It might be more productive for us as readers to look at Picture Theory as a non-electronic hyperfiction in which images rendered in language act as visual links to other parts of the text and to other texts. It is by virtue of its words more of a holofiction than a hologram, however rooted in the image and the Imaginary. Morphed into a radical discourse, the visual is necessarily an integral element of Brossard's lesbian grammar. Cycling through a montage of images instead of following a linear narrative, the book constructs networks of propositional spaces with common elements that make explicit the visual nature of desire as a creative act. Through the refusal of a narrative outside of these inter-connected images, Brossard invites the reader to construct her own plot--just as hyperfictions do--and her own visual trajectory of female desire.
In a daring experiment, Brossard's text moves "backwards" (Moyes 214) to finish with the completed hologram that the first three-quarters of the book constructs and depicts. Like the hologram, each section of the narrative contains all of the elements of the whole, but we cannot 'see' the whole image until the final section. What we arrive at is the lesbian as an icon of virtual clairvoyance, "the woman through whom everything could happen" (147). Brossard makes the lesbian visible in the erotic act of reading, writing, and loving in a utopian (or virtual?**) context, making her apparent in the light of seeing and being seen. The reader is transformed not only into an active participant within her pages, but also into a dynamic part of the content--as a reconstruction and re-visioning of classic lesbian texts by writers like Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein within this framework is affected by a reader's own prior interpretations. Readers engage in a collective project to create the lesbian in the act of performing her words, her desire on the textual skin of her lover.
The title Picture Theory evokes Wittgenstein's statement that "a proposition is a picture of reality," but reality--and clearly women's reality--is an extremely subjective vantage point. Brossard celebrates and embraces the multiplicity of subjectivities that is projected through the magic of words.
*Eduardo Kac, the holopoet, for example, first began experimenting with holopoetry in 1983 (Kac "Holopoetry" 185).
**Brossard's most recently translated novel, Baroque at Dawn (1997), experiments with virtual reality as a lesbian environment.