2 - Roth, literary influence, and postmodernism

Summary

In Philip Roth's ninth book of fiction, The Professor of Desire, young David Kepesh, attending college at Syracuse University, places on the bulletin board in his room two quotes that justly capture the budding scholar's dual nature: Lord Byron's dictum, “Studious by day, dissolute by night,” and Thomas B. Macaulay's remarks on Sir Richard Steele, “He was a rake among scholars, and a scholar among rakes.” He places these quotes, as he discloses to the reader, “directly above the names of the girls whom I have set my mind to seduce, a word whose deepest resonances come to me, neither from pornography nor pulp magazines, but from my agonized reading in Kierkegaard's Either/Or.” This is just one of a many passages in the novel where Kepesh taps into the wisdom of his literary heroes, those who are presumed to have influence over his life, to justify both his intellectual and lustful passions.

In fact, if one were to look for the one novel that stands as the best indicator of Roth's forebears, at least ostensibly so, it would probably be The Professor of Desire. The pages of the book are swarming with direct and subtle references to a variety of literary touchstones, including Sophocles, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Strindberg, O'Neill, the Bloomsbury group, Joyce, Maupassant, Twain, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Henry James, Hemingway, Chekhov, Freud, Kafka, Yeats, Faulkner, Genet, Synge, Céline, Hardy, Mann, Brönte (both Emily and Charlotte), Bellow, Kundera, Melville, Colette, Updike, Henry Miller, Hawthorne, and Gogol.