This chapter focuses on Louis-René des Forêts’s poetic sequence, Poèmes de Samuel Wood (1988) in order to highlight the relationship between poetic form, authorial voice and the genre of autobiography. Des Forêts’s sequence comprises a 559-line poem divided into thirteen sections, attributed by its title to the heteronymous author-figure Samuel Wood. Notwithstanding its form and authorial disguise, the poem is obliquely autobiographical and forms part of the overall project of the long, final phase of his writing, best exemplified by the fragmentary work of 1997, Ostinato. My analysis seeks to stake out a distinctive way of conceiving the relation of poetic form to autobiographical genre (taking a distance, notably, from Lejeunian typological approaches), and in order to do so endeavours, on the one hand, to work with the idea of form as active, dynamic and mobile, a process of forming, deforming and reforming which is always temporally emergent and variable, rather than a structure that might simply contain something like content or experience, and on the other hand, to connect that mobility of form to des Forêts’s pursuit of a distinctive autobiographical mode. Far from reflecting and securing authorial identity, this mode might be considered as one that concerns an impersonal or anonymous level of experience that is fundamentally insecure and ultimately inappropriable; we might think of this mode as a kind of degree zero of autobiography, an autobiography in the neuter, or an ‘autobiographie intérieure’.
Extending the embodied semiotic square: A cultural-semantic analysis of “Follow your Arrow”