Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2000. [Vol. 6.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Tibor Tóth: The Golden Cradle: Philip Roth's Revision of the Golden Bough Tradition

incessant cross interpretation contradicts the very goal he set forth; it undermines the possibility of a valid definition of the free individual on the basis of available interpretations of life situations contained within great works of art. Another of his obsessions results in a strange taste for role-playing His fictional biography reveals that at college he is awarded leading roles in university productions of plays by Giraudoux, Sophocles, and Congreve. In the same period of his life David Kepesh improvises a long 'dialogue' of his parents which he refers to as tragical-comical-historical-pastoral. While he is deliberately sacrificing virtually everything on the altar of desire, he is an intellectual who instead of acquiring the wisdom provided by artistic heritage reinterprets everything even the great modernists' works (Chekov, Flaubert, Kafka) and as it is but natural with a Rothian protagonist, his own chaotic life. He considers American girls to emanate a sense of "all-pervasive atmosphere of academic property" (P. D. 22). He finds the expression and the justification of his overheated sexual desires in Shakespeare and finally his desire to be the girl's arms that touch her breasts translates as Romeo's words uttered under Juliet's balcony. David Kepesh in his search for a free self wants to define freedom in an existentialist sense on the basis of already reinterpreted artexperiences. He does not understand a word of the Arthurian legends and Icelandic sagas in London and considers that the fact that he is supposed to read them is all punishment for his being smart. What he discovers while at King's College is that he is ready to die as Maupassant did, or that it does not make sense to have a whore who does not look like a whore and he develops an obsessive taste for enormous breasts. I realize with an odd, repulsive sort of shrill that this woman whose breasts collide above my head like caldrons-whom I chose from among her competitors on the basis of these behemoth breasts and a no less capacious behind-was probably born prior to the outbreak of World War I. Imagine that, before the publication of Ulysses, before ... {P.D. 28). The professor starts from a Kafkaesque understanding of the self to adopt an elegantly post-modernist interpretation of the Chekovian 'romantic disillusionment' acknowledging its authority for Kepesh's 114