique poetic nature of Paz’s essay confounded many because it questioned the autonomy of established disciplines” (2001: 219). However, despite its perceived crisscrossing of genres, many critics, including Morse and Stanton, now classify the work under the banner of the identity essay/essay of ideas (Morse, 1996, Stanton, 2001). This is a rich tradition within Latin America, inaugurated by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento in the seminal text Facundo: civilización y barbarie (1845) [Facundo: Civilisation and Barbarism].

Laberinto was, like Facundo before it, an extremely influential work in Latin America, with Richard Morse judging it to be probably the “best known Latin American essay in the twentieth century” (1996: 64). As Gerald Martin explains, the text was notable, alongside Jorge Luis Borges’ Ficciones [Fictions] (1944), for helping to establish the labyrinth motif as representative of Latin America’s historical identity (1989: 25). Within this framework, Mexicans, but also other Latin Americans in general, could negotiate their labyrinthine past through a series of “contrasts, differences and opposites […] with a choice between ‘Europe’ and ‘America’ inaugurating and preordaining a whole series of later choices as the determinants of race, nation, class and gender construct, reconstruct and deconstruct individual and collective identities” (25). However, despite the fact that Laberinto became a celebrated text and even an institutionalised one within Mexico, on its publication in 1950 it provoked much controversy as “a book which sought to deconstruct dominant myths” of Mexican history and identity that had been popularised in the post-revolutionary era (Stanton, 2001: 217). Later, of course, Paz’s reconstruction of Mexican identity would itself become mythologised and adopted by the political and cultural elites as “an authoritative, official codification of everything supposedly Mexican” (218). Writing the definitive account of something as complex as Mexican identity was not what the author said he intended to achieve when recalling its international reception some years later in a 1975 interview with Claude Fell. Paz stated that his work was merely a “‘tentativa’” or an attempt to understand and question certain myths of Mexican origin and identity, rather than an effort to create a new set of myths around the subject (quoted in Stanton, 2001: 218).

This questioning stance that Paz takes in dealing with Mexican hybrid identity, which denotes a degree of racial, cultural and social fusion, probes some of the oppositions which arise from this state and their complexities. This accounts to some extent for the meandering development of the argument, as Paz debates the subtleties of the points raised on the subject of identity, and so disorients and then reorients himself and the reader within the debate. This probing for answers about Mexican identity, which often prove complex and lead the author down alternative paths of thought, before he concludes with a final analysis, is evidenced, for instance, in the description of the pachuco as “un híbrido perturbador y fascinante [“a disturbing and fascinating hybrid”) (Paz, 1999: 19 [1985: 16]), who rebels against both the Mexican society of his origins and the North American society in which he lives. The pachuco may be a North American and Mexican hybrid, but, in choosing to belong to neither society, he becomes a figure on the margins, defying the supposedly neat dichotomies of Mexican life and culture, which in the essay, is composed of “adornos, descuido y fausto” [“decorations, carelessness and pomp”] and its contrasting North American counterpart of “precisión y eficacia” [“precision and efficiency”] (15 [13]). However, Paz’s skill as an essayist, weaving opposing strands of the dialectic together at the end of each chapter, allows the reader to identify key themes and figures representing Mexican identity. In the opening chapter, “The Pachuco and Other Extremes”, Paz manages to do this by uniting the oppositions embodied in the pachuco: “La persecución lo redime y rompe su soledad: su salvación depende del acceso a esa misma sociedad que aparenta negar” [“Persecution redeems him and breaks his solitude: his salvation depends on him becoming part of the very society he appears to deny”] (20 [17]).

Further into the chapter, Paz conflates the condition of the pachuco with the condition of Mexicans generally. For Paz, the orphanhood afflicting the pachuco afflicts all mestizo Mexicans, who as racial and cultural hybrids are historically conditioned to seek their origins without success. From amidst the labyrinth of history and the cultural heritage from Spain and indigenous Mexico, Paz has expanded from the singular and specific example of the pachuco to the collective example of Mexicans, a generalisation that serves to conclude the dialectic.

