ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies objects which evoke images of adolescence and childhood and explores how child figures, more than any others, highlight the fundamental tensions structuring the works of Marcel Proust, Samuel Beckett, and Louise Bourgeois. Childhood objects and children's games highlight the gap between wordless sensation, exemplified by remembered childhood sensation, and the arrangement of narrative within space and time. These objects can therefore help one renew or begin the acquaintance with Bourgeois, Proust, and Beckett's work, through the alternative value system that children's toys offer. If consumption in Beckett is indissociable from asceticism, Proust's novel is full of pleasure in food and drink. The chapter describes a sample of Bourgeois's numerous toy-like figures, examining how they beckon viewers to play with the boundaries between art and life. Bourgeois's dolls might prepare one for life in the same way as children's toys give him/her a trial run of the adult world.
