ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how childhood memory causes metamorphoses in the adult body: from Marcel Proust's narrator to Samuel Beckett's dramatic characters, via the ghosts haunting one of Louise Bourgeois's Cells. It compares Proust and Beckett's treatment of the relationship between memory and fiction. Despite the two writers' fundamental differences in this regard, Beckett and Proust's child figures offer similar insights into life's metamorphosis into art. The chapter examines how childhood in Proust and Bourgeois is intimately linked to the workings of an imagination full of metamorphic energy. It argues that the life-art relationship, and the way it posits the works' origin as a logical impossibility, links all the metamorphoses, revealing the fundamental unity of the different myths that they offer. The chapter addresses childhood and fertility in All That Fall with regard to Beckett's 'imaginative universe'. Childhood in All That Fall is part of what Knowlson calls a 'kaleidoscope of images of sterility, decline and fall, suffering and death'.