Nicola Miller contends that those figures identified as representative of mexicanidad,such as the pachuco, have evolved into stereotypes (1999: 150). Indeed, it is ironic that although Paz sets out to challenge and dispute hegemonic notions of cultural nationalism, Laberinto has, since its publication, become the ‘definitive’ account of mexicanidad and its associated myths. This can be partially explained by Paz’s authoritative narrative style, which tends to tell the reader about the state of Mexican identity, rather than to hint at identity traits. In so doing the author often generalises about his subjects. An early example of this occurs in chapter one, where Paz pronounces that “la historia de México es la del hombre que busca su filiación, su origen” [“the history of Mexico is the history of a man seeking his parentage, his origins” (1999: 23 [1985: 20]). While this statement forms a key argument in the text about the mestizo Mexican, it does not distinguish between Mexican citizens or consider the many indigenous Mexicans, who may not share these concerns with origins and identity. Later in the chapter Paz makes a clear distinction between North Americans and Mexicans. In a broad generalisation of national character he states that “ellos son crédulos, nosotros creyentes; aman los cuentos de hadas y las historias policiacas, nosotros los mitos y las leyendas” [“the North Americans are credulous and we are believers; they love fairy tales and detective stories and we love myths and legends”] (26 [23]). This is the start of a list of generalisations about the two nations that sets them up as wholly oppositional and leaves little possibility for cultural crossover/influence or for individual variances on these supposedly national character traits.

Twenty and twenty-first century critics have taken up the debate on the pachuco and other figures of national significance mentioned in Laberinto and developed it. The pachuco is, in the opinion of José Quiroga, the most important emblem in Laberinto. Yet because of his status as a border figure, instilled, as Quiroga says, “at the fissure between two cultures and two modes of life” (1999: 69), the pachuco is also the most important emblem of hybridity, managing against the odds to combine elements of North American and Mexican culture. Quiroga challenges Paz’s representation of the pachuco as victim. He believes that, in his outlandish mannerisms and personal style aimed at provoking a hostile reaction in the onlooker, the pachuco is in fact the “active agent not the passive recipient” of his own representation (1999: 70). This is borne out somewhat in Paz’s own reflections on the pachuco when he mentions their determination to be different. The mythologizing of the pachuco by North American society, which attributes to him dangerous and yet enviable powers, further undermines the notion of the pachuco as victim and elevates his status to that of a cultural mediator, owing to his ability to bridge North American and the Mexican ways of thinking and feeling. Nevertheless, Paz ultimately describes the pachuco as a figure divorced from history, who has lost any connection to his Mexican heritage. Being a Mexican-American hybrid is for Paz a negative, static state; it is an identity that cannot be adopted and discarded, but rather it entraps the pachuco. It is characterized by masks and self-enforced solitude adopted to deal with the irreconcilable dualities of straddling two nations. These are themes that Paz developed further in his meditation on Mexican racial mixture or mestizaje in Laberinto, particularly in chapters two, “Mexican Masks”, and four, “The Sons of Malinche”.

In Laberinto Paz does not downplay the violent imposition of Hispanic culture on the indigenous. He defines the Hispanic Conquest as a historical and literal violation of the Indian population, but throughout Laberinto he emphasises the layering and conjunction of indigenous and Spanish influences. In the text, the Mexican himself, unwilling to adhere to either heritage, retreats into a spiritual orphanhood. In effect Paz is outlining a transculturation of sorts, which William Rowe and Vivian Schelling define as “the mutual transformation of cultures, in particular the European by the native” (1991: 18). Rowe and Schelling are conscious, however, of the destructive impact of the Conquest and subsequent assaults on indigenous memory and culture which have led to a kind of social amnesia. This resonates with Paz’s depiction of the reluctant hybrids of Laberinto, where the transculturation is not fully accepted or acknowledged, due to a desire to occlude a violent past.

