[In the following interview, Brossard discusses the form and major themes of her novel Picture Theory, and its relationship to her other work.]

[Canadian Fiction Magazine:] Firstly, why did you return to an English expression by an Austrian writer, Wittgenstein, in a Québecois novel that deals with language?

[Brossard:] In Amantes, I had already used the expression "Picture theory" for its intriguing, aesthetic qualities, if I may use those terms. It's an expression that fascinated, seduced me. On the one hand because of the word "picture," and on the other because of the word "theory." Little by little I got to know the works of Wittgenstein. So "Picture theory" could be rendered by "picture of reality" or "painting of reality." I don't think the word "theory" can be translated by the same word in French, not in that expression anyway. I was intrigued and probably got my first inspiration after reading: "one can not express reality, one can only show it." That's why I wrote in the last chapter: "Language is a spectacle of what we can not imagine as such." The only way I could express the spectacle of the unthinkable was by the grammatical intervention of the feminine plural. I am inspired by the works of Wittgenstein in much the same way as by the works of Barthes, among others. So much reading has stimulated my research, my examination of language and its fictitious reality. For instance, I am interested in tautology and its relation to sense and nonsense, and I intend to work on that among other things as a follow-up to the paper I presented at the conference on "The emergence of culture in the feminine." as well as on the reading of the works of Gertrude Stein, which function according to that principle. Wittgenstein is important as a stimulus support, but so is the idea of the hologram, which applied to writing prompts me to want to explore a word, an idea, a concept in order to grasp all its dimensions. Just as I have to explore my own subjectivity.

In the whole of your works, however, this is still an important innovation: for the first time, you haven't invented It all yourself That brings us back to the intertextuality of the title, which may be metonymical in relation to the workings of your text. One could also emphasize the fact that Wittgenstein didn't choose the titles of any of his books.

But when you talk of borrowing, you mustn't forget that French Kiss is a ready-made expression, as are Un livre, Sold-out, and Suite logique.

Let us move on to the two quotations you use as an epigraph to your novel. The quotation from Wittgenstein in a literal translation might read: "What can be said, can only be said by means of the sentence, and so nothing necessary to the comprehension of all the sentences, can be said." Does this imply a failure of language?

Not a failure; to quote again from Wittgenstein: "The world is everything that happens." One could also say: the sentence is everything that happens. And that surely links up with what I was saying about "Picture theory"—one can not express, one can only show. I would even add: one can not express, one can only write. In that sense it is necessary for the understanding of the word "show." I've continually been playing with enigmas, of which the first and greatest is: how to make a woman appear, how to "show" her through whom anything can happen. This is doubtless why the idea of the hologram is so important in this book: for what is a hologram if not a visibly fictitious reality? And that is the question I asked myself to see if I wasn't, in my turn, going to make another woman appear fictitious. When I want to make a woman appear real. But still, I wasn't able to remove all the images that I had around the hologram and it may well be that without these images, I would not have been able to portray in words her through whom anything can happen. I wanted, at all costs, to avoid repeating that the first woman is a mother. Am I answering the question?

Yes, in as far as you say you want to "show." But this sentence is very striking at the beginning of the hook. It is difficult to integrate with the rest. For the moment, there is still a barrier.

The sentences follow one another and each one creates the whole of the plan by showing the other sentences and being shown by them. Could one understand the whole plan if one expressed it in a single sentence as plan? Each sentence is part of the plan and makes the last chapter, which is the hologram, plausible. The whole book is structured so as to arrive at the writing of this Hologramme. To me, Picture Theory is a novel that I wrote with the feeling of having a three-dimensional consciousness, that is, at a certain point, especially in chapter 4 and even throughout the writing of the text, I had the feeling that for the first time I was experiencing the aerial vision that I've already talked about in other works. I was seeing immediately the semantic, syntactic, grammatical and acoustic effect. At the time of writing this novel I had the feeling of an absolutely extraordinary synthesis. This synthesis was accompanied by an enigma, a feeling of strangeness, just as there is a feeling of strangeness when one sees a hologram. It is "obvious," one sees the object, one knows how the image is produced, but one can't get rid of the feeling of total illusion. Effect, feeling, or emotion cause the resurgence of the enigma or the strangeness that I felt throughout the writing of Picture Theory, while still having the most acute sense of synthesis and precision. I hope the novel will be read as I wrote it, in a continuous to and fro between the pages.

