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How much is narratology linked to the corpus from which it was elaborated, the “three-volume Pléiade edition” of À la recherche du temps perdu? In “Discours du récit” as in Nouveau Discours du récit, but also throughout “suite bardadraque” in which he evoked the narratological project, G. Genette attributes to À la recherche du temps perdu a deliberately paradoxical status: that of a work unfinished after the fact. However, can the alternatives of complete novel and unfinished work be indifferent to a “general theory of narrative structures”? We propose here to review all the statements relating to the status of the Proustian novel in order to reflect on the presuppositions of the method and to try to uncover what may constitute one of the hidden postulates of narrative theory.