Solitude in Two Contemporary Authors

Introduction

Throughout history we have seen different conditions of the human being. These conditions have led him to act in particular ways. Circumstances, environment, culture, people, influence the thoughts and the decisions that someone can make. There are certain states that have a positive or negative impact. If a child, for example, is raised by good parents who support and take care of him, especially through the simple fact of being with him. This child would have a higher probability to have a happier life than an orphan child who has suffered abandonment. One of these estates, which is quite common, is solitude. But what is solitude? Is it only being alone in the middle of nowhere? Is it a feeling, a subjective perception or a physical state?

The 20^th century, an era marked by the disasters of the world wars, is the nest that gives life to two authors who express this state through their quills. Each one of them according to their own circumstances and specific styles. One of them is Octavio Paz, winer of the Novel Prize, who wrote a series of essays called “The Labyrinth of Solitude”. These writings are, among many other issues, about the solitude as constitutive element of the Mexican identity. On the other hand, there is the novelist Gabriel Gacia Marquez who express solitude through his Novel Price masterwork “One Hundred Years of Solitude” offering through his vivid characters and stories a notable example of this state. Both writers being supported by their own experience, they can easily provide us with a good understanding of what we are looking for.

Chapter 1

Octavio Paz

Biography

Octavio Paz was a Mexican Poet, writer and diplomat born in Mexico City on March 31, 1914. “Paz’s family was ruined financially by the Mexican Revolution, and he grew up in straitened circumstances”[i]. This event would mark his life and eventually would influence his writings. He got the Guggenheim scholarship to study in the United States where he encountered English poetry. In 1945, he became a diplomat in the Mexican embassy in Paris. There he would know French intellectuals and writers and from other nationalities as well. Those experiences will prepare the grounds for him to become a critic of politics and contemporary society.

Years later, he will move to the Mexican embassy in Japan and later to the embassy in the India where he was able to experience eastern ideals and philosophies. “Paz was influenced in turn by Marxism, Surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. He explored the zones of modern culture outside the marketplace, and his most prominent theme was the human ability to overcome existential solitude though erotic love and artistic creativity”[ii]. When Paz came back to Mexico, after been immerged in all kinds of cultures, he became very prestigious not only for his writings but also for the knowledge that he had. Paz was an invited professor in several important universities around the world. Moreover, he organized and directed the magazine Vuelta and many others.

Among the numerous awards and recognitions, he has received, there is the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Cervantes Prize. These awards praise not only the style or content of his works but the deep knowledge about modern people. A man well formed in both western and eastern ideas was able to reflect on them and provide through his writings a rich legacy to understand our society. Octavio Paz died in Mexico City on April 19^th, 1998.

The Labyrinth of Solitude

The title itself discloses the complexity of explaining solitude without mentioning diverse aspects. Despite of the difficulty, Paz is able to synthesize it in a short phrase: “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”[iii]. We must remember that, when he refers to Mexicans, is that because his collections of essays are meant to describe the Mexican culture. What makes this work remarkable is that even though it was written for a specific people, it is universal as well. It contains aspects such as the search for identity, the dealing with solitude and the repercussion of history in the present.

Although the author did not mention, it might be considered as an autobiographical work since content quite experiences from the writer’s life. When he was 35, he had a large itinerary of poetical and political experiences behind him. In Paris he wrote a book about Mexico. He already had been 6 years away from his homeland and he missed the flavor, the religious Mexican party’s smells, the Indians, the fruits, the sunny atriums of the churches, the candles, the vendors. He knows his family is a tree rooted in the past and tradition. He wanted to unroot that past and see it with clarity. Since the beginning of the 40s he has proposed, as other writers and philosophers, to find Mexicanity, that invisible substance that is somewhere. We do not know what it consists of, nor by what road we will reach it; we know, obscurely, that it has not yet been rebelled. It will sprout, spontaneously and naturally, from the bottom of our intimacy when we encounter true authenticity, the key to our being, the truth about ourselves. For Paz, the truth is solitude. No one in Mexico, except Octavio Paz, has seen in the word solitude a constitutive feature of the country and its people, its culture, and its history[iv]. The Labyrinth of Solitude will eventually become Octavio’s own solitude.

