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

total identification with female erotic power, destroying virtually all elements of his male identity, except for the desire for sexual intercourse with the female, whose imposing, permanently inflated organ he becomes by abandoning his ruined male sexuality. Kepesh's fetishizing of Claire's breast has turned her into a fantasymother and him into a nursing infant; he seems to regress further and merges himself with the breast as if there were no boundary between the self and the nurturing world. The breast is the womb and they are both Kepesh. (Crews 66-67) David Kepesh, the professor of comparative literature blames art for what has happened to him. ... might be my way of being Kafka, being Gogol, being a Swift. They could envision these marvellous transformations - they were artists. They had the language and those obsessive fictional brains. I didn't. So I had to live the thing. (5.72) Thus, he exposes yet another deficiency contributing to his perplexing misery, namely his lack of authority over the fictional reworking of the real. The result is not freedom but imprisonment, as he becomes the captive of his own contaminated imagination. He has no faith in fiction, insisting on the importance of reality (although his awareness of it is questionable). At one point David Kepesh states 'reality has more style.' No, the victim does not subscribe to the wish-fulfilment theory, and T advise you not to, neat and fashionable and delightfully punitive as it may be. Reality is grander than that. Reality has more style. There. For those of you who cannot live without one, a moral to this tale. 'Reality has style,' concludes the embittered professor who became a female breast. Go, you sleek, self satisfied Houhynhnms, and moralize on that! (Ä34) When any chance of normality disappears, David Kepesh insists that he is not abnormal and given the absurdity of the environment he is right: in the abnormal world where a person can wake up as a female breast nothing makes sense, no value judgements can be reliable. David Kepesh insists on his right to have sex, and he wants it with a highly professional prostitute. 119