The use of the image of the spiral is integral to Brossard's philosophy and her fiction theory, turning up repeatedly in many of her texts. Alice Parker has remarked that in Brossard's writings: "Turning on itself, propelling us toward unsuspected sites, the spiral connects us with our roots, the radical past, and the energy of the present. The lesbian body inaugurates a new cycle" (323). But the trajectory in Picture Theory goes further. The spinning lesbian body breaks out of earth-bound atmosphere, tries to grasp the elements of grammar (88), turns herself inside out (50) and sprouts wings. She is a new kind of language embodied; one of Brossard's character's states, "a letter...would reflect me in two different voices I would be radically thinking like a ray of light, irrigating the root, absolute reality. The generic body would become the expression of woman and woman would have wings above all, she'd make (a) sign" (149). The virtual woman is the letter and the sign, both word and sentence as she retells women's history in images of the body (151) and she can exist only in fiction. In all of her incarnations, she is doubled, multiple, fluid, uncontainable and unspeakable.
Integral to the guiding premise of Picture Theory is the reasoning behind Brossard's use of Wittgenstein's theory that "one cannot express reality, one can only show it" (qtd, Cotnoir 122). Her response was that "Language is a spectacle of what we [women] can not imagine as such" and the only answer to depicting the "unthinkable was the grammatical intervention of the feminine plural" in French (Cotnoir 122). Picture Theory is, as a result, a revisioning of "woman as a complete sentence and source of coherent light" (Picture Theory 175). The novel is an attempt to construct the fluidity of the Imaginary in language as much as to build a feminine sentence. It is not surprising as a result that it traces its origins as much to Gertrude Stein as to Wittgenstein. Twisting off the surface of the page, this body of desire is a three-dimensional, inclusive language that allows woman to speak as she never has before. No longer existing merely as "silence that revolved around an image" (74), her unspeakable thoughts, feelings and desires are embodied in an audible--or readable--form. For, as Brossard states, her virtual woman "had come to the point in full fiction abundant(ly) to re/cite herself perfectly readable (183-184).