At the very beginning of the work, we find one of his reflections on solitude. He mentions the presence of it since we were born. However, we become aware of that when we realize our uniqueness in comparison with others.

All of us, at some moment, have had a vision of our existence as something unique, untransferable and very precious. This revelation almost always takes place during adolescence. Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, transparent wall — that of our consciousness — between the world and ourselves. It is true that we sense our aloneness almost as soon as we are born, but children and adults can transcend their solitude and forget themselves in games or work. The adolescent, however, vacillates between infancy and youth, halting for a moment before the infinite richness of the world. He is astonished at the fact of his being, and this astonishment leads to reflection: as he leans over the river of his consciousness, he asks himself if the face that appears there, disfigured by the water, is his own. The singularity of his being, which is pure sensation in children, becomes a problem and a question.[v]

This is a powerful idea. The discovery of our own characteristics as a unique human being makes us feel solitude since nobody else is like me. This is the fundamental principle of solitude according to Paz.

As the essay unfolds, Paz shares his experiences from his time in the United States and develop the idea of uniqueness in the middle of diversity. He describes the interesting character called Pachuco who is a Mexican foreigner living in United States that do not want to mingle with the American culture nor to accept his Latino roots. This detachment from any identity makes him create his own being through specific ways of behaving, speaking or dressing. In other words, the Pachuco forms a sort of mask to protect him which isolates him as well.

Yes, we withdraw into ourselves, we deepen and aggravate our awareness of everything that separates or isolates or differentiates us. And we increase our solitude by refusing to seek out our compatriots, perhaps because we fear we will see ourselves in them, perhaps because of a painful, defensive unwillingness to share our intimate feelings.[vi]

Fear is another aspect that goes along with solitude. Fear of being known by others. Even more, fear to discover in others his own self.

Paz continues saying:

It is impossible to equate these two attitudes: when you sense that you are alone, it does not mean that you feel inferior, but rather that you feel you are different. Also, a sense of inferiority may sometimes be an illusion, but solitude is a hard fact. We are truly different. And we are truly alone [vii].

Here he contrasts the relationship between feeling alone and feeling inferior. Since all humans have the same dignity as a living person, the sense of inferiority is subjective. That means that none is better than the others. As Paz explains, inferiority does not exist, rather being different is behind that sense. What he highlights here is that solitude is real, and it is present in life. Once again, everything is grounded in the sentence “you feel you are different”. That is characteristic of the Pachuco, who is looking for his own identity.

It is quite interesting how he flips perspective and now look at the solitude of the American.

He has built his own world, and it is built in his own image: it is his mirror. But now he cannot recognize himself in his inhuman objects, nor in his fellows. His creations, like those of an inept sorcerer, no longer obey him. He is alone among his works, lost — to use the phrase by Jose Gorostiza — in a “wilderness of mirrors [viii].

Unlike the Mexican who is torn from his traditions, the American lives in his own world because for them “the world is something that can be perfectionate”[ix]. They have the mindset that everything can be made according to how they think is better. In other words, he lives surrounded by his own image, which means that, in the end, he is alone. “If the solitude of the Mexican is like a stagnant pool, that of the North American is like a mirror. We have ceased to be springs of living water”[x].  Paz’s conclusion is that solitude experienced in both cultures leads to withdrawing into themselves, leaving no room for what is out there.

In the next two essays, Paz speaks about masks and parties. After a very well-made description of both issues, he says that masks are a mechanism of defense we use to protect ourselves. “Hermeticism is one of the several resources of our suspicion and distrust. It shows that we instinctively regard the world around us to be dangerous”[xi]. On the other hand, parties are meant to escape from reality. “The solitary Mexican loves fiestas and public gatherings. Any occasion for getting together will serve, any pretext to stop the flow of time and commemorate men and events with festivals and ceremonies”[xii].