In that sense Picture would be like the illustration paving the way by various means to finally arrive at a definition, a "showing" so that this woman manages, as the last sentence of your book puts it: "in the total illusion of abundance to claim to be perfectly readable."

Yes, but at the same time these are not stages in the sense that "because I know A I will know B, because I know B I will know C." It is quite complex: these are not explanatory or demonstrative markers that work in any linear way (although in certain details or fragments there is some linearness which dissolves completely at the end of the last chapter). I think we have to talk in terms of sentences rather than in terms of stages or milestones. In the term of a sentence keeping in mind both the singular and the plural of "term," could also have been the title of Picture Theory.

Can one say that the repetition and metaphorical use of definitions in the novel have created a sort of hologram, the portrait of this woman one is trying to show, in a fictitious relationship, of course?

I would hope so. I try to portray this woman by considering all subjectivities as well as my own. The choice of one word over another serves to define or to image the logic of the text. For instance, when I say that Sarah Stein is listening to a recording of Schumann. I had at first written Schubert, but logic demanded Schumann because of the sound "shoe" and "man" since the expression the heel of man appears often in the text. It is the text itself that structures its system of images and meaning.

There is also a sort of repetition, a "logical series" in the constant presence of the city. How is this expressed in the novel?

The word city actually has two meanings: the place, and that links up with the feeling one has of life amid the noises and the bodies, the feeling of the place, a sort of cultural sensuality; and then, of course, the city as the business centre, which evokes the institutions. The first chapter, entitled L'Ordinaire, introduces the city by describing it in, and through the concept of darkness (for instance: the subway, the elevator, the black-out of New York, the bars, the entrance halls of the Hotel), the blackness here being associated with the patriarchy, not in contrast to white, but as the absence of light. In the second chapter, which in fact becomes Book One, one enters into the light, supported by a vocabulary heavy in the symbolist tradition: forest, water, sea, angel, helmet, etc. The city, then, is especially evident in L'Ordinaire, but it appears again in chapter 4, La Pensée. Here I am concerned with two things: the city where the writing is taking place (Montreal) and the writing table. The author returns to her writing table and the city is born in the fiction as it develops. Un livre and French Kiss both had similar chapters dealing with the city. I have the impression that with Picture theory (this is what I felt while I was writing) I have produced a synthesis of all the novels I have written. A synthesis of what is working plurally within me.

Where does the first sentence come from: "I am exercising my faculties of synthesis"? It echoes le Sens apparent, Amantes and L'Amèr. The last sentence of L'Amèr here becomes concrete.

We mustn't leave out Un livre, because I believe that everything I consent to as well as everything I reject at a textual level is expressed in condensed form in this book.

In this novel the city is more than just a force—there are also privileged places where privileged things happen Often a kind of homosexuality is connoted. It is striking that the more the characters are in a fringe area inside the city, the more the women-sentences seem free and light—on the island, south of Cape Cod for example. Things are less rushed, less "blacked-out" than in New York. Even at the level of the writing—when the women are around the table one feels a certain freedom in the style and wonders why this is not the case in New York?

The city-centre is homo-ideological, the city is homo-sexist; the island is Utopian, the island is the place of replenishment. But what interests me in the city as well as on the island is that people are thinking. That is why, in all my books, novels anyway, there is always a table. A writing table and/or a restaurant table where people are engaged in discussions while eating, drinking, smoking. Inside, outside around a table. In my work there is always a table and a street. Basically, the places mentioned in the city are almost always mentioned in reference to my view of writing, my desire to write, or to an actualization of the writing. For example, the third chapter is set on an island, but one can also say that the heart of the chapter is set around the table when the five women come together for their meals. The island is a privileged place because it recalls Utopia and because the imaginary world proceeds both from the Utopia and from the books the women brought with them to the island. As far as the writing is concerned, the city demands elliptical writing—one doesn't want to see everything and one can't see everything given the number of stimuli. On the island, time works differently, and the writing reflects this by its fluidity.

Isn't there some danger of isolation in a mythical or Utopian spot, which is more or less what the desert island is, the setting of the emotion in the third chapter? Isn't emotion always somewhere on the fringe?

