This grammar can only be cyclical and subjective for desire overwrites words: "Such an abundance of light wea(i)thers the gaze. Eyes darken like a memory. Everything about this woman attracts me and words become rare. Imperative grammar incendiary" (31). Desire is focused through the lens of a lover's eye and, as such, makes the reader an active part of the envisioning of the image that both is the text and that the text constructs. Pleasure for Brossard is transparent:
What makes it [pleasure] difficult is total and irrevocable consent; this transparency the body carries within itself like a personal history it relives in a decisive gesture. This gesture may be the movement of a hand toward a breast, the body or even to touch the sex directly. There is always clothing that intervenes and con/forms exactly to the tension of skins concentrating extremely" (27).It is the reader's role that projects the virtual woman into the third dimension of Brossard's language, the holographic hyperfiction. (Michel Bernard defines the hypertext as the third dimension or volume of language, 5). Required to participate in the visualization of the multidimensional woman appearing in her many facets over the course of the text, the reader is an element of the text, simultaneously witnessing the construction of and constructing the three-dimensional woman as a potential projection or reflection of the "text/ured hypothesis" (52) of the reader herself in a hypothetical future. The reader's decisive gesture of desire is this act of visualizing the naked body beneath the clothing of the text's words.
The reader becomes the 'author' of the textual image more than just through the act of reading, for the novel turns an ambiguous address outward, speaking (perhaps to the five lesbian characters in the text or) to the reader directly: "intonation, intention of desire: it is reflected. Holographed bodies in the entrance hall. We enter. On the living room table, some typed sheets. Is it your manuscript?" (original emphasis; 120). The reader is thereby reflected in these pages, drawn in through the mirror of subjectivity. With the reader's role in constructing the novel each individual visioning of this text is privileged, refusing a single definitive reading. The narrative fragments that refuse to shape themselves into a linear story operate as a hologram, "a combinatory in which each unit is constantly redeveloped in new combinations" (Godard "Preface" 7). As we learn during a visit to the Museum in the text, "in HOLOGRAPHY, the principle element is the method of lighting" (original emphasis; 25-26) just as light is the narrative thread we must follow around the turns of Brossard's visual labyrinth.
Picture Theory could be viewed as an "album" of images in the same vein as Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and, like Wittgenstein, who "broke the conventions of linear reference by his use of language," both Wittgenstein and Brossard also work "within the constraints of printed text as a physical marker for information and meaning" (Liestøl 90-91). Brossard appropriates the book as an embodiment of the unspeakable voice and gesture of desire and 'she'--the merged subjectivity of narrator and reader--simultaneously flows like light as she is light. The holographic woman is re-visioned from all sides in each section of the text, literally allowing the reader and her to see anew as she emits a light with a heat that curls the mind's vision around the unspeakable image: the body of desire as a utopian future that can only be imagined.