Three-Dimensional Woman

Sight Lines

"I link history to what surrounds me: it is always somewhere else. Archivist or poet on the frontiers of fiction, you will feel, even if all the memory in the world came back to you, your body flinch before the anachronisms, for ever and ever you doubt the reality of books if rashly you look for women in them" (Brossard Picture Theory 125).

The hologram that Nicole Brossard constructs in Picture Theory is a three-dimensional image of the virtual woman. She may be virtual, but she is not alone. Her existence only has meaning as she is reflected back in the women characters' eyes and as they are reflected by her. One of the text's major concerns is with issues of women's subjectivity and, through a network of intertextual references, with images of women in literature. Lianne Moyes says: "By deliberately confusing the texts of [Djuna] Barnes and [Gertrude] Stein (texts the characters are reading) with those the characters are writing, Brossard's text insists upon the role of reading in the production of a text--that is, in the process of coming to write--as well as in the reception of a text. In other words, literary history reads backwards at the same time that it reads forwards" (Moyes 208). The three-dimensional woman who exists in utopian space only has relevance if she is a collective or chorus, mirroring and speaking parts of ourselves, changing how we read and write ourselves and others. While it is "books" that "repeat us, take the form of our emotions" (143), Brossard's characters seek to address the absence of women--and particularly lesbians--in literature.

Like Alice, the characters must actually venture to step through the looking glass before they can realize and visualize the three-dimensional woman's impact, and this act of seeing themselves is shattering, overthrowing the world and perceptions utterly. The new perspective allows them to read in both directions: "Claire Dérive opens me...under the oval of the mirror...recto-verso a book promised backwards and i composed in the scent of the wood the links under tongue so that she speaks" (53). The seeds of this utopian revolution are contained in the shock of recognition, but not repetition: "two women thunderstruck by a s/lashing reversibility" (47). The revolutionary shock is in the versimilitude of the mirror image, in the sensation of sameness without unity where each fragment contains the whole. Repetition, however, does not mean that we read the repeated image in the same way each time for the act of repeating it changes our reading. Here is the realization of true, revolutionary collectivity. This communal vision is echoed in the moment of desire, the ultimate experience of self-reflexive presence in tandem. (This is a literalization of the binocular vision that is required to view the hologram--each eye sees the image differently--that privileges subjectivity.)

Michèle Vallée, a fictional character within the text who is writing fiction, sees this most clearly. She realizes:

...that's what she was seeking in the heart of the aerial letter, that phosphorescence in the night like a permanent feminine presence taking on relief in stone. The image is fluid. Words lapidary. Sense troubled. All reality is condensed in abstraction. Double fluid still, a succession of images visibly of women (without chronological order) three-dimensional, make a proposition.*

*A proposition is a picture of reality, Wittgenstein (Picture Theory 115).

The doubleness of the three-dimensional woman is key because her dynamic nature is fueled by and travels on the two-tongued currents of desire (in the text these are both bilingual and dual). Her hunger is a quest for reflections of her self in the "radiation" of the written word (Cotnoir 129) in the body of the text of a lover. Her hunger is a quest to transcend subjectivity in order to enter the mythical realm of utopia--not by abandoning her self but by reclaiming it. The key to transcendence, Brossard feels, lies in abstraction (Cotnoir 128). Brossard states that the abstract woman possesses the "mental space" necessary "for a contemporary vision" (Picture Theory 167) because she is:

readable, completely. She has become plausible, readable insofar as she is the creation of a feminine (mine and others) and a feminist subjectivity. She is accessible in the philosophical sense of the word: she can actually become her through whom anything can happen. She can generate abstraction, emotion, vitality, energy, "truth" (qtd, Cotnoir 130).

This is only accessible within the realm of a utopian environment. As Larry McCaffery has noted, "purely speculative abstractions ('immortality,' 'illusion') whose 'existence' was tied to matters of semiotics and definition have now suddenly become literalized" in the science fiction genre (qtd, Bukatman 14). Likewise, it is only in the literal space of the utopian text that the abstract woman--who exists wholly outside of patriarchal constructs--can find the courage to step into the three-dimensional mirror of her own textual subjectivity, don the robes of self-possession, and "occupy her thought like a territory" (Picture Theory 183).

"Intention and fervour do not make a text nor a woman of me. It makes the singular body which sometimes borrows correspondence from desire move in double(d) forms. Coincidence. Appearance." (Brossard Picture Theory 17).

Carolyn Guertin