The male imagination lacks the ability to conceive that women together could re-invent the world (ideas, emotion, sexuality, creativity, games). This inability rubs off on the female imagination. The island, the Utopian spot, thus becomes a challenge for the imagination, for writing. Emotion becomes civilization: one reads, one thinks, one discusses, one writes, one exchanges. The emotion doesn't go in circles, it does have consequences. Utopia is not a dream, it is an emotion.

Don't you feel you could be criticized for not having seen the emotion in New York?

I don't see how. But one could say: "Isn't there a contradiction: you put the women together and you express emotion, and then return a little later in chapter 4 to say that you know little about emotion?" That's true, but in chapter 4 emotion has taken another meaning; it concerns the individual, the narrator, the woman who is writing and who certainly wouldn't be were she not emotion itself. What interests her in emotion is the idea of emotion, the process of emotion. She gives up the emotion of the spoken word in order to write. If she didn't the writing would not be emotion. As for suffering, which she also claims to know little about, this must be seen as a strategic lie that refers us once again to the writing. I know that for many women suffering is at the root of their writing; for me, writing is at the root of writing. That can be neither shown nor is it said.

It must have been impossible to use a setting other than this isolated island for the conversation, the creation of the text, the words and the language, for the emotional creation as well as the definitions (all this filtered by a woman's vision) so that women might isolate themselves to rediscover themselves, to reformulate themselves, in women concepts.

I think this is a reference to what one calls privileged places where privileged people are gathered with whom one can go the farthest distance possible in discussions, thoughts, insofar as one accepts critical and exploratory work. To me, it is clear that women can only be thought by themselves. They must, therefore, avoid anything that acts as a parasite on their thought. Woman's work is produced in chapter I when Florence Derive gives her lecture, but immediately there are distractions. Someone says: "Yes, but men…." There are always interruptions. Discussion does take place, but you can not follow your train of thought. The island, on the other hand, is the place where thought can expand, where time and mental space become other. I say on the island, but I must add "around the table, on the island."

But the real work of research on women and on writing is carried out on this island where the five women meet up, where there is an elaboration, women's words that are neither blocked nor stopped.

Yes, and when the women leave the big house, they are immediately overwhelmed by sexist songs, by the need to negotiate, to deal with the patriarchy; they are caught up again by this atmosphere. Even on the boat, on their arrival, there is a flash: the old reflex, they turn around. They don't just turn toward the flash, but toward the man who is taking the picture. There are all these reminders of the patriarchy. The only place they can really become explorers is around the table on their own. When an anecdote filters in, it is interrupted. For instance, when Oriana tells the story of her life, twelve or fifteen sentences suffice, because for each sentence one can guess the rest.

The concept of abstraction recurs very often in this novel. Perhaps we should talk about it. One particular sentence refers to the relation between emotion and abstraction: "At the source of every emotion, is an abstraction…." And this ends with: "Abstraction is a solution." One thus starts off from an abstraction, which gives rise to an emotion, only to realize that at the end one is returning to the abstraction. Could you elaborate on that?

The word abstraction works just like the title "Picture theory." As a seductive word, a vital enigma. It is linked to the notion of theory, which is also often seen as an abstraction. I see nothing abstract in an abstraction insofar as it is the result of a feeling, an intuition, or an emotion. It is always the result of what appears in the subjectivity of the person who is expressing himself. Abstraction is transcended subjectivity. Once it has been expressed, it becomes the source of emotion because the mystery is resurfacing. Because along the way one forgets one's subjective course. Abstraction is thought-compelling because it is "strangely" familiar. In a word it tells the truth without one really remembering the why. To be afraid of abstraction would be like being afraid of life itself.

One doesn't have all the pieces; one has lost (in the sense of abstracted) some along the way. One only has a conceptualized sign that has lost its subjective embodiment, and given rise to the abstraction….

Little by little, one abstracts the essential from things and from beings. One concentrates on the abstraction becoming motivation and primary motive. In that sense one has lost nothing, but rather eliminated the detailed anecdotes and retained only the idea. This is not easy, but it is exhilarating. That is partly what I mean when I talk of aerial vision and aerial letter. This is something vertiginous, but bedazzling.

