Octavio Paz' The Labyrinth of Solitude

Octavio Paz' The Labyrinth of Solitude is a literary quest for the identity of Mexico and the Mexican people. It is a soul-searching experience: enlightening, universal and passionate - the kind of reading which is very difficult to put aside once started. Octavio Paz takes the reader through the history of Mexico - and the world - with remarkable intensity and speed. His extremely human approach to independence, revolution, war, customs, religions, economy, and other aspects of national life make this book unusual and fascinating. This human approach also opens boundaries: although Octavio Paz is writing exclusively through the perspective of Mexican experience, one can easily imagine any other member of the global community finding questions and answers to their problems of identity as a people.

The body of The Labyrinth of Solitude consists of nine essays produced on or before 1961.* Many of these essays were written as independent articles and, although Paz' writes in Spanish, some were produced directly for the English-language magazines Dissent and The New Yorker. Despite the fact that these essays are more a compilation than a deliberately-structured work of nonfiction analysis, all are connected as with an umbilical cord by the same underlying question: What is a Mexican? In examining the answers to that question - and, indeed, examining the question itself - Octavio Paz attempts to avoid what he terms "the pitfalls of abstract humanism and illusions of a

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attitude to death ran so deeply in the Mexican blood, they were cut off from the rest of the world in this respect, hermetic, solitary in their ambivalence to it. This has made the Mexican "baffling or even offensive"(65) to others, particularly his Norte Americano neighbors. Nowhere is the Mexican's solitude more apparent than when he is among the Norte Americanos, Paz observes. Although large portions of the United States were once part of Mexico - and still are home to millions of Mexican heritage - their solitude is doubly enforced by living among a culture that finds them "inscrutable" (65). Paz uses the pachuco as the prime example of this Mexican-American solitude. The pachuco was the zoot-suiter of the 1940s still strutting his solitary, macho way down the streets of Paz' 1961 review. This was a man cut off from his traditional culture, yet feeling it inside. His response was an overly-hyped adaptation of American style to the point of parody - a parody that resulted in his alienation from the culture he sought to emulate. However hard he tries to wear the American mask, though, the pachuco is always Mexican. Always Mexican: no matter what mask the pachuco may wear, his Mexican-ness is a problem, Paz discovers:

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