Symbolizing Technique in Humboldt's Gift

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【Abstract】Humboldt’s Gift describes the history including success and failure of two generational writers. In this paper, symbolizing technique is mainly discussed.

【Key words】writing technique; symbol

Saul Bellow(1915-2005) is regarded as one of the most important Jewish American novelist. In 1976, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature with “the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his works.” The prize established him as a representative figure in the contemporary American Literature and a vanguard of contemporary fictions in the wake of Ernest Heimingway and Willian Faulkner.

humboldt’s gift describes the history including success and failure of two generational writers. For many years, the great poet Von Humboldt Fleisher and Charlie Citrine, a young man inflamed with a love for literature, were the best of friends. At the time of his death, however, Humboldt is a failure, and Charlie’s life has reached a low point: his career is at a standstill, and he’s enmeshed in an acrimonious divorce, infatuated with a highly unsuitable young woman, and involved with a neurotic Mafioso. But then Humboldt acts from beyond the grave, bestowing upon Charlie an unexpected legacy that may just help him turn his life around.

Simply, symbol refers to the facts that can represent the meaning exceeded themselves; generally, it refers to the traditionally associated thinking, that is using the idiographic facts to express some nonfigurative concept or feeling. In the literature, symbol is a special imago which represents the deeper meaning associated with the idiographic object, landscape, and action. The flag and cross both have the symbolic meaning. It is also one of the significant characteristics in Romanticism literature. It is the main technique in the creation of poem and novels. There are many writers used it in their productions to represent their special meanings. By parallelism, association and hint, symbol describes specially idiographic image, which can express cognition for the verity. In Humboldt’s Gift, Bellow emphases his theme of the novel by using the symbolizing technique.

1 Rose

There are many descriptions in the novel for rose. Before being summoned, Citrine kept on thinking about rose. “The object I chose for meditation was a bush covered with roses. I often summoned up this bush, but sometimes it made its appearance independently.” The rose symbolizes the hope which represents that Citrine escapes the reality and makes him deep in the imagination. “I concentrated all the faculties of my soul on this vision and immersed it it the flowers. Then I saw, next to these flowers, a human figure standing. The plant, said Rudolf Steiner, expressed the pure passionless laws of growth, but the human being, aiming at higher perfection, assumed a greater burden-instinct, took a chance on the passions. The wager was that the higher powers of the soul could cleanse these passions. Cleansed, they could be reborn in a finer form. The red of the blood was a symbol of this cleansing process. But even if all this wasn’t so, to consider the roses always put me into a kind of bliss.” He wants to put his passion cleansing like the renascence of rose. Here, rose symbolizes the perfect world bringing hope for human being.

2 For an atypical foot you need an atypical shoe

The relationship between foot and shoe appears in the novel many times, which implies the relationship between man and woman. Under the arrangement of Citrine’s friend George, Citrine and the players sat at a round pedestal table and as the clean cards flew and flicked George got the players to talk. They were playing cards. Among them, there was a tuxedo man who was in mourning for his lady friend, a telephone ad-taker at the Sun Times. He spoke with a baying Lithuanian accent, joking, bragging, but gloomy, too. Tuesdays he drove in his station wagon to a joint near the Loop where the suits were put to soak in vats of cleaning fluid. Then he spent the afternoon with a girl friend. “She was a good family type of girl. She was my kind of people. But she’s do anything. I told her how, and she did it, and no questions.” When Citrine asked: “And you saw her on Tuesdays only, never took her to dinner, never visited her at home?” He said: “She went home at five o’clock to her old mother and cooked dinner. I swear I didn’t even know her last name. For twenty years I never had but her phone number.” Even his girl friend who he was mourning, he didn’t even know her last name. The relationship is like stranger. “But you loved her. Why didn’t you marry her?” Citrine asked. He seemed astonished, looking at the other players as if to say, what’s with this guy? Then he answered, “What marry a hot broad who turns on in hotel rooms?” while everyone laughed the Sicilian undertaker explained to me in the special tone in which you tell the facts of life to educated dummies, “Look, professor, you don’t mix things up. That’s not what a wife is about. And if you have a funny foot you have to look for a funny shoe. And if you find the right fit you just let it alone.” In the modern society like that, everyone knows the special relationship between man and woman except Citrine.

3 Ulick’s seascape

Water waters everywhere, in addition, there is nothing, without a rock, or a boat, or any human beings. After operation, Ulick wants Citrine buy a seascape for him.

Citrine answers his claim. For Citrine “It was implied that I was entitled to a commission-unofficial of course. It would be unnatural for me not to chisel a little. This was the form his generosity sometimes took. I was touched.” But surprisingly, there is no seascape like that.

【Bibliography】

[1]Bloom, Harold. Modern Critical Views: Saul Bellow. Chelsea House Publishers, New York New Haven Philadelphia, 1986: 179-193

[2]Kieman, Robert. F. Saul Bellow. New York, Continuum, 1989: 164