Embora o romance Em busca do tempo perdido seja incontestavelmente uma obra inacabada, não se trata, entretanto, de uma obra incompleta. Seu fechamento circular, promovido pelo diálogo entre o primeiro e último volumes, foi tema de grande parte da crítica proustiana. Com relação à sua composição, seu processo escritural passou por diversas mudanças e a construção, equiparada à execução de uma catedral, poderia igualmente ser caracterizada pela colagem, montagem ou costura dos fragmentos textuais esboçados nos setenta e cinco cadernos de rascunho. A busca pela unidade em meio a essa profusão de textos levou o escritor à atividade incessante de releitura e reescritura e, consequentemente, ao inacabamento da obra. O trabalho que ora apresentamos tem por objetivo o estudo dessa composição, a partir da leitura e análise dos cadernos 53 e 55, ambos consagrados à elaboração da história de Albertine. / Although the novel In Search of Lost Time is certainly unfinished, it is not an incomplete work. Its round ending, promoted by the dialogue between the first and last volumes, was the subject of much Proustian criticism. With respect to its composition, its writing process has gone through many changes and the construction, equivalent to the execution of a cathedral, could also be characterized by the process of montage or the stitching of textual fragments contained in Prousts seventy-five exercise books. The search for unity amongst this profusion of texts has led the writer to the ceaseless activity of rereading and rewriting and thus to the incompleteness of the work. The analysis presented here is aimed at studying this composition, having the reading and the analysis of exercise books 53 and 55, both related to the elaboration of the story of Albertine, as a starting point.

Le seul vrai livre, pour Proust, est la traduction des impressions perdues dont la trace subsiste dans notre mémoire sensible. Les personnages entrent dans le texte de la Recherche en frappant la sensibilité du héros. Or, « toujours déjà là, » la grand-mère, comme la mère, relève d'une réalité qui ne s'est jamais imprimée, une réalité antérieure à la conscience du narrateur et de ce fait, antérieure au texte. Néanmoins, la grand-mère est une mère qui vieillit et qui meurt. Alors, elle apparaît au narrateur, suivant ainsi le chemin inverse de l'altérité. De présence immédiate pour le héros, il lui faudra devenir autre, une vieille femme étrangère, indéfinie dans son geste vers la mort, afin que le texte lui restitue une première impression. C'est précisément dans cette distance à parcourir, cet itinéraire entre l'immédiateté du départ et la première impression, que la spécificité du personnage de la grand-mère touche à ce que Proust qualifierait lui-même de « névralgie » de son texte. La réalité maternelle, pour devenir objet du style littéraire, doit se plier au trait de l'écrivain. Or, le personnage de mère, telle qu'il est élaboré dans la Recherche, résiste à ce « fléchissement ». Le personnage de grand-mère permet à Proust d'exprimer la réalité de la mère qui se dégrade et qui meurt, une mère que la main du fils devenant écrivain rend malléable. / According to Proust, the only true work is one translated from lost impressions, still sustained in our memory of senses. Characters enter the text of the Recherche by hitting the hero's sensibility. However, the grandmother, toujours déjà là (always already there) like the mother, belongs to a reality that has never imprinted itself, a reality that is anterior both to the narrator's consciousness and to the text. Nevertheless, the grandmother is a mother who ages and dies. Then only she appears to the narrator, but in reverse direction to the general introduction of alterity. She must become another woman, old, unknown, and indefinite in her gesture towards death in order for the text to give her back a « first impression ». It is precisely in this distance - which is also an itinerary - between the immediacy from the beginning and this first impression, that the grandmother's specificity approaches what Proust would call a neuralgia of his text. In order to become an object for literary style, the mother must bend (se plier) to the writer's stroke. Yet, the mother character, as it is elaborated in the Recherche, seems to resist this bend. The grandmother character allows Proust to express the reality of the mother's decay and death, a mother made malleable by the hand of a son becoming a writer.

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