La Règle du jeu differs from L'Age d'homme in one immediately obvious respect. L'Age d'homme builds up a composite image of the subject from a relatively static position governed by the ego. The thirty-year span of La Règle du jeu, however, is spread over four volumes, and as a result the autobiography not only charts the forces acting on the structuration of the self, but is itself profoundly affected on a formal level by such forces. This can be seen most immediately in the different organization of material in each volume, as the autobiography works towards a coincidence of artistic construction and living circumstance, only to shatter into a less ambitious ‘constellation’ in the final volume. Biffures thus has eight chapters, each one marking a stage in Leiris's linguistic education. Fourbis has three chapters, dealing with Leiris's attempt to engage increasingly with the world. Fibrilles collects four numbered sections under one delirious heading, ‘La fière, la fière … ’, as it seeks to fuse the subject-in-language and the world into one revolutionary énonciation. Frêle Bruit survives in the wake of the crisis point and failure through which we pass in Fibrilles, offering a constellation of passages whose structural logic is given over to a ‘marvellous’ confluence of self and world, rather than to the more ambitious and willed programme of recapitulation and conclusion originally envisaged under the title Fibules.