Louis-Rene des Forets and Inner Autobiography

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Louis-Rene des Forets (1916-2000) devoted the last twenty-five years of his writing life to an innovative practice of autobiography, spanning poetry and fragmentary prose, and culminating in the key works Poemes de Samuel Wood (1987), Ostinato (1997) and the posthumously published Pas a pas jusqu'au dernier (2001). Ian Maclachlan’s study is the first to take this innovation in life-writing as its principal focus and to draw out the wider resonances of des Forets’s distinctive project for the theory and practice of autobiography. Des Forets’s unusual traversal of genres, formal experimentation, and sparseness of biographical detail give rise to a new mode of abstract, impersonal autobiographical writing. Echoing des Forets’s own, earlier use of the term autobiographie interieure in relation to his short-story collection La Chambre des enfants (1960), as well as his friend Georges Bataille’s idiosyncratic notion of experience interieure, this novel style of life-writing is explored here under the rubric of ‘inner autobiography’.

Ian Maclachlan is Professor of French Literature and Fellow of Merton College, University of Oxford.