This might sound contradictory to what was said about the theory of masks, but later Paz explains that “The Mexican does not seek amusement: he seeks to escape from himself, to leap over the wall of solitude that confines him during the rest of the year. All are possessed by violence and frenzy… The important thing is to go out, open a way, get drunk on noise, people, colors.”[xiii] Masks and parties both have opposite meanings, though both come from the same solitude. Masks lead us to enclose ourselves in solitude. Parties make us flee from solitude. “Hence the feeling that we are alone has a double significance: on the one hand it is self-awareness, and on the other it is a longing to escape from ourselves”[xiv].

“We are alone. Solitude, the source of anxiety, begins on the day we are deprived of maternal protection and fall into a strange and hostile world”[xv]. This is a hard truth to hear but it is a common reality for everybody. We cannot live without experiencing solitude.

To live is to be separated from what we were in order to approach what we are going to be in the mysterious future… Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out 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.[xvi]

 In other words, “We are condemned to live alone, but also to transcend our solitude, to re-establish the bonds that united us with life in a paradisiac past”[xvii]. I belief that for Octavio Paz, solitude is not only a feeling. It is a consequence of the falling nature of humankind. It belongs now to our deep heart’s core. For example, “death and birth are solitary experiences. We are born alone, and we die alone”[xviii]. But it does not finish here. “The solitary or isolated individual transcends his solitude, accepting it as a proof or promise of communion”[xix]. Therefore, for Paz, Solitude is not the end, it is only the path to get to the end.

Throughout the labyrinth of solitude, we find numerous nuances of solitude. Beginning with the discovery of our own uniqueness as the principle of all solitude. Although human beings share the same essence, each one is unique. Therefore, the experience of solitude is present when we become aware of it. That awareness causes in us fear of the external world, fear of being known by others. Which leads us to isolate and withdraw ourselves, wearing a home-made mask to protect us. And like the American, we just look to us in the mirrors that we have created. After not been able to live like this we escape to parties or anything that helps us to flee from our own labyrinth. This natural reaction is because at the core of humanity we have the longing for communion. Solitude is a real experience that encompasses every man, but everyone is called to overcome it and learn from it.

Chapter 2
Gabriel García Márquez

Biography

In his autobiographical work “Living to Tale the Tale” Garcia Marquez wrote “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it”[xx]. One of the most impactful anecdotes he tells is when he was a child, he received dictionary from his grandfather: “This book not only knows everything, but it is the only one that is never wrong. Then Gabriel asked: ‘How many words has it?’. The old man answered: ‘all of them”[xxi]. This old memory would frame the life of Grabriel who later would become a prodigious writer.

Born on 6 March 1927, in the town of Aracataca, Colombia. García Márquez would spend his early years with his maternal grandparents, Colonel Nicolás Márquez and Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes de Márquez. Colonel Nicolás was one of the characters that influenced the future writer. After Nicolás’s death, they moved to Barranquilla, a river port. He received a better-than-average education but claimed as an adult that his most important literary sources were the stories about Aracataca and his family that Nicolás had told him. Although he studied law, García Márquez became a journalist, the trade at which he earned his living before attaining literary fame.

As a correspondent in Paris during the 1950s, he expanded his education, reading a great deal of American literature, some of it in French translation. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, he worked in Bogotá, Colombia, and then in New York City for Prensa Latina, the news service created by the regime of Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Later he moved to Mexico City, where he wrote the novel that brought him fame and wealth. Because of his critics against the regime in that time he would be exile from Colombia. From 1967 to 1975 he lived in Spain. Although he kept a house in Mexico City and an apartment in Paris, he also spent much time in Havana, where Castro (whom García Márquez supported) provided him with a mansion. Among many awards, he received the Novel Prize in 1982. García Márquez died of pneumonia at the age of 87 on 17 April 2014, in Mexico City.[xxii]

One Hundred Years of Solitude

This great novel, written in 1967, tells the magic and real story of the Buendía family throughout seven generations. The story develops in a fictitious town called Macondo. The novel is characterized by the vivacity of the characters and their own personal story within the general plot. Gabriel said that the main source of inspiration was his memory. Which means the story combines his own experience with some creative imagination. Since my approach to the novel is from the glance of solitude, I want to look at several characters in the story and see how they incarnate solitude.

