The labyrinth of solitude.

In 1950, when The Labyrinth of Solitude (to which the book of the same name under review is a belated appendage) first came out, it must have seemed a national indiscretion, as if Deng Xiaponing had spoken on infant exposure or Satyajit Ray about Delhi belly. Mexican men--need I remind you--are macho.

Which means, according to Octavio Paz, that they live in perpetual solitude. A hermetic tribe for whom "openness" is pur shame. The Mexican male will not confide or share or even display a knowable face. He has form-fitted a disguise--and that make-up job becomes, in time, no less real than the contour under it. He certainly would never write with such revealing candor as Paz advanced in 1950. An ideal man is vanquisher, ripper-open, Machiavel, rogue. (Homosexuality can be macho in Mexico--if you're the aggressor. Bottom men, of course, are contemptible: they've opened themselves.) Romantic love, naturally, doesn't take off in this cryptic, tricksterish environment. Women get little respect. The are, after all, bilogically "open,"--vulnerable, passive, and dangerous. On during fiest does the Mexican male ribsaw himself apart. Yet that, too, is ritual. "We are not frank, but our sincerity can reach extremes that horrify a European."

We should be grateful, we gringos--it is a considrable boon--that America has never experienced conquest. Not only can defeat shame you and crater the heart, but it will also braid your ancestral roots something awful.

Mexico has a clogged sewer-pipe full. What, anyway, is Mexican? For background Paz distinguished British colonization from Spanish. Indian people in North America either were killed or got a general eviction notice. The Spanish, by contrast, had to absorb. They imposed Catholicism and autocratic rule on top of Aztec sacrificial religion and autocratic rule. That transfer, in fact, was quite smooth. (Catholicism, Paz insists generously, gave the Aztec a spiritual reference: Jesus, too, was sacrificed.) The difference between America and Mexico is the difference between Reformation (individualism, personal God) and Counter Reformation (rigid structure, communal God). Yet Aztec civilization remained, pentimento-like, under Spanish cultural lacquer. Suppose a WASP New Yorker had nagging, vague memories of some Iroquois council fire.

But the subsequent reform and revolutionary movement--which drew on European positivist language--could never quite accord with darker, bloodier Mexican archetypes. A serious disjunction has taken place. Paz suggests, nonetheless, that Aztec influences still after-shock. Even the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has a pyramidal shape. There is no other medium for advancement in Mexico: power rises and can only converge. The PRI, though absolute, is not ideological. For that reason it has never become totalitarian. At pyramid top, where God once resided, a president now rules. His authority is complete, but not personal. It depends on a bureaucratic godhead conferred, for one term, by party-pyramid. In time some new God will rise from the old term. (Paz himself was a government official. He resigned after the 1968 student massacre, which he compares to ritual bloodletting.) But Mexican obsession with Aztec tyranny and extremism is mistaken. Indeed, Paz emphasizes, Aztec conquest was a late barbarian adventure. The great period of meso-American culture--Mayan, Zapotec, El Tajin--had long pre-dated it. And was neither centralizing nor brutal.

But it was hardly your New England town meeting either. The American ideological export department should remind itself that democratic (let alone capitalistic) institutions often appear outlandish, sterile, and impersonal in foreign weather. If your religious and customary template is an Aztec pyramid or some local chieftain or Czar Nicholas II, shifting to representative government may feel downright sacrilegious. Democracy, for good or bad, requires a modern sense of self. And of nationhood. The Mexican--Creole or Indian or Metizo--has just recently begun to consider himself Mexican at all. Imagine being Chadean or Namibian. There are two fundamental (and almost adventitious) reasons for Communist Third World success that get little coverage. a) Communism will emphasize, however hypocritically, the group over the personal. b) It most often provides an authoritarian caudillo or boss. Even under bitterest represseion most tribal or just-post-tribal pople are more comfortable with these thought-forms than they could be with the disquieting responsibility of the franchise or a consciousness-raised and expansive self.

But Paz may have broken his imaginative pinata in 1950. This collection--quilted together from Labyrinth spinoffs, a New Yorker essay, one interview--is quite repetitious. On the modern condition, development, debt, Mexico v. America, Paz doesn't have much to add. Maybe he gave up in macho reticence. Paz is even-tempered, clear, and remarkably fair throughout: qualities that are rare in political writing south of Nogales. If, though, as his jacket blurb will assert, this "trenchant analysis of Mexican society ... has yet to be equaled," then Mexico is in an unfortunate intellectual stasis.