| Term Paper Title | Octavio Paz |
| # of Words | 1362 |
| # of Pages (250 words per page double spaced) | 5.45 |
Octavio Paz
Widely acknowledged as the greatest poet of contemporary Mexico, Octavio Paz has led a life that in many ways is typical of the Mexican intelligentsia he describes in THE LABYRINTH OF SOLITUDE. He has published ten books of poetry, fought with the Loyalists in Spain, and served his country as a diplomat. Deeply involved in the future of the Mexican land, he has fitted himself out for defining it to the world by a career that includes the experiences of intense action and intenser contemplation.
THE LABYRINTH OF SOLITUDE was first published in 1950 by Jesus Silva Herzog's famous and influential magazine, Cuadernos Americanos. The version that comes to North Americans through Lysander Kemp's translation is based upon a second edition, revised and expanded, published by the Fondo de Cultura Economica in 1959. This book is in effect the result of labors that span a decade, labors that show themselves best in Paz's mastery of his own implications: the labyrinth he describes is the modern world.
Paz begins with an analysis of the phenomenon of the pachucos, those youths of Latin descent who during the 1940's and 1950's alarmed the cities of the Southwest with their "antisocial" behavior, their peculiar dress, and their hostile acts and attitudes. He sees the pachuco as standing between Mexican culture and North American culture, in a Limbo, unable to accept the values of either, equally alienated from both. Moreover, says Paz, the pachuco has, without understanding them, reasons; for both cultures have cut themselves off from the flux of life, have failed in their separate ways to reconcile man and the universe. Unable to partake of communion, both the Mexican and the North American have thus become spiritual orphans, imprisoned in the sterility of solitude. If the Mexican seclusion is similar to stagnant water, Paz says, North America is similar to a mirror. Neither contains life any more.
The forces that confine the North American are summarized in the three sets of laws to which Paz pays at least lip service: the seventeenth century religious code of Calvin, the eighteenth century political code of the Founding Fathers, and the nineteenth century moral code of the American Victorians. Caged by these sets of laws, the North American has let himself become a cipher, handling the universe easily by simply denying any part of it that might conflict with these codes. As a man he lives, therefore, in a wholly artificial world, creating his psychological mothers and fathers out of the delusions of his own Panglossism. The Mexican, on the other hand—and here Paz has the support not only of innumerable Mexican observers but also of an informed outsider like Oscar Lewis—has no such delusions, but sees himself more or less clearly in his orphanhood, without a mother and without a father.
For a Mexican, life is a combat in which his role as an isolated individual can only be defensive. To North Americans with some experience of Mexico, the best image for this role is perhaps one that Paz, as a Mexican, is not in an objective position to suggest: the blindfolded child cautiously rushing in, stick raised but head averted, to smash the Christmas pinata. Concealing himself behind a mask of reserve, the Mexican is in reality blindfolded, violent, fearful, like such a child, as well as trapped in the lie of his own apparent stoicism. His interior turbulence is a torture, while his exterior defensiveness destroys even the possibility of the communion that might bring him happiness. Hence his world is hollow, self-consuming, masochistic, more or less devoid of love, for what love he knows is merely a form of narcissism. Paz says that the Mexican refuses to progress beyond himself, to free himself, to expose himself to the outside world. If North American happiness exists only in neutralizing illusions, Mexican happiness exists only in remotest theory.
Relief comes to a certain extent with the fiesta, a uniquely Mexican plunge into chaos from which the group emerges purified and strengthened, a drunken rapture during which t...Read entire document
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