The meaning behind the title might offer a clue to understand the whole story and to explain the behaviors of each character. The last lines of the novel say: “because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth”[xxiii]. The entire Buendía family is already condemned to live in solitude. Through this, Gabriel is trying to communicate that solitude is a common issue nowadays.

I want to start off with one of the main characters José Arcadio Buendía. This enigmatic man is the patriarch of the family and the entire Macondo. “José Arcadio Buendía, whose unbridled imagination always went beyond the genius of nature and even beyond miracles and magic”[xxiv], is always immersed in his own ideas, which not often are the most reasonable. In comparison with the rest of the inhabitants of the town he is unique. His visionary spirit and robustness allow him to found Macondo. Solitude would enter his life when he encounters Melquiades, “a heavy gypsy with an untamed beard and sparrow hands”[xxv], who shows him all kinds of artifacts brought from all over the world. José Arcadio Buendía engages more and more with those innovations up to the point when he starts to lose the sense of the time, to forget about his family, the town and finally he ends up crazy and tied to a tree. “Ten men were needed to get him down, fourteen to tie him up, twenty to drag him to the chestnut tree in the courtyard, where they left him tied up, barking in the strange language and giving off a green froth at the mouth”[xxvi].

One characteristic of solitude is oblivion. It can be appreciated in the sunset of José Arcadio Buendía’s life. As Gabriel describes “It was all the same to him.” His own self-immersion got to such an extreme that he was no longer able to remember reality. In a similar way people around him have fallen into the same oblivion. Nevertheless, there was still a figure who was with him until the end of his life and with whom he shares his most precious memories: Prudencio Aguilar. Prudencio was an ambulant soul who, still alive, José Arcadio Buendía murdered in his youth for nonsense. “It was Prudencio Aguilar who cleaned him fed him and brought him splendid news of an unknown person called Aureliano who was a colonel in the war.”[xxvii] Here we can appreciate man’s longing to relate to others, to have a companion with whom to share oblivion.

Moving on to another family member, we come across Aureliano Buendía, one of the sons of José Arcadio Buendía. He inherited the parsimony and reflexive personality of his father. Having failed in relationships with everybody else the sense of solitude was already in him. Circumstances, finally, make him withdraw into himself. Over the story, to escape from solitude, the characters have committed multiple incest and sexual relationships out of marriage. Most of them, if not all of them, ended up bringing more solitude. In the case of Aureliano Buendía, due to the failures in his love life, he dedicated himself to work fabricating little fish made of gold and fighting the revolutionary war against the conservative regime. Colonel Aureliano Buendía, who will be called so later, finds himself completely changed “intoxicated by the glory of his return, by his remarkable victories, he had peeped into the abyss of greatness”[xxviii].  Solitude is exteriorized by this sentence: “It was then that he decided that no human being, not even Ursula, could come closer to him than ten feet. In the center of the chalk circle that his aides would draw wherever he stopped, and which only he could enter, he would decide with brief orders that had no appeal to the fate of the world”[xxix]. At the highest point Colonel Aureliano Buendía “felt scattered about, multiplied, and more solitary than ever”.

Up to this point “The intoxication of power began to break apart under waves of discomfort.”[xxx] and Aureliano “Alone, abandoned by his premonitions, fleeing the chill that was to accompany him until death, he sought a last refuge in Macondo in the warmth of his oldest memories.”[xxxi] Here is another aspect of solitude: Memory. As we see throughout the story, it is very common that many characters go back to the past, remembering the best moments of their life. In memory we can keep experiences and carry them with us. On memory identity is founded. The action of remembering becomes more intense at the end of life, when the youthly strength is gone and one has had many things to remember. “Colonel Aureliano Buendia could understand only that the secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.”[xxxii]

We can draw the process of solitude from Aureliano’s life. We see how in his early years he has no healthy relations which make him experience solitude. We also see how he tries to escape, or to forget about it through working meticulously and fighting a senseless war. Over time, solitude has been so rooted in his life that he is completely isolated inside his chalk circle from everybody else. However, we see how he keeps remembering those moments when briefly he shared his solitude with wretches like him.