Might this word "abstraction" not be the new link with the other books? One suddenly finds this word in the centre, the concrete origin of l'Hologramme. And the hologram one could find at the level of the analysis already in French Kiss, or by allusion in the other texts. In some settings the omnipresence of abstraction as a positive plan, in the general sense, would be something to be avoided. In Picture Theory abstraction is automatically linked to Utopia (and once again the meaning of the word Utopia is altered in relation to Utopia in general, whether one sees it as the Utopia of the counter-culture or as the origin of Utopia). This is where strangely enough the woman appears to exist between abstraction and Utopia. And here is a new link with abstraction, a word that is strictly taboo even among intellectuals, and a notion of Utopia which engenders a definite emotion specific to women in the course of organizing themselves.

I think it is new because here the word is "shown," written. It has its own radiation. I must say this was essential to my plan. For from the real, from reality—for example in the white scene, which is a love scene—I absolutely had to abstract the essential or the light, the aura produced by the two lovers. That is why I end the chapter saying: "we had become vital abstractions." It is only when these women have become abstractions that they can be everything, complete. They can be angels, light, the four elements, etc. I can say that textually, without this scene, I would not have been able to portray "her through whom anything can happen," the woman who "makes contact." In relation to her, the mother is a symbolical by product. Some day one should try to understand why abstraction is so striking to the imagination. I feel that there is something mythical there.

We must talk about integrality and origin, which may have been seen as a passage toward difference.

The notion of completeness and integrity appears in Picture Theory (the woman who appears is complete, inalterable). In Picture Theory there is theoretical work on this question, but it is self-actualized through the fiction. At the origin of words is Man's subjectivity, and as far as we have learned to consume words, we have consumed them with their root. We are now in the process of uprooting ourselves from the subjectivity/objectivity of Man to take root in our own subjectivity that transforms reality. Women have to be at the root of the meaning they give to life, to their lives. Picture Theory is the pleasure of writing, but it is also the question about origin that troubles Claire Derive and the narrator M. V. considerably. In fact, it is the origin of meaning. By what means can one get to the origin of meaning? For life to have a meaning, for life to be accessible by being readable, for it not to be the constant effect of contradiction. To put an end to ambiguity. And that brings us back to the question of sense and nonsense, back to tautology. At the beginning of this novel there is a fundamental question: will the patriarchy take place again? How can we make the word woman be at the root and generate general and specific meaning, be the driving force behind all the reading of all the realities, and plausible at the same time? I would place the turning-point in Skin Screen Utopia when I make this woman appear. I say that this time Claire Derive will speak without an accent to make her through whom anything can happen, appear. I end book 4 with "skin the tongue goes to the brain." For finally this woman has become 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." One can never be complete without first being radically curious about meaning. For women the question of meaning is fundamental because it links with the question of their onto-symbolical existence. For a man, to be or not to be is an incidental phrase because man exists. I would even say he over-exists, he pre-exists through God. For a woman, to be is the question. Thus the fusion of the root and integrality gives the verb to be.

Might there not be another side to concrete abstraction in the dichotomy between an intertextuality with Joyce and the relation with perfectly readable sentences? Usually Joyce is the author who is furthest removed from perfect readability. Might there not be a new synthesis that draws a picture, a new "picture theory"? The reference to Joyce is surprising: why choose Finnegan's Wake if not for the complexity of this novel, a reference to its different styles?

The reference is there. It is like an obsession with a final examination of form and expression, and again also of sense and non-sense. How far can one go with the whole and with detail? One can do almost anything with words. I also thought of Gauvreau; everything retraced as being plausible, letter by letter one can retrace a subjectivity. There is even sense in the nonsense when there is an existential stake. When there is no stake, there are "clownish cats sadly." Writing, when one doesn't think of abandoning it, and I have no intention of that, is its own beginning and end. But an obsession with size must accompany it, an obsession doubtlessly nourished by a who am I in the language that speaks to me internally—by this I don't mean the mother tongue, but a figurative language, so figurative that to live with it, I have to abstract its essential. For Joyce it is Ireland, for me it is Woman. In answer to the question who I am in this language: I am all or nothing. That is why writing exhausts itself at everything, and ends by touching the untouchable body of the language, the grammar. Intertextuality is the memory of the sweat of writing. The sweat that "take pains."

Could one describe this novel as being baroque? One of the characteristics of the baroque is, after all, mobility, changing perspectives.

