The third feature of the work's incompleteness is the volume's ending, which remained uncertain for a long time, and which Proust altered again in the late summer of 1913 due to the excessive size of the manuscript. We come back to this in the last session.
We need to reread the first pages of "Combray", putting ourselves in the mindset of the first readers, whose amazement was legitimate, and taking seriously Jacques Madeleine's words: "the only difficult way to give an idea of the work is to follow the author step by step, groping like the blind man we are." Confusing for a long time, before one recognizes oneself in it, the book's opening precisely thematizes, as Proust himself explains to René Blum(Corr., XII, 296), the question of misdirection and recognition.
One enters the novel through a hallucinatory experience: " I myself was what the book was about"; "the subject of the book was detached from me"(RTP, I, 3). There was total confusion with the subject of the book. This lack of subjectivity in the hallucination is to be taken literally, without reducing its strangeness as most readers have done. It will be recalled that, when listening to the sonata in "Un amour de Swann", there is mention of Vinteuil's "insanity", similar to the "madness of a bitch" and that of "a horse"(RTP, I, 211; cf. Carnet 2,fo 19ro [spring 1913]).
Absent from the typing sent by Proust to Grasset in February 1913, the hallucinatory passage on the first page of "Combray" appeared in the margin of the other typing. At this point, the object of identification is stranger: "it seemed to me that I myself was the date of these sculptures". It's likely that the writer had the idea for this hallucination in March 1913, and that it was reported in the closets at the beginning of April.
In the BnF sheets, the narrator compares himself to "the regional school of architecture" and "the style of the regional school of architecture". Missing from this version are the church, the quartet and the rivalry between Francis I and Charles V, which only appear at the next stage, on the Bodmer plates Proust sent to the printer. He therefore hesitated for a long time over the object of the hero's hallucination.