Although everybody in the Buendía family is condemned to live in solitude, there are occasions where everything changes for good. This happens when someone decides to go out and break the chains of solitude. Úrsula Iguaran, the wife of José Arcadio Buendía. With her strong personality, her active character and an unbreakable will she was able to patiently endure the crazy ideas of her husband, the whims of her children and the atrocities of the war. She was the one who brought the family forward and never gave up until the last years of her life. Besides all of this, her mayor contribution was to get her relatives out of solitude. “Then Colonel Aureliano Buendia realized, without surprise, that Úrsula was the only human being who had succeeded in penetrating his misery, and for the first time in many years he looked her in the face”[xxxiii]. On many occasions Úrsula formed allies with the people of Macondo and began a revolution against the purpose of Colonel Aureliano Buendía. She welcomed any stranger who came to her home and helped anyone in need. Because of this she expanded the Buendía house, so everybody felt welcome. But regardless of all this, Úrsula could not escape the curse of her family.

“But despite her strength, she still wept over her unfortunate fate. She felt so much alone that she sought the useless company of her husband, who had been forgotten under the chestnut tree. “Look what we’ve come to,” she would tell him as the June rains threatened to knock the shelter down. “Look at the empty house, our children scattered all over the world, and the two of us alone again, the same as in the beginning.”[xxxiv]

This may be very unfortunate, but no one in the Buendía family escapes from solitude, and neither do we. Solitude could lead us to the desert land of oblivion as well as the sweet contemplation of the past kept in memory. Although solitude might be something frightening, it is an experience that, eventually, all must go through. This is inevitable. However, Gabriel, through his novel, teaches an important lesson: to overcome solitude. Which is its ultimate purpose.

A good example of this lesson is the relationship between Aureliano Segundo and his daughter Meme. Aureliano Segundo is the great-grandson of José Arcadio Buendía. He was born with an energic and affable personality, unlike his twin brother. Over time, he has spent most of his life partying, trying in this way to drown his solitude. This lifestyle made him fat, unfocused. He forgets about his family until Meme gets sick and he realizes the reality.

Aureliano Segundo felt a twinge of conscience when he saw Meme’s state of prostration and he promised himself to take better care of her in the future. That was how the relationship of jolly comradeship was born between father and daughter, which freed him for a time from the bitter solitude of his revels. At that time Aureliano Segundo postponed any appointments in order to be with Meme, to take her to the movies or the circus, and he spent the greater part of his idle time with her. In recent times his annoyance with the absurd obesity that prevented him from tying his shoes and his abusive satisfaction with all manner of appetites had begun to sour his character. The discovery of his daughter restored his former joviality and the pleasure of being with her was slowly leading him away from dissipation.[xxxv]

A drastic change of life like this is due to the presence of someone in Aureliano Segundo’s life. We see how spending time with his daughter strength the bond between them and frees him from the dissipated life caused by solitude. Moreover, it is impressive how Meme was always there, but Aureliano Segundo had not paid attention to her. This lack of awareness, among many other things, bittered his joyful personality and welfare.

It would take one hundred years to speak about solitude among the innumerous characters of Gabriel’s novel. By looking at some of them, we can sufficiently appreciate the weight of solitude that it has in humankind. The Buendía family’s story is a mirror which reflects solitude in nowadays culture by looking at the behaviors of an entire caste from a literary perspective. The magic realism style helps to see the atrocities that solitude causes in those who are condemned by it. Despite the tragic panorama of the family, we can find over the story a deep hope. They hope to overcome solitude and hope to understand the mystery of longing for company.

