Hinterland Diary

In his book "The Double Flame," Octavio Paz offers a much wider critique that nevertheless has sympathetic vibrations with Epstein's comments.

"Since 1950, noteworthy works and personalities have appeared in poetry, music, and the plastic arts," he writes in 1993. "But no great aesthetic or poetic movement has appeared. The last was Surrealism. We have had resurrections, some brilliant and some merely ingenious. Or, rather, to use the precise word in English, 'revivals.' But a revival is not a resurrection: it is a sudden blaze that burns itself out."

The real, original 20th century art movements took place during the first half of the century, not the latter half, Paz argues.

He asserts that Pop Art is derived from Dadaism; that Beat poetry is derived from Surrealism; and that Abstract Expressionism, however brilliant, was more of a revival, a sudden blaze, than something really new.

He makes the same argument about Existentialism: by method it continues Husserl, by subject it continues Heidegger.

"The works of the second half of the 20th century are different from and even contrary to those of the first half," Paz concludes. "They are twilight works."

Furthermore, there is a direct relationship between the derivative nature of post-World War II Western culture and the 1960s student movements.

The positive achievement of the student movement, Paz argues, was erotic freedom. Yet, like the artistic and philosophical movements mentioned above, the student movement, too, was derivative.

"The student movement was no prelude to revolution but instead the final consecration of a struggle that began at the start of the 19th century, and its groundwork was laid in equal measures by the libertine philosophers and their adversaries, the Romantic poets," Paz writes.

As such, the student movement was a revival --a revival that burned itself out. Erotic freedom remains, Paz writes, but fell under the domination of capitalism.

Paz fears this development: For the twilight of eroticism -- and by extension, love --means a new threat to human integrity posed by a sinister coupling of capitalism and technology.