This article brings into dialogue Marcel Proust, John Ruskin, and Dénètem Touam Bona through the concept of arboreal figuration. I argue that trees, vines, and vegetal forms function in these writers not merely as natural objects or symbolic representations, but as ‘figures’ in a stronger sense: operational forms that organize perception, memory, thought, and relation. Drawing on Michel Serres’s notion of figures as mediating structures traversing nature and culture, the essay explores the ways arboreal forms shape aesthetic and ecological imagination alike. While Ruskin reads trees as symbolic and structural models for Gothic architecture and medieval spiritual order, Proust treats arboreal forms primarily as phenomenological occasions for aesthetic perception and memory. In Touam Bona’s Wisdom of Lianas, by contrast, the liana becomes a figure of entanglement, marronage, fugitivity, and postcolonial relation. Bringing these perspectives together allows us to reconsider trees not simply as natural objects represented in literature, but as operative figures that structure perception, imagination, and cultural meaning. Arboreal figures reveal a continuity between aesthetic structures and ecological forms. What appears in Proust as a moment of aesthetic perception thus points toward a broader insight: trees organize ways of seeing, remembering, and inhabiting the world.
Jeffrey Burkholder (Wed,) studied this question.