Conclusion

“It is not good for the man to be alone”[xxxvi] said God in the Bible. However, man often found himself alone. That is a reality he must learn to deal with. From birth to dead, both came to happen in solitude. By discovering his uniqueness, he finds out that he is completely alone because no one else is like him. Nobody else can see or think of feel in the same way he does. Man is amazed at the fact of being, but at the same time devastated for he has no one that can understand him. This makes him withdraw into the remote lands of his interior. Out of fear he creates a way to defend himself. He creates a mask to protect himself from the outside. Stubborn in his solitary confinement, the man searches for a way to escape but without let a glimpse of his inner self be seen. He goes out to parties. He immerses himself in work. He seeks ideals. He fights wars. He looks for pleasure, but in the end, he comes back to his solitary cave more alone than ever. Entangled in his own thoughts, he spends his life in this endless cycle. Man can reach such an extreme of solitude that he can totally forget reality, family and even himself. Solitude can lead him to the desert land of oblivion as well as the sweet contemplation of the past kept in memory. But it does not end here. Deep in his heart, man does not lose hope. There is something that moves him out. He has a desire, a longing for company. To be vulnerable and be known by others. Solitude is not the end. Rather, it is an opportunity for the solitary man to realize how much he needs others, even if it takes him one hundred years in the labyrinth of his solitude.

We live in a world full of social media networks, which, apparently, allows us to share everything with others almost instantaneously. This means that solitude might not be a problem nowadays. But we are more solitary than ever. The instantaneous factor has taken away our ability to share what we carry deep inside us because we do not stop to think about it. With a screen in between it is easier than ever to create the mask we like the most to hide ourselves from the outside. The overflow of information and entertainment generates countless ways to escape from solitude. So, I think that it is important to be aware of all these factors and especially, to know the process and purpose of solitude. For this, the reflexives essays of Octavio Paz are a very good source to approach solitude from an intellectual perspective. They offer a thoughtful idea that will be personified in the various vivid characters of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, who explores the human heart’s behaviors through a literary perspective. Both approaches to solitude are related and both complement each other. The two contemporary authors conclude that solitude is something intrinsic to human beings. It is meant to be transcended and overcome. Man is called to communion, to relate with others. Thus, he will find the purpose of his solitude.

[i] BRITANICA ENCYCLOPEDIA, Octavio Paz, Chicago 2010. Macropædia, Vol. 9. Pg. 220.

[ii] Ibid

[iii] O. PAZ, The Labyrinth of Solitude, Grove Press, New York 1961. Ch. 9 The Dialectic of Solitude. Pg. 195.

[iv] Cf. E. KRAUZE, Redeemers: Ideas and Power in Latin America, Hamper Collins, New York 2011. pg. 136.

[v] The Labyrinth of Solitude Ch 1 The Pachuco and Other Extremes, pg. 9.

[vi] The Labyrinth of Solitude Ch 1 The Pachuco and Other Extremes, pg. 19.

[vii] Ibid

[viii] Ch 1 The Pachuco and Other Extremes, pg. 19.

[ix] Ibid

[x] Ibid

[xi] The Labyrinth of Solitude, Ch 2 Mexican Masks pg. 30

[xii] The Labyrinth of Solitude, Ch 3 The Day of the Dead pg. 47.

[xiii] Ibid.

[xiv] Ibid.

[xv] The Labyrinth of Solitude, Ch 4 The Sons of La Malinche pg. 80.

[xvi] The Labyrinth of Solitude, Ch 9 The Dialectic of Solitude pg. 195.

[xvii] Ibid.

[xviii] Ibid.

[xix] Ibid.

[xx] G. GARCÍA, Living to Tell the Tale: An Autobiography, Vintage International, New York 2003. Epigraph.

[xxi] G. GARCÍA, Living to Tell the Tale: An Autobiography, Vintage International, New York 2003.

[xxii] Cf. BRITANICA ENCYCLOPEDIA, Gabriel García Márquez, Chicago 2010. Macropædia, Vol. 5. Pg. 117.

[xxiii] G. GARCÍA, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Avon Books, New York 1970. Ch 20, Pg, 201.

[xxiv] Ibid.

[xxv] Ibid.

[xxvi] Ibid, Ch 4, Pg 44.

[xxvii] Ibid, Ch 7, Pg 72.

[xxviii] Ibid.

[xxix] Ibid.

[xxx] Ibid.

[xxxi] Ibid.

[xxxii] Ibid.

[xxxiii] Ibid. Ch. 9, Pg. 88.

[xxxiv] Ibid. Ch. 6, Pg. 57.

[xxxv] Ibid. Ch. 14, Pg. 134.

[xxxvi] Genesis, Ch 2; 18.