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  • Childhood as Memory, Myth and Metaphor: Proust, Beckett and Bourgeois by Catherine Crimp
  • Rosemary Lloyd
Childhood as Memory, Myth and Metaphor: Proust, Beckett and Bourgeois. By Catherine Crimp. (Legenda Main Series). Oxford: Legenda, 2013. 209 pp.

From metaphor through metamorphosis to minimalism, the child figure in this erudite study serves as a useful optic for considering the works of three apparently diverse yet strangely similar creative artists: Marcel Proust, Samuel Beckett, and Louise Bourgeois. In all three, Catherine Crimp argues, we find a central metaphor, that of the child figure offered as ‘the first emergence of form and consciousness from chaos’ (p. 55). There is nothing comforting, however, and certainly nothing saccharine in the concepts of inner child or structuring force that are unearthed here, in a study that presents the child as an exemplification of the void from which we came and to which we shall return. ‘You better grow up’, as the title of one of Bourgeois’s mirror- and glass-laden cells unsettlingly insists, but there is little to suggest that doing so will free us from the haunting though stifling theatres of childhood, which are full, as Crimp argues, of ‘images of glass and transparency’ (p. 86). Brittle reflectors of our older personae, these child figures fragment or multiply under our gaze, destabilizing what we thought to be a process from chaos to constancy. Even if childhood memory is the bedrock of Proust’s narrator’s personality, games, toys, even food all tend to become threatening and ambiguous: in Bourgeois, children devour their fathers; in Beckett, the food of old age (second childhood) is also that of childhood, annihilating maturity; the little boy playing at soldiers is the sadist beating Charlus. Yet it is childhood that releases the evocative power of language in Proust, enables Bourgeois to create her provocative forms and figures, and is [End Page 584] constantly recalled in the rhythms and sound patterns of Beckett’s writing. Based on an extensive bibliography and drawing on a wide range of philosophical positions while emphasizing that of Maurice Blanchot, this study scrupulously eschews the biographical to focus on the child figures independently of the lives of their creators. The book is beautifully produced, especially perhaps as regards the illustrations of Bourgeois’s work. In general, Crimp writes well, although the repetition of certain phrases, particularly ‘infinitely withdrawn origin’, the ambiguous use of the verb ‘stage’, and ‘gesture towards’ (why not ‘indicate’, ‘suggest’, ‘point to’?) grow irksome. Occasionally, an argument is less than convincing — take, for instance, ‘a melodrama that is uniquely modern, centred as it is on middle-class childhood and family life’ (p. 69), where at the very least some clarification is required — and there are some pretentious statements (‘the space he occupies as a critic is a helpful one for us to visit’ (p. 70)), but elsewhere our reading is greatly enhanced by such pithy expressions as ‘Proust fights forgetting; Bourgeois tames chaos; implicitly, the reverse is also true’ (p. 135). Challenging and original, this is a study that will appeal not just to specialists of these three creative figures but also to everyone interested in narrative, metaphors, and the ways in which the image of the child simultaneously enables and challenges creativity.

Rosemary Lloyd
University of Adelaide
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