“Mexican Masks”: An Introduction to Octavio Paz’s “The Labyrinth of Solitude”

Abstract

The paper is devoted to The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950, 1959) – the most famous Octavio Paz’s essay, which occupies a central place in his versatile work and gives a characteristic example of the hybrid genre most corresponding to the idiosyncrasy of Latin American cultural thinking. Deciphering the turning-points of Mexican history, facts of culture and literature, idioms and codes of behaviour, and revealing archetypal structures of the Mexican cultural imaginary, Paz seeks to abolish certain national myths, but, despite his own intention, gives them a new life: the literary quality of the text he created favours a crystallization of the second order myths, like the figures of macho and Malinche, the images of the Conquest and the Mexican Revolution, and, finally, the labyrinth of solitude itself. The paper traces the genesis of the essay, as well as its conceptual and textual origins, interprets the symbolism of the title, and points out the French influence: the essay was written in the summer 1949 in Paris, where the poet was living and working in 1945–1951. The paper is followed by the translation of the second chapter “Mexican masks” that can be regarded as a matrix of the whole essay: there Paz introduces the key concept of the Form and a correlated image of the mask that help him to catch a rhythm of Mexican history, culture and psychology – duality, dialectics of the authentic and the artificial, the concealed and the exposed, the veiled and the revealed, of the solitude and the communion.

Keywords

• octavio paz
• the labyrinth of solitude
• essay
• philosophy of mexican identity
• authenticity
• mask
• labyrinth
• dialectics of solitude and communion