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

sources of Nathan Zuckerman's irreverence, his manipulation of structure, form and moral principles on the basis of three excellent and extremely controversial novels. The golden cradle of Nathan Zuckerman 'ars poetica' is relatively directly formulated in The Professor of Desire (1977), The Breast (1972) and My Life as a Man (1970). In these novels Philip Roth refuses to share his power and freedom with his characters yet these characters' respective debates concerning authority over their statuses as art-minded people, or as free individuals lead to a more or less comprehensive interpretation of David Kepesh's and Peter Tarnopol's statuses as creators, manipulators and also as prisoners of texts and ultimately of Philip Roth's fiction. The above three novels can be interpreted as Nathan Zuckerman's golden cradle in many respects. Nathan Zuckerman appears for the first time in My Life as a Man and becomes one of the best-known Rothian characters. He is an artist who admires and recycles the modernists' power unlike David Kepesh or Peter Tarnopol. It is important to state that in these books the protagonists' attempt to rule the existential through the aesthetic changes their 'existence' and this can be interpreted as the power of the aesthetic to rewrite the existential, in fictional terms of course. This is so because Philip Roth's characters are convinced that art has the power to grant them the possibility of achieving some degree of freedom, but in the context of these novels this possibility remains an illusion for most of the protagonists, although it is available to the author and to some extent to Nathan Zuckerman. David Kepesh and Peter Tarnopol have a relatively limited view of freedom and they have to pay dearly for their ignorance regarding the delicate relationship between life and art. I start from the thesis that the novelist stresses the centrality of freedom in these books, and interestingly enough Philip Roth obsessively reformulates, asserts and questions even his fictional interpretations of this theme. The result is a weird definition of freedom, which is similar to John Fowles's formula for a freedom that allows for other freedoms to exist.

1 1 Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant's Woman. London: Jonathan Cape. 1969 110