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
matrimony." These letters are commentaries on the Zuckerman sections. Peter receives another letter, this time from his brother who is warning him against the Dark Ladies. The fictional fact that Peter Tarnopol received the Prix de Rome of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim grant undermines the validity of the fictional statement, as the same thing happened to Zuckerman in the earlier stories. Different domestic scandals are served up in the chapter entitled Susan and "Marriage A la Mode." Embittered, Peter Tarnopol realises that his obsession with high moral principles and literature determined him to accept his humiliating situation. "Literature got me into this and literature is gonna have to get me out" ( M.L.A.M . 194). The section entitled "Dr. Spielvogel" is introduced by an excerpt taken from Sigmund Freud's "Analysis Terminable and Interminable." The result of this continuous displacement of the narrative T and the fragmentation of the narrative structure is chaos. Thus the diversification of the narrative structure casts the character into a situation, which cannot be interpreted even by an artist figure. In fact when speaking about My Life as a Man Philip Roth refers to the scene in The Trial, where K. , in the cathedral, hopes that the priest will come down from his pulpit and point him to "a mode of living completely outside the jurisdiction of the Court" (Roth, Reading. 108). As Roth sees it, the man in the pulpit is oneself, and the court 'is of one's own devising' a catch 22 all right. And the narrative structure of the novel bars his protagonist inside this court. Philip Roth presents a similar conflict and accompanying rationale in The Breast , The Professor of Desire and My Life as a Man, and emphasis falls on his heroes' enslavement by the magic power of art the necessity of freedom. This freedom is weighed against the restrictive power of traditional stereotypes active in art and life. The Rothian characters' search for freedom ends in disasters, as art is a magic world, which denies any support let alone direct participation for the fictional character. Nathan Zuckerman, who appears in My Life as a Man for the first time will get authorial support, and one can suspect some sort of 'co-operation' between author and fictional artist character in the Zuckerman novels. In the Zuckerman novels Philip Roth provides the artist character with pseudo-divine freedom, and this trickster uses and abuses his 133
