Childhood as Memory, Myth and Metaphor

Proust, Beckett, and Bourgeois

Catherine Crimp

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781907975394
• eBook ISBN: 9781351192378
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"A fascination with childhood unites the artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) and the writers Samuel Beckett (1906-89) and Marcel Proust (1871-1922). But while many commentators have traced their childhood images back to memories of lived experiences, there is more to their mythologies of childhood that waits to be explored. They invite us to move away from familiar ideas - whether psychological or biographical - about what a child can represent, and even what a child is. The haunting child figures of Bourgeois, Beckett and Proust echo each other as they show how imagining origins- for a life, for a work of art - involves paradoxes that test the limits of our forms of expression. Art meets literature, profusion meets concision, French meets English, and images of childhood reveal new insights in this encounter between three great figures of twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture. Catherine Crimp holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and is currently Lectrice d'anglais at theEcole Normale Superieure de Lyon."

CHAPTER 1
The Inner Child and the Inner Artist: From Cliché to Compulsion

In Proust’s novel the child guides the adult into his past and helps him write his novel: a life story takes shape against the void of the forgotten and the threatening fact of mortality. Beckett’s characters in the early Textes pour rien [Texts for Nothing] initially appear to give their childhood the same role, but this process entangles character and reader alike in a self-consciously fictional monologue. When childhood memories guide the narrator into himself, he finds turmoil. This evokes a confusion of unimaginable moments: forgotten things; the moment of the fictional character’s gestation; the transition from a writer’s memories into a character’s memories; the time before birth and the time after death. Both writers, therefore, although in many respects they are hardly kindred spirits, show us how the creation of fictional worlds depends on a surrounding void from which they emerge. The stories Bourgeois tells about her own work seem at first to position it in the same way as Proust and Beckett’s in relation to childhood memory. However, I argue that it is not Bourgeois’s words, but the images and objects she produces, that give the theme of childhood in her work its metaphorical potential. By the end of this first chapter I will have moved on from metaphor as the basic linking factor between my three subjects, turning to the hints that they offer of the void where such comparisons originate.

The representation of childhood memories is key to structuring and linking my trio’s works, but it is only part of the wider role of their child figures. Each child figure founds a myth of origins, structuring the works: they illustrate the birth and development of an artist figure within a personal creative vision. As well as figuring the beginning of a legend, these children have symbolic importance as metaphors, ranging from Proust’s images of artworks as children, to the metaphors evoked in Bourgeois’s more ambiguous games with childhood scenes and images. At their most familiar the comparisons introduced in this chapter are clichés: ‘getting in touch with your inner child’ and recognizing that ‘everyone has at least one good book in them’. It is of course Proust’s narrator who claims: ‘La vraie vie, la vie enfin découverte et éclaircie, [...] c’est la littérature. Cette vie qui, en un sens, habite à chaque instant chez tous les hommes aussi bien que chez l’artiste.’ [Real life, life at last laid bare and illuminated [...] is literature, and life thus defined is in a sense all the time immanent in ordinary men no less than in the artist.] (IV, 474; VI, 253) For Bourgeois, Beckett, and Proust, however, these ideas are not reassuring truisms. If the inner child and the artwork awaiting creation can be metaphors for each other, it is because they both indicate their origins in a void that defies containment in conscious activity, and which they barely conceal.

In Beckett, as in Proust, explicit dialogue between memory and fiction enables narrators to speak. Beckett is more akin to Bourgeois, however, in revealing the endless metamorphosis, destruction and rebirth of forms as a deforming force against the ordering force of language. Yet Beckett’s characters as literary constructs, unlike Bourgeois’s artworks, are trapped in language. Nowhere is this clearer than in their relationships with child figures, including the children they may or may not once have been. These paradoxical relationships work as metaphors for the works’ relationship with their own, unrepresentable origins. In this sense the origin of the consciousness of the fictional characters is not the characters’ earliest memories, but some aspect of Beckett’s own experience: his separation both from his own past and from the world of his works. Proust and Bourgeois reveal the same separation. It is something the reader or viewer can potentially share: we all have limited access to our memories, and to some extent we are the writer or artist’s equals in front of their work, which constitutes its own independent world. In this respect the text or artwork allows us to share the artist or writer’s separation from the origins of their life and of their work. However, as we shall see, all three bodies of work also undermine the sentimental stability of identifying, nostalgically or otherwise, with the idea of a beginning.