As well as the pachuco, Laberinto also debates other emblematic figures in Mexican history, such as la Chingada, the archetypal indigenous woman raped by the conquering Spaniard, a powerful myth which Paz contended still held sway over the Mexican psyche at the time of his writing Laberinto: “la Chingada es la Madre abierta, violada o burlada por la fuerza. El ‘hijo de la Chingada’ es el engendro de la violación, del rapto o de la burla” [“the Chingada is the Mother forcibly opened, violated or deceived. The hijo de la Chingada is the offspring of violation, abduction or deceit”] (87-88 [79]). Accompanying la Chingada in this pantheon of national images are: Cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec king; La Llorona, “la sufrida madre mexicana” [the “long-suffering Mexican mother” (83 [75]); and la Virgen de Guadalupe, Mexico’s patron saint. However, la Chingada’s direct counterpoint is the Macho or Gran Chingón who displays “agresividad, impasibilidad, invulnerabilidad, uso descarnado de la violencia, y demás atributos del ‘macho’ poder” [“aggressiveness, insensitivity, invulnerability and other attributes of the macho power”] (89 [81]). In this formulation, el Gran Chingón becomes the violator of la Chingada, and, as Paz says, it is easy to transfigure Cortés, as chief conquistador, into el Chingón, and la Malinche, Cortés’ Indian interpreter and mistress, into la Chingada. In Laberinto la Malinche (also referred to as Doña Marina), has come to symbolise the Spanish Conquest, itself a violation “no solamente en el sentido histórico, sino en la carne misma de las indias” [“not only in the historical sense but also in the very flesh of Indian women”] (94 [86]). Whilst the text acknowledges la Malinche’s willingness to work alongside Cortés, she is essentially an object, having been tossed aside by him when her usefulness expired. Furthermore, she is a traitor to the Mexican people for opening herself and, metaphorically, giving away the nation, to foreign domination. Even today, malinchista is an insult directed towards those who welcome foreign influence in Mexico (Swanson, 2003: 244). Paz clarifies that la Malinche has passed from historical veracity into the realm of myth. Gerald Martin terms this myth, which has governed Latin America’s “self-interpretation”, as a “grand historical narrative” of victimhood, with virginal “Mother America” violated by malevolent Europeans (1989: 8 and 10). As the mestizo of Laberinto wholly subscribes to this myth, he finds himself unable to align himself to this traumatic hybrid origin, in itself a source of anguish.

Paz’s intellectual position in Laberinto has attracted much controversy. This is partly because of his authoritarian tone, which often makes pronouncements of utter certainty about Mexico, placing Paz at the centre of his country’s history. This has provoked various critics, such as Rowe and Schelling, to question the author’s appropriateness as a representative of his people, given his privileged background (1991: 163; see note). Conversely, other critics, such as Ilan Stavans, seem immune to Paz’s flaws in Laberinto, because of the towering intellectual hegemony he exerted during his lifetime and continues to exert in the Mexican intellectual arena. Stavans praises Paz calling him the “quintessential surveyor” of culture, and credits the author with “opening up the Hispanic mind and making it modern and discerning” (2001: 3, 7). Paz himself believed that he was simply repeating and reflecting on entrenched myths in Mexican culture as he explained in the 1975 interview with Claude Fell (quoted in Stanton, 2001: 218). Laberinto investigates how subscribing to these myths of damaged hybridity impacted on the Mexican self-image and on the attitude of the Mexican people towards the rest of the world. Paz himself wanted to break the dependence on such myths and review history more rationally. As he explains in Laberinto, quoting French statesman André Malraux, “los mitos no acuden a la complicidad de nuestra razón, sino a nuestros instintos” [“myths do not enlist the complicity of our reason, but rather that of our instincts”] (1999: 167 [1985: 155]). For Paz, then, the instinctive reliance on certain historical myths for the construction of national identity had trapped Mexicans, who were unable to break the cycle and re-evaluate their country’s past, thus impeding their ability to progress and become citizens of the world.

