Three-Dimensional Woman

New Tricks


Nicole Brossard says that "By 'magic of words,' I mean that which leads to the elaboration of thought and to its emotion, that which transforms, which is the motive force of being, the being that I am or that I could be or yet that I want to be at the point of becoming it in an inalienable present..."
(qtd, Brossard "Access" 8).
The magical nature of the virtual woman in Picture Theory is represented not only by her existence in another dimension but by her ability to project into this one. She inhabits space, time and text/cortex. Swimming in a sea of light where she "breathes words" (144), the three-dimensional woman is quantum paradox made flesh: she is light and emits light, and is both particle and wave. The images we see of her throughout the book function like particle sightings and yet she is simultaneously diffuse, fluid and in motion--difficult to imagine and impossible to speak--both surrounding and being surrounded by the text.

Barbara Godard has identified 'the parallax--the quantum leap'--within the text as an element of the intertextual, critical function of Picture Theory ("Quantum Poetics" 125), but I would argue that it is the generic body of the three-dimensional woman that makes the quantum physics of the text possible. The text itself functions as a parallax, changing the nature of the spatio-temporal event as we view/read its varying perspectives on the virtual woman. She is fluid quantum energy and refuses to be fixed or captured. As follows:

spacetimetextcortex
lightdurationvelocitycharge
holofictionprocesshyperfictionhelix
imagepagevolumecorpus
whitenesstransparencyinvisibilityluminosity

=

One aspect of the virtual woman is Michèle Vallée (M.V.), a fictional character in the text who is writing fiction. She can grasp the idea of the virtual woman and utopia in ways that we as readers cannot. She observes:
Agree is visibly the only verb that can allow verisimilitude here, the transparency of utopian silk/self (in my universe, Utopia would be a fiction from which would be born the generic body of the thinking woman). I would not have to make another woman be born from a first woman. I would have in mind only the idea that she might be the woman through whom everything could happen. In writing it, I would have everything for imagining an abstract woman who would slip into my text, carrying the fiction so far that from afar, this woman participant in words, must be seen coming, virtual to infinity, form-elle in every dimension of understanding, method and memory. I would not have to invent her in the fiction (147).
M.V. demonstrates how Brossard is realizing abstraction as a spatio-temporal event in the text. In other words, M.V. shows us what we are seeing, but only she--and not Brossard--can truly realize it for, the abstract woman can only exist within the parameters of utopia, a fiction. Fiction is "the finishing line of thought" (148) that makes abstraction tangible. It is in M.V.'s language that the feminine plural is made visible and audible, an occurrence in the French tongue (the language Picture Theory was composed in) that is possible only on the page. Language is the catalyst that makes the magic (or the quantum events) in the text operative, and Brossard clearly demonstrates Wittgenstein's theory that "a proposition is a picture of reality" (Picture Theory 115) through envisioning the Imaginary as a corporeal abstraction where "Language is the spectacle of what we cannot think as such (women)" (161). We can only think around the idea of the three-dimensional woman, but our minds can visualize the abstraction. The images in the sentences perform as "limitless visual information running over our bodies at the speed of light" (163) and the text serves up "Anatomical slices of the imaginary: ...virtual like the woman who gathers up her understandings for a book" (153). It is a "magical appearance" (153) when the nature of the metamorphosis is revealed and the virtual "woman could be a complete resonant sentence dreaming a source of coherent light" (175). The abstraction is made visible and the reader can finally see her utopian form, see her as a three-dimensional image, a hologram, in the last section of the text.
"Skin/link: yes, language could be reconstituted in three dimensions beginning with the part so called pleasure where the lesbian body, language and energy fuse..."
(Brossard Picture Theory 165).
Entrances | Retort: Holofiction + Hyperfiction = Magic | Illuminations | Reflections | Chronology | Torsion | Exits | Spirals | Intertexts
Carolyn Guertin