PROUST’S CONCEPTION OF NATURE
31
It is important to note that Marcel is in the carriage of the Marquise de
Villeparisis, whose presence prevents him from concentrating on the trees
entirely. It will be the marquise who introduces him to the Guermantes5
clan, the clan and the society which will distract him from his work for so
many years, and which he will have to deny before he can give full expres-
sion to his art.
In conclusion, it can be said that Proust’s treatment of nature in the first
volume of the Recherche, and thus throughout the rest of the novel, can be
divided into several categories: (1) His is not an intellectual approach,
which would obscure the essence of nature; in the true impressionistic man-
ner, he perceives it only through his senses and then assimilates it to his
own being in order to make it part of himself. (2) The scenery around
Combray is used to portray the mental states of the young Marcel, spatial
distances being equal to mental distances. (3) The minute study of the
lilacs and the hawthorn is also a minute study of the affective nature of a
young boy on the threshhold of adolescence, about to embark on his first
experience of love. (4) Finally, nature is present in the work to convey
an aesthetic theory: the trees of Tansonville attempt to awaken the slumber-
ing artist within the young man. Nature for Proust is never an isolated
factor of the novel; it is integrated into all the themes of the work. Since
Proust does not believe in a discontinuity between life in the outside world
and that in the mental world, he is able to integrate nature into his being
so as to make it a part of his “moi-successifs” and to portray spiritual
realities. Nature has become a means to know and penetrate the self.
NOTES
1. Heinrich Henel, "Erlebnisdichtung und Symbolistnus," Deutsche Vierteljahres-
schrift, XXXΠ, 1958, p. 82.
2. As quoted by Martin Turnell, The Novel in France (New York, 1958), p. 329.
3. Marcel Proust, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, ed. de La Pléiade, Vol. Ill (Paris,
1954), p. 693.
4. In Jean Santeuil we already find Jean attracted to the lilacs and the hawthorn.
The significance of these flowers is sketched out in this work of the very young
Proust. See Jean Santettil (Paris, 1952), Vol. I, pp. 136, 203-210.
5. Proust, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 112.
6. For Sartre things receive their meaning from man. The most primitive way of
knowing a thing, the not-self, is by consuming it. Through this act the object
becomes part of the subject and receives its existence from the latter. “Connaître,
c’est manger des yeux. . . . Dans le connaître la conscience attire à soi son objet
et se Tincopore; la connaissance est assimilation; . . . Ainsi y-a-t-il un mouvement
de dissolution qui va de l’objet au sujet connaissant. Le connu se transforme en
moi, devient ma pensée et par là même accepte de recevoir son existence de moi
seul.” Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Etre et le Néant, (Paris, 1943), p. 667.
7. Proust, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 136.