Whilst it is useful to perceive Paz as the “diagnostician” of Mexican identity (Quiroga, 1999: 80), the autobiographical element of the text should also be considered. Was Paz including himself amongst those he was diagnosing? Several critics believe that he was (Stanton, 2001, Wilson, 1986). Paz declares mestizos to be the subject of his reflections in the opening pages of Laberinto, and the use of “our” and “we”, suggests that Paz is including himself among that group. An example occurs when he states in the second paragraph that “despertar a la historia significa adquirir conciencia de nuestra singularidad, momento de reposo reflexivo antes de entregarnos al hacer” [“to become aware of our history is to become aware of our singularity. It is a moment of reflective repose before we devote ourselves to action again”] (1999: 12 [1985: 10]). However, contradicting this is Paz’s statement in the first chapter of Laberinto (1999: 24) that he is not writing on behalf of any group, but to define Mexican identity for himself. There is now some critical consensus that Laberinto was in part inspired by the author’s wish to reconcile his own hybrid origins as the son of a Spanish mother and a Mexican father (Stanton, 2001: 212, Stavans, 2001: 34). Although the tortured archetypes of popular myth, el macho español and la chingada indígena, were inverted in his case, Paz still faced the same challenges as his fellow Mexicans in bridging the two strands, Spanish and indigenous, without denying one or the other. Throughout Laberinto, Paz attempts to realise this communion by balancing both elements of his racial identity with equal praise and criticism. As Stavans comments, Paz resisted official myth, which denigrated the Spanish and elevated the Aztecs (2001: 14-15). The Aztec culture, as he relates it, was also based on violence and domination of other less powerful indigenous cultures, resulting in indigenous collaboration with Cortes to topple the hated Aztecs. In Laberinto, therefore, the polarities of conqueror and vanquished, oppressed and oppressor are blurred as Paz traces the coexistence and integration of the old world and the new from the era of the Conquest. He writes that “el Estado fundado por los españoles fue un orden abierto. Y esta circunstancia, así como las modalidades de la participación de los vencidos en la actividad central de la nueva sociedad: la religión, merecen un examen detenido” [“the state founded by the Spaniards was an open order, however, and deserves a sustained examination, as do the modes of participation by the conquered in the central activity of the new society, that is, in religion”] (1999: 110 [1985: 100]). Despite the post-Conquest imposition of Spanish culture on Mexico, in the area of religion, at least, the new Catholic faith mingled with indigenous beliefs, as Paz underlines: “resulta innecesario añadir que la religión de los indios, como la de casi todo el pueblo mexicano, era una mezcla de las nuevas y las antiguas creencias” [“it is unnecessary to add that the religion of the Indians was a mixture of new and ancient beliefs”] (112 [102]).

Perhaps it is fitting that as a work focusing on hybrid identity, Laberinto should have been influenced by hybrid sources from Mexico and beyond. Paz does not hesitate to showcase his repertoire of intellectual knowledge gleaned from literary, historical, philosophical, sociological and psychological sources. The debt to Mexican philosopher Samuel Ramos’ Perfil del hombre y la cultura en México (1925) [Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico] is acknowledged in the text, as are the influences from other early 20th-century Mexican intellectuals, such as Jorge Cuesta and Alfonso Reyes and from French anthropologists, such as Roger Caillois and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. Other sources include modernist British and North American writers, such as D.H. Lawrence and T.S. Eliot. The influence of Eliot’s epic poem The Waste Land (1922), with its preponderance of myth and labyrinthine images, combined with “its implications of expulsion and pilgrimage” is apparent (Bethell, 1996: 65). Lawrence’s novel, The Plumed Serpent (1926), focused on the continued relevance of Mexico’s mystical indigenous past and was recognised as an interesting study by Paz and a catalyst for the writing of Laberinto (Sheridan, 2004: 444). Paz also claimed that the work of the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, specifically the tract On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), was the founding influence on Laberinto. Paz claimed, “Nietzsche guided me in exploring the Mexican idiom: if words are masks, what is behind them?” (quoted in Morse, 1996: 64-5). Despite the dangers of integrating these eclectic sources, Paz blends them seamlessly. Laberinto does not disintegrate into a fragmented compendium of other peoples’ ideas but is notable as a unique work that expresses Mexico’s inherently syncretic identity, across disciplines and artistic influences.