I couldn't use that term in my plan; it is not one of the dimensions that I am aware of in Picture Theory. I always imagine a great lack of precision in the baroque because of this change in perspective. Whereas with perspective in thought and writing, one always maintains a sense of precision of the image one observes or even of the image one thinks. In an analysis one may see some correspondence with the baroque; but in practice and within the circuit of my imagination the baroque did not serve as an inspiration.

But in the repetition, the plurality, the varying angles, in the question of anamorphosis, one could see the appearance of the woman as a sort of angle. It is interesting that an author doesn't always see all the nays his work can be read. Your resistance to the word baroque is interesting. It is a corpus or an idea from which all women have been removed: there are no famous women architects of the baroque. Perhaps because the baroque is quite near madness, and women, afraid of being surcharged with madness, did not "embark" on the idea of the baroque, while the men do it casually.

I see the baroque as a great exuberance of form and relief. When one works with the hologram, it is the feeling of relief, and not the relief as such, that predominates. It is a game of virtual and real images. Simply the fact of thinking in terms of the hologram and the laser (coherent light) places us in a different relationship with reality, and with forms, which transforms our impression of the world, the knowledge, the learning, the illusion of the world. In terms of energy, this is simple and produces new perspectives and, especially, new dimensions. When one talks about mobility, it would be preferable to use the expression chromatic fringe, that is, the blur of the chromatic fringe. All the references are linked to light, also to scientific dimensions, to work on the use of energy. I think we must be careful not to connote the novel feelings of the 20th and the 21st centuries with other feelings, products of a totally different observation of the body in space, of the eye and consequently of the imagination.

From the perspective of this light, wouldn't the Scène blanche be a libidinous bond, a privileged place?

It is a privileged place that appears in quite an unexpected way. Someone goes to look for a book, and one doesn't know if it is a scene from the book or the white scene on the rug with the arbitrary date May 16. It is a love scene where little of the action is seen or consummated—although I say the opposite in presenting it—a relatively novel scene in our everyday life. It is a love scene, but above all a scene of this light which gives life and completeness, which makes each one of the two women become whole. One witnesses the appearance of the mother, the mirror; one explores nature, the city-centre, the cities through their filled libraries, life, death. One experiences energy in its most concrete, most scientific, most materialized form. It was a desire for synthesis where the whole of life would be given. Everything is concentrated here. These words meant nothing as long as I wasn't writing the text. There again is cliché whose meaning is turned around: it can be a hand that directly touches the breast or the clothing or the genitals. It isn't necessary that this happen very gently to contrast with the cliché of brutality. Anything can happen. There is something else that accompanies this scene: the idea, the abstraction, the concept, everything we experience in real or abstract terms.

Could the Scène blanche be the origin?

Exactly. It is the spiritual birth, which, at that point, can only be expressed by poetry and which, although apart, is all-pervasive. It is a scene of concentration, of meditation, expressions that I use in Amantes.

The scene appears sporadically, especially in the chapter L'Ordinaire, and acts as an important counterpoint allowing the utopia of Skin Screen Utopia to come to light, a counterpoint taken up again in the whole, hut this time as a hope of l'Hologramme come true.

This scene does in fact haunt the whole book. In the first chapter it is already there, almost announced, then it becomes more concrete. Then it is put aside a little, but it actually nourishes the whole text to arrive at myself—writing, to give birth to this woman—not as a mother but as a writer, in a relation to words, in their organization. She can be born, can exist, can take her whole place.

Could this be le Centre blanc of poetry? In the story it would become a Scène blanche?

It is true that le Centre blanc is the first collection I wrote, in the belief that in writing one could express the essential. That one could really say the ultimate about life, that poetry could satisfy the expression of that energy. In Scène blanche it is basically the same process that makes me want to express the essential. Here it occurs between two women and will create words as a result, will give rise to other words which will make this woman appear, at the same time abstract, real, fictitious, concrete and carnal. It is fundamentally the same principle. Just now I said it was the same obsession that gave rise to Un livre, and to the inserts in French Kiss and in Sold-Out. I think the Scène blanche comes from the same search for the essential, the energy of the subject as in le Centre blanc. The same person did write the two texts.

There is something almost subliminal about the story (almost in the perverse sense used in advertising) that treats the women's issue in a new way, and by super imposition, by images like those in the hologram, actually makes us believe in the existence of this utopian testimony about the necessary existence of women in history.

