Three-Dimensional Woman:

The Visual Discourses of Female Desire in Brossard's Holographic Hyperfiction

Nicole Brossard, one of Quebec's foremost writers, has made it her life's work to render the erasure and invisibility of the female in the French language visible. Woman in language has form and a voice only on the page where her presence is felt in orthographic agreement. She is what is hidden behind the curvature of words--for it is of no small significance that feminine agreement and the feminine plural in French are visible and audible only in writing. In order to find a three-dimensional model for rendering woman in language, Brossard conceived her novel Picture Theory (Montreal: Guernica, 1991) as a textual depiction of a hologram. The holographic image for her is an exploration of the visual as a means of freeing women from the restrictions of patriarchal and linear thought into a more fluid or multi-linear means of representation.

Cycling images in Picture Theory act as thematic links that replace conventional narrative and lead the reader on through the text towards the beginning at the end: the completed 3D image of the lesbian occupying and authoring virtual space. (With each section standing alone, there is no imperative beyond convention that we read the novel in the order it is set out--in fact, the final section "Hologram" has its own copyright page with the publication date cited as 2011, but the rest of the novel only becomes clear with the revelation of the entire image in that section.)

"Thinking of her, visualizing her, was an extreme act of the will"
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

Carolyn Guertin