Laberinto’s effectiveness in integrating its many sources can largely be ascribed to its original use of language. To convey Mexico’s hybrid identity Paz stresses the layering of historical epochs and influences on Mexico and the constant search for identity within this mixed heritage. The image of the pyramid becomes a metaphor for Mexican identity, which integrates elements from pre-Hispanic and Spanish cultures one on top of the other. Paz guides the reader chronologically through Mexican history, from the Conquest in the 15thcentury, to Independence in the 1820s, to the Reform era in the 1860s. This is followed with an analysis of the period under dictator Porfirio Díaz in the late 19th century. It concludes with the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20 and its aftermath.

The Revolution alone is designated as the era in which Mexico found a form to express itself “authentically”, and prompts a flurry of images of origin to evoke this rebirth and reaffirmation of identity in chapter seven, “The Mexican Intelligentsia”. The origin Paz is referring to relates to Mexico’s pre-Cortesian past, the indigenous “substrata”, which he had hitherto represented in Laberinto as a bubbling undercurrent of the Hispanic tradition (Wilson, 1979: 26). However, Paz contends that the Revolution failed to have a lasting liberating impact on Mexico, because it could not synthesise the nation’s hybrid traditions: “la Revolución mexicana ha muerto sin resolver nuestras contradicciones” [“the Revolution has expired without resolving our contradictions”] (187 [173]).

The triumphant images Paz associates with the Revolution contrast with the language of alienation deployed for previous historical epochs. This is a language dominated by masks, orphanhood, rupture and being cast adrift from origins, or deliberately denying them. The era of Positivism, a French philosophy adopted in Porfirian Mexico that attempted to apply practical scientific solutions to national problems, was the epitome of “falseness and falsehoods” in Mexican politics and identity formation according to Paz (133).

Ironically, at the end of Laberinto, Paz appears to seek refuge in the world of myth, which he has previously distanced himself from. After exhorting his nation to open up to the world and embrace modernity, however tortuous, retreating into myth and the hallowed origins of pre-conquest Mexico seems a reversal of all the text has been arguing for. It contradicts the indelible fact that, as a mestizo nation, there can be no return to an imagined idyllic past for Mexico. There can also be no escape from a complex and often painful history, which its citizens must learn to re-evaluate if they are to free themselves from its labyrinth.

Note:

Octavio Paz was a letrado, a term used to describe the educated elite in Latin America. His grandfather, Ireneo Paz, was a prominent liberal intellectual and author in Mexico and his father was a journalist, meaning that Paz was exposed to literature since a very young age. Paz’s intellectual activity enabled him to the U.S. on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1943. In 1945 Paz joined the diplomatic service and it was while serving in France that he composed Laberinto. He went on to hold several prominent diplomatic positions abroad and continued to write prolifically, as well as founding and editing several journals of art and politics in Mexico. This placed Paz at the forefront of Mexico’s intellectual elite. His contribution to Mexican letters was recognized with the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990.

Works cited:

Martin, Gerald. Journeys Through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction of the Twentieth Century.London: Verso, 1989.
Miller Nicola. In the Shadow of the State, Intellectuals and the Quest for National Identity in Twentieth-Century Spanish America. London: Verso, 1999.
Morse, Richard M. ‘The Multiverse of Latin American Identity, c1920-c.1970’ in Bethell, Leslie (ed.), Ideas and Ideologies in Twentieth Century Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 3-129.
Paz, Octavio. El laberinto de la soledad. México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999.
Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude. Translated by Lysander Kemp, Yara Milos and Rachel Phillips Belash. New York: Grove Press, 1985.
Quiroga, José. Understanding Octavio Paz. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999.
Rowe, William and Schelling, Vivian. Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America. London: Verso, 1991.
Sheridan, Guillermo. Poeta con paisaje: ensayos sobre le vida de Octavio Paz. México D.F: Ediciones Era, 2004.
Stanton, Anthony. “Models of Discourse and Hermeneutics in Octavio Paz’s El laberinto de la soledad”, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 20: 2 (2001): 210-234.
Stavans, Ilan. Octavio Paz: A Meditation. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001.
Swanson, Philip (ed.). The Companion to Latin American Studies. London: Arnold, 2003.
Wilson, Jason. Octavio Paz: A Study of his Poetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
—. Octavio Paz. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986.

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Citation: Baker, Pascale. "El laberinto de la soledad". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 April 2016 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=31812, accessed 01 April 2025.]