PROUST’S CONCEPTION OF NATURE
by Eva Maria Gerstel
Proust’s conception of nature is based entirely upon the fact that physical
realities can represent psychic realities. His is a nature assimilated into the
innermost being of an observer and made part of his personality, rather than
perceived merely from the outside by the intelligence of that observer.
Nature for Proust depends entirely upon the observer and his inner reality;
it is not an outer reality fixed and determined.
If one wishes to distinguish Proust’s treatment of nature from that of the
French Romantics, one may say that Proust does not seek to decipher
nature as a whole, but rather the mysteries of the self through a penetration
of specific objects in nature. He does not present us with a grandiose picture
of nature such as that of Chateaubriand’s Atala, but is quite capable of
imparting through a microscopic study a certain type of grandeur to a
hedge of hawthorn. While the Romantic artist sought through his emotional
being to comprehend nature as a whole, Proust, in the tradition of the
Symbolists, applies his rational faculties in order to comprehend a small
portion of nature.1 This oriental technique of analyzing the most minute
detail of a certain aspect of nature serves to obscure the dividing line be-
tween time and space, and hence lends to nature a four dimensional quality.
On reading Proust we no longer have the impression that nature is used as a
part of the décor, but rather that it is another personnage of the work.
Marcel, the protagonist of the novel, conceives a true physical love for the
hawthorn; he wants to penetrate the essence of the flowers as if they were
human beings; he talks to them as if, in effect, they could answer him.
Proust no longer cares as the Romantic did what he experiences in respect
to nature, but rather how he experiences nature itself. No longer does the
author receive consolation from nature, nor does he suffer from nature’s
indifference toward his fate, but considers it as an extension of his own
being.
Ortega y Gasset refers to Proust as “the inventor of a new distance be-
tween ourselves and the world of things.”2 For instance, the sea and
Albertine’s face drift together to form a whole; Marcel would transform
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