BOOK REVIEW : ON GIVING BIRTH TO ONE’S OWN MOTHER<i> by Jay Cantor</i> Alfred A. Knopf $19.95, 177 pages : Essays Pay Tribute to 3 Patriarchs

The icon-toppling of the ‘60s, the questioning of all established values, was charged with moral and metaphysical fervor. The gleeful smashing of crockery was intoxicating in itself, but it was bolstered by the righteous notion that something stronger and more beautiful would come to replace the shards. Casting out the established devils would let in angels, unspecified.

The Bible--not a leading ‘60s text--warns, of course, that castings-out risk lowering the neighborhood with a worse class of devil. Break your old plates and you may get not Coalport but Styrofoam. The Kent State students lay dead, and society hiccuped; Che Guevara was killed, and the Andes did not burst into tears or flames.

If the ideal was frail, doing-your-own-thing was Protean. It spent $75 on a necktie, went into bond trading and bought Warhol prints. Values were for questioning; not in order to find better ones, but because that was what you did with values. That way, they wouldn’t get too near the lifestyle.

In other words, “Irony that tastes like a sharp bitter alkaloid becomes our daily drug, a substance we abuse to protect our self-respect as we suffer a fate we can not make.” It is jailhouse irony; it attaches to “the intolerable prison that history will become to us if it does not become the field of our making.”

The words belong to Jay Cantor. Cantor was a young ‘60s rebel on the far left. Then Guevara was killed. Cantor became neither a post-modern ironist nor a New Right canonist. Something curious happened. He had seen a photograph, he tells us, and suddenly Guevara was not a dead symbol but a dead man. As lonely as any dead man.

Advancing into this loneliness, Cantor wrote what I think is our best political novel of the ‘80s: “The Death of Che Guevara.” He followed it with “Krazy Kat,” a high-wired tear-away look at the mortal distance between our culture and our needs.

“On Giving Birth to One’s Own Mother” is a collection of Cantor’s essays and incidental pieces over the last few years. They vary in subject and scope. One is a consideration of the artist as a melancholic. Another is a sketch in which Ignatz Mouse--Harriman’s raspy recalcitrant--accuses Mickey Mouse of selling out to the corporate culture. Krazy Kat intervenes skeptically. If they make you an offer, she tells Ignatz, “you’d do lunch like a shot.”

Most of the pieces deal with Kantor’s third way for our time. He rejects post-modernist reality-shrugging, but I think he admires its aesthetic courage and spirit of experiment. It is his own aesthetic in a way; it is not his values.

On the other hand, he has little use for the tight-collared values police, the cultural wincers who wouldn’t know a value if it kicked them. Especially if it kicked them. If it kicked them, it wouldn’t be dead, so of course, it wouldn’t be a value.

Cantor pays tribute to three patriarchs--his word for them--of the modern spirit: Marx, Freud and Nietzsche. Less perhaps for their conclusions than for their mortal engagement with the chaos of the modern world and their determination to face it and imagine a way through it. Their discoveries are impossible either to rest in or to ignore.

The post-modernists turn away from their insistence that the depths of existence are real; the conservative culturalists may accept some of their work into the canon but show no sign of imitating their revolutionary fire.

I find that Cantor’s reverence for Freud, in particular, can lead him into excessive efforts to fit his own insights into the Freudian schema. It gives an effect of academicism that he is utterly not in need of. We want his fire out here for ourselves; we resent his carrying a substantial bit inside to nourish Freud’s votive flame.

Cantor’s writing is occasionally murky and abstract, as in an essay on the films of Dusan Makajevic. He is tunneling through dark parts of our time, and sometimes he disappears into them. Then he breaks through, and the light is dazzling.

It is particularly so in the superb essays that begin and end the book. I paraphrased parts of the first one, “The Patriarchs,” at the beginning of this review. “Death and the Image” starts as a discussion of how our world of images--film, television--overwhelms our imagination. The discussion then deepens into a stunning analysis of how three filmmakers--Resnais, Lanzmann and Ophuls--have tried to overcome the dilemma of art and the holocaust. How do you make it real without destroying us, and if you do not destroy us, how have you made it real?

Cantor’s essay does not answer the unanswerable, of course, but it takes us wonderfully close.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “Traveling Ladies” by Janice Kulyk Keefer (William Morrow).