Story Time in Proust

Proust’s depictions of childhood make him a landmark in the history of autobiographical, fictional and semi-fictional récits d’enfance [childhood narratives]. Drawing on writers like Chateaubriand and Nerval (Chevalier 2004: 336; see also Proust, IV, 498; IV, 284–85), he went on to influence later writers like the Jean-Paul Sartre of Les Mots [Words] (1964). The late nineteenth century had brought a fashion for autobiographical childhood stories to France, ‘soutenue par une attention nouvelle des politiques pour les problèmes de l’éducation et des scientifiques pour la psychologie, la sociologie, l’ethnologie et l’anthropologie’ [supported by new areas of focus: education-related issues, for politicians; psychology, sociology, ethnology and anthropology, for scientists] (Chevalier 2004: 336). Proust builds on this tradition: ‘Conformément à la tradition du dix-neuvième siècle, le poète, dont le modèle est Orphée, doit avoir traversé les Enfers. L’enfant fantôme auquel l’art seul redonne vie est dès lors chargé de guider l’écrivain dans la lecture de soi, de son livre intérieur dont il semble détenir les secrets. C’est là ce qui différencie Du côté de chez Swann des récits d’enfance qui le précèdent.’ [In keeping with the nineteenth-century tradition, the poet, whose model is Orpheus, needs to have crossed the underworld. The ghost child whom only art can bring back to life must, from now on, guide the writer in his reading of his own self, of his inner book whose secrets he seems to hold. This is what makes Swann’s Way different from the childhood narratives that came before it.] (Chevalier 2004: 337) Proust’s originality in this respect gives us our point of departure: his mythology of childhood as the beginning of a writer’s life. Reading and writing are central: from the child’s earliest reading experiences, to the adult’s decision to begin his own book in Le Temps retrouvé [Time Regained].

As a child the narrator longs to be a writer. This desire is inseparable from his physical and mental hypersensitivity: ‘mon manque de volonté, ma santé délicate, l’incertitude qu’ils projetaient sur mon avenir’ [my lack of will-power, my delicate health, and the consequent uncertainty as to my future] (I, 12; I, 12). This in turn accentuates his dependence on his family. For them, he needs to strengthen his body and his will (I, 11; I, 10), but for the self-proclaimed aesthete Legrandin he has a soul ‘d’une qualité rare’ [of rare quality], ‘une nature d’artiste’ [an artist’s nature] (i, 67; I, 80). The narrator’s desire to write is therefore inseparable from his parents’ concern over his fragility, and from that trait with which he struggles throughout La Recherche, his absence of ‘volonté’ (I, 12; I, 12). The child sometimes hopes his father will organize his literary career (I, 170–71; I, 207). However, this leads to disillusion and a sensation ‘du néant de ma pensée’ [of the nullity of my intellect] (I, 171; I, 208). The narrator internalizes his parents’ desire for him to conquer his inertia: writer and good son become inseparable roles. As the connection between writing and family life persists, it prolongs his childhood. His newfound resolve in Le Temps retrouvé is not an escape from this dependence. On the contrary, his novel becomes an account of the ‘bad’ son’s life he sees himself as having led (IV, 465, 484; VI, 243–44, 264).

Even though he feels talentless, the young narrator finds that some sensory impressions seem to be hiding something (I, 176; I, 214). Having to rejoin his family (ibid.) interrupts his reveries; family life is a limitation, but a welcome one (I, 177; I, 215). Later, desperate to convey his impression of the Martinville steeples but having nobody to speak to, the narrator writes it down (I, 178–79; I, 216–17). Yet he is in a coach taking the family back home (I, 177; I, 215). Despite the solitude it demands, the writing episode takes place within the family environment. The piece instantly becomes separate from him: he is ‘débarrassé de ces clochers’ [relieved of the steeples] and their secrets (I, 180; I, 218). The narrator quickly returns to his younger self’s childish bedtime anxieties (I, 180–81; I, 218–19). Within this mythology it is only as a memory, filtered through the complexities of adult experience, that childhood can generate literature. Consequently, when the adult narrator reproduces his Martinville piece, he frames it with bizarre claims: ‘Je ne repensai jamais à cette page’ [I never thought again of this page] (I, 180; I, 218). This ‘never’ clearly does not take us up to the present. But we also rediscover this page presented to an indifferent Monsieur de Norpois in À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs [Within A Budding Grove] (I, 447; II, 30). Similarly, the narrator evasively says he has made some revisions to the passage (I, 179; I, 217). It is unclear whether these changes relate to the narrator’s concealment of his identity, his embarrassment over his younger self’s style, both of these or something else altogether. In any case, as the narrator prepares to conclude these reminiscences he summarizes them as the impressions of a dreaming child (I, 181; I, 220): in order to structure his narrator’s account of his emotional and intellectual development, Proust contains this early experience of art and creativity within the transitional stage that is childhood. It is only in Le Temps retrouvé that these experiences take their place in the narrator’s creative vision. He recalls ‘obscure impressions’ (IV, 456; VI, 231):

