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
fictional free will to manipulate the other fictional characters and even argues with his author about the way in which they should shape the novels. One thing does not change though and that is, the artist character's relationship with his possible muses, that is, the uneasy relationship of the male protagonist with his women partners is as annoying as it was in The Professor of Desire, The Breast , or My Life as a Man. Zuckerman becomes a kind of 'secret sharer' of Philip Roth. The Zuckerman novels mark the 'changing of the guards,' a shift of emphasis from the social dimension to the aesthetic or the artistic in Philip Roth's works. This means that Philip Roth's experiments with different definitions of morality and freedom, contemporary and earlier fictional designs and artistic modes of presentation continue in the Zuckerman novels. The golden bars that imprisoned David Kepesh and Peter Tarnopol serve as the golden cradle for the fictional novelist as intertexts, the pleasure taken by the narrator and the character in shaping the 'interplay' of the narrative and of the larger structure are relevant aspects of Philip Roth's Zuckerman novels which occasionally 'reforget' the fictional environment into which the artist character was born. In the Zuckerman novels art ceases to be merely a golden cradle, it becomes a kind of 'protagonist' in these novels and the character's search for freedom occasions various fictional re-interpretations of the artist's status, his 'freedoms' and responsibilities as well as the possibilities of twentieth century art rewriting history, tradition, its relationship to the mass media and the great dilemma that occurs when one attempts to be both serious and popular. This means that in the fictional hierarchy produced through Zuckerman's search for freedom art occupies a superior position and thus it is a tempting source of freedom an eternally reformulated golden cradle. 134
