Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City to a family of writers. His paternal grandfather was one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly indigenous theme and his father was a political journalist who, like other intellectuals of the era, joined the agrarian uprisings of Emiliano Zapata. In 1937 he travelled to Valencia, Spain to participate in the second international congress of anti-fascism. When he returned to Mexico in 1938 he founded the literary magazine Taller which translates to ‘workshop’. The magazine brought on a new movement of Mexican writers. A few years later he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France where he wrote his seminal work “The Labyrynth of Solitude”. In 1962 he was appointed as ambassador to India, but resigned after the violent suppression of student protests in Tlatelolco during the Olympic games in Mexico. He has won many awards such as the Cervantes award in 1981, the American Neustadt Prize, honorary doctor at Harvard University, and the Nobel Prize in literature in 1990.

The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950)

Grove Press

“[After the Mexican Revolution] The popular arts emerged again, after centuries of having been ignored; the old songs were sung once more in schools and concert halls; the regional dances with their pure and timid movements, combining flight and immobility, fire and reserve, were danced for a wider audience. Contemporary Mexican painting was born. Some of our writers turned their eyes to the colonial past, and other used Indian themes; but the most courageous faced up to the present, and created the novel of the Revolution. After the lies and pretenses of the dictatorship, Mexico suddenly discovered herself, with astonished and loving eyes: “We are the prodigal sons of a homeland which we cannot even define but which we are beginning at last to observe. She is Castilian and Moorish, with Aztec markings.” (Paz, 153)

“If the history of Mexico is that of a people seeking a form that will express them, the history of the individual Mexican is that of a man aspiring to communion. The fecundity of colonial Catholicism resided in the fact that above it all it was participation. The liberals offered us ideas, but no communion was made with those ideas, at least while they were not incarnated and turned into blood and food. Communion is festivity and ceremony. At the close of the nineteenth century the Mexican, like Mexico, was imprisoned in a rigid Catholicism or in the closed and hopeless universe of the official philosophy.” (Paz 134)

“Solitude – the feeling and knowledge that one is alone, alienated from the world and oneself – is not an exclusively Mexican characteristic. All men, at some moment in their lives, feel themselves to be alone. And they are. To live is to be separated from what we were in order to approach what we are going to be in the mysterious future. Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature – if that word can be used in reference to man, who has “invented” himself by saying “no” to nature -consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude…. In our world, love is an almost inaccessible experience. Everything is against it: morals, classes, laws, races and the very lovers themselves. Woman has always been for man the “other,” his opposite and complement…. Women are imprisoned in the image masculine society has imposed on them; therefore, if they attempt a free choice it must be a kind of jail break. Lovers say that “love has transformed her, it has made her a different person.” and they are right. Love changes a woman completely. If she dares to love, if she dares to be herself, she has to destroy the image in which the world has imprisoned her.” (Paz, 195-8)

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