déjà à Combray je fixais avec attention devant mon esprit quelque image qui m’avait forcé à la regarder, [...] en sentant qu’il y avait peut-être sous ces signes quelque chose de tout autre que je devais tâcher de découvrir, une pensée qu’ils traduisaient à la façon de ces caractères hiéroglyphes qu’on croirait représenter seulement des objets matériels. [...] [Q]u’il s’agît d’impressions [...] ou de réminiscences [...], il fallait tâcher d’interpréter les sensations comme les signes d’autant de lois et d’idées.

(IV, 457)

[already at Combray I used to fix before my mind for its attention some image which had compelled me to look at it, [...] because I had the feeling that perhaps beneath these signs there lay something of a quite different kind which I must try to discover, some thought which they translated after the fashion of those hieroglyphic characters which at first one might suppose to represent only material objects. [...] [W]hether I was concerned with impressions [...] or with reminiscences [...], the task was to interpret the given sensations as signs of so many laws and ideas.]

(VI, 232)

Within the legend that the narrator develops, emotional and creative failures associated with family life overshadow childhood attempts at literature. The child wants to find a subject with infinite philosophical significance (I, 170; I, 207). Instead, the text tells the story of his failure to do so: ‘je ne voyais plus que le vide en face de mon attention’ [my consciousness would be faced with a blank] (ibid.). Proust thus delays revealing the full significance of his narrator’s childhood memories until Le Temps retrouvé. As Jacques Rancière explains:

La forme du récit d’apprentissage est [...] un trompe-l’œil. [...] Le chemin du savoir et le chemin du devenir-artiste n’ont pas de raison de se rejoindre jamais. Pour qu’ils se rejoignent, il faut que la sensation épiphanique joue son double rôle d’événement de [...] conversion [...] et de fleur japonaise qui contient le livre en puissance.

(1998: 162)

[The form of the Bildungsroman is [...] an optical illusion. [...] There is no reason for the path of knowledge and that of becoming-an-artist to have to cross. They cross only when the epiphanic sensation plays its double role as the conversion-event that stops infinite wandering and as the Japanese flower that contains the book in potential form.]

(MS, 162)

The child as writer-to-be becomes a doubly mythical figure: personally, for the narrator, and more generally, for his readers as they make their way through La Recherche.

This is true of what he reads as well as of what he tries to write. Through the content of his books and a disappointing meeting (I, 537–38; II, 139–41), the imaginary writer Bergotte informs the narrator’s developing attitudes to literature. Proust’s description of the child reading Bergotte’s novels in the garden, for example, sets out one of the novel’s main preoccupations, the relativity of perception:

Quand je voyais un objet extérieur, la conscience que je le voyais restait entre moi et lui, le bordait d’un mince liséré spirituel qui m’empêchait de jamais toucher directement sa matière; elle se volatilisait en quelque sorte avant que je prisse contact avec elle, comme un corps incandescent qu’on approche d’un objet mouillé ne touche pas son humidité parce qu’il se fait toujours précéder d’une zone d’évaporation.

(I, 83)

[When I saw an external object, my consciousness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, surrounding it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever touching its substance directly; for it would somehow evaporate before I could make contact with it, just as an incandescent body that is brought into proximity with something wet never actually touches its moisture, since it is always preceded by a zone of evaporation.]

(I, 98)

The child reader’s experiences recalled by the adult prepare the reader doubly for the rest of La Recherche. They stress the separation between consciousness and the outside world (ibid.), and the way fictional worlds seem to possess a greater reality than this outside world (I, 83–84; I, 99–100) while holding the secret of a mysterious ‘truth’ (I, 83; I, 99). Proust encloses the child figure in reflections on literature and perception. This transforms childhood reading into a myth of origins for the narrator, but also for the reader: it prepares the ground for the novel’s immense synthesis of metaphors and fictional m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Editions of Beckett and Proust
• Translations for Other Sources
• Introduction
• 1 The Inner Child and the Inner Artist: From Cliché to Compulsion
• 2 Cells, Cylinders and Cork-Lined Rooms: Confining Childhood Memories
• 3 Childish Things: Childhood Objects in Text and Space
• 4 Memory and Metamorphosis
• 5 Minimal Figures
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index