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
Why shouldn't I have it [sex] if I want it! It's insane otherwise! I should be allowed to have it all day long! This is no longer ordinary life and I am not going to pretend that it is! You want me to be ordinary-you expect me to be ordinary in this condition! I'm supposed to be a sensible man- when I am like this! But that's crazy on your part, Doctor! ... Why shouldn't I have anything and everything I can think of every single minute of the day if that can transport me from this miserable hell! ... Instead I lie here being sensible! That's the madness, Doctor, being sensiblel (B. 36-37) David Kepesh, the breast cannot see, and doesn't even really want to relinquish his identity as a breast. He interprets his life as a dream or a Dali painting and tells the doctor that he cannot foresee a miracle and suspects that the breast wants to continue to exist. David Kepesh's search for freedom, although much in the mode of a post-modern comic allegory, displays some alienation motifs very similar to those expressed by Niel Klugman's identical attitude, when he uses Gaugin's painting and Gulliver's Travels , to explain his problematic status. Certainly Kepesh's understanding of arts should have been deeper and thus we have to look for the sources of his startling disintegration. Poor Kepesh is suspended between reality and imagination, left alone with the chance to 'sleep the sleep of the sated' as he sways in his hammock, and endures the absurd within the constraints of the analyst's couch. The trap according to Philip Roth offers no other possibility but an ironic toleration of that situation as literary influence becomes an explicit part of David Kepesh's enslavement and he declares that he got it from fiction. Teaching Gogol's "The Nose" and Kafka's "Metamorphosis" forced him to out-Kafka Kafka. But Dr KI inger is there to tell him that hormones are hormones and art is art, to make him accept himself as real. David Kepesh's task is to accept the situation. Philip Roth's comment on this incredible situation is laconic. For him there is no way out of the monstrous situation, not even through literary interpretation. There is only the unrelenting education if his own misfortune. What he learns by the end is that, whatever else it is, it is the real thing: he is a breast, and must act accordingly. (Roth, Reading. 63) 120
