The Weaving Of Voices And The Decoding Of Urban Space

Saul Bellow is one of the most significant American novelists in the post-war era. Most of his novels are set in big American cities, and his protagonists are in essence urbanites. This dissertation aims at a comprehensive analysis of Bellow’s Chicago novels, as Bellow’s life experiences could be viewed as those of a Chicagoan, and more significantly, he repeatedly depicts this Midwestern city in many of his works.According to Henri Lefebvre, city is regarded as a social space which is the assembly of social relationships. The representational spaces of urban writers are precisely descriptions of this assembly, which are usually coded. As for the question how to decipher or decode a space, Lefebvre borrows Roland Barthes’s five codes of reading a text. This dissertation attempts to use the Lefebvrian/Barthesian set of five codes/Voices to decipher the representational space of Bellow, which somewhat exists as the city of Chicago coded in his novels, especially in The Adventures of Augie March, Humboldt’s Gift and The Dean’s December.The analysis of the three Chicago novels is divided into three individual but interrelated chapters, each chapter focusing on one novel. In the first chapter, from the perspective of the Voice of Science, the discussion centers on the analysis of Augie’s memory of Chicago in the 1920s and 30s as his referential knowledge of urban space. As a Chicago boy, Augie March’s knowledge of his native city develops with his age and experience, and this body of urban knowledge arises from both what he sees and what he learns:the former refers to his various jobs in Chicago, while the latter refers to his encounter with numerous local characters. However, in his memory of Chicago, there is always deep city vexation, for he never feels at ease with the overwhelming power of the urban forces encouraging urbanites to find a specific aim in social climbing.Chapter Two aims to provide two more Voices for the decoding of a Bellovian Chicago in Humboldt’s Gift, namely the Voice of Symbol and the Voice of Person. The protagonist Charlie Citrine at his middle age returns to Chicago. He, on the one hand, through the Voice of Symbol, encounters an assembly of symbols in Chicago of the 1970s, such as coupes, skyscrapers and typical Chicago gangsters; on the other, the Voice of Person reveals his deep personal feelings for the vanishing old neighborhood. Moreover, despite his encounter with external urban symbols and internal feelings about his native city, Citrine at the same time meditates privately upon his once mentor Humboldt the poet, as well as the failure of the power of art and poetry in America. Therefore, this chapter also tries to see through the various symbols in the city and Citrine’s personal feelings about Chicago and to further reveal Citrine’s anxiety about modern boredom and his response to this urban plight.Chapter Three concentrates on Bellow’s Chicago in the Voices of Empirics and Truth, both of which are closely related to the Dean Corde’s articles on the status quo of Chicago. Corde’s observation of the urban space, especially what he writes in his published articles, is a version of Chicago in the Voice of Empirics. But after reading his argument, many Chicagoans identify him as a man who has no idea about this city at all. Hence, there is the inevitable question of truth versus illusion:as a senior Chicagoan, does Corde really understand Chicago or just fall into traps of illusion? What troubles Corde is the Voice of Truth. Moreover, this novel is also a tale of two cities due to the changing scenes between Chicago and Bucharest. This chapter also tries to make a comparison between these two cities and as a result, studies Bellow’s sincere concerns about the issues facing the future of big cities:the inevitability of inner city disturbances, the dominance of show business, and the lack of humanistic vision.Finally, in the conclusion part, this dissertation summarizes that through the weaving of five Voices, the urban space of Bellow’s Chicago is manifested as an assembly of protagonist’s relationships with his native city and his fellow Chicagoans, which at the same time reflects Bellow’s complicated attitude towards big cities. Besides, Bellow regards Chicago as a miniature of American society, which best exemplifies urban reality under siege, and in a larger sense, it also reveals essential perplexities of modern civilization. By means of decoding Bellow’s Chicago, this dissertation indicates that to Bellow, metropolis means not only the physical complex, but the mentality of urbanites as well, and his characterization of typical men in the city is a combination of both urban fighters and outsiders.