The landscape refers firstly to a pictorial genre that has nature as its main object. In literature, it means a representation of the land by way of writing. For the Romantics, the landscape was an experience of going out of oneself and expending into the world. Motivated by the positivist and materialist current of the age, the realists considered the landscape as an accurate and faithful representation of things. On the other hand, for the Symbolist school, the landscape exists exclusively in the inside of the spirit and acts only as a mirror of the soul. Impressionist painting tries to capture in a moment the effects of light just as it reflects on the eyes. Coming after the Romantics and the Realists, contemporary with the Symbolists and the Impressionists, Proust must have been sensible of this polyvalent aspect of the landscape. The latter is thus for us a key-motif to understand the changes of Proust’s aesthetics along with the formation of the writer. Indeed, from the early writings to À la recherche du temps perdu, one can notice the inflating meanings attributed to landscape, which, in return, transforms and reforms itself under the influence of the writer’s experiences, travels and encounters with artists, aesthetes and poets. My purpose here is to evaluate how Proust progressively found his own balance between interior and exterior landscapes. Such a dialectic will finally be related to the major theme of his ultimate novel. In À la recherche du temps perdu, the landscape works as a revealing pattern of the literary vocation of the hero, which determines the very structure of the novel. Proust attempts to demonstrate how the hero comprehends landscape and successes to express his life-long groupings of perception.