That is a very perverse question. It is true that the word "sub-liminar" has been very important. The question has been there throughout the text. But what does it mean? It means that one has perceived something as a truth and that suddenly one has lost track of what was true (the working of the hologram). However, instead of being in front of us, this truth is in our heads. It has been recorded. I am sure that in the writing of this text, the subliminal is at work. It works especially by the repetition and the appearance of words like "abstraction" (sometimes where they are not expected) and by the linking of words like "emotion," "feeling," "idea," "concept," then by a sort of geographical environment of words like "the city." "the water," "the desert," "the mountain," and finally by a certain number of references to "heel," to "helmet," etc. All that is at work. But every time it reappears, it does so in a meaningful way, so that one can not help but recall that "it's been here before." Even if one feels one has forgotten, it crosses the different levels of consciousness.

Like the word Skin Screen, which has a vast range of meaning. The screen can be a net, a veil; it can hide, it can unveil, it can allow something to pass, to escape, etc. The order of the subliminal certainly enters in that sense.

I even say that "when you have a room of your own, you can still screen a corner of the room." I have a room of my own, but not in order to unveil everything; it is also in order to have a screen and I need to cross it, to attract Michèle Vallée ("I knew that the screen behind her would be lowered"). There again it is a question of virtual and real images, or of images to be guessed or suspected. The screen of the skin is also very important. The skin is a screen filled with images which provide sensations.

In advertising, the subliminal sets out to convince. Isn't this aspect dealt with in the most "subliminal" way in Picture Theory? This seems to be a new aspect in relation to the theoretical aspect expressed in l'Amèr.

That is why I could not call this book theoretical fiction as I did l'Amèr. Picture Theory is a book that prepares for theory. I think that all fictional writing works with the subliminal, whatever its quality or its mediocrity. When I say, for instance, "one word rather than another at the speed of light," it reflects the subliminal trait of thought and of writing. That also explains the terror we have of losing our manuscripts. Every writer is himself the "victim" of the subliminal in his texts. It is true to say that the subliminal is at work—I would even draw attention to it by virtue of the fact that this process reflects what in me tries to rise onto the screen of my thought. The chapter of the Hologramme is in a certain way the visual moment when the image finally stays fixed on the retina long enough to no longer be an illusion. "Shown," it is perfectly readable. The whole of Picture Theory is the story of the implementation of this image, in other words, everything was written so that I might capture a clear image of her through whom anything can happen. An image that is clear, complete, three-dimensional, inalterable.

The work of writing is thus done in transparent strata and this produces the movement of reading (which refers back to the working of the hologram). How then, can one find in this book the markers that indicate the other works? Does Picture Theory function as a condensation of the thought processes of writing and of feminism?

Yes, I think it is a synthesis of my method of writing from a feminist consciousness, from lesbian emotion and thought that open into essay and poetry. When I look at Picture Theory, I realize that the first chapter could have been a page from Un livre. The second, although it is different from Amantes, could be the moment of Amantes; but it works differently. It goes beyond sensuality, beyond sexuality, it joins le Centre blanc in the way we already discussed. It moves on into a transcendent, even philosophical dimension. The third chapter is what appears in Sold-Out, French Kiss and le Sens apparent, in other words, there is always this attempt to write a chapter with a subject-verb-complement as in the inserts of Sold-Out and French Kiss, or in the fluid writing of Sens apparent. It is the temptation of the always disputed, always diverted story. I very seldom consent to the subject-verb-complement or to the anecdote. I have played on the present and the imperfect tenses which create quite a different relationship between very fluid sentences. I played on a certain number of clichés like "the obscure clarity." Chapter 4 is in my usual style. Chapter 5 is quite novel in terms of breathing and rhythm. This is a synthesis which in a different way could nourish the books yet to come. I am thinking of an essay on modernity, on writing, on feminism and lesbianism, on the imaginary, aerial vision, the hologram, light, etc. On tautology also. Picture Theory is obsessed with the poem, and I have the impression that this word will probably actualize other writing. Picture Theory is a loose novel that examines many dimensions, that is concerned with writing, the women's issues, the ontological existence of women. Strange as it may seem—I have, after all, been talking about it for some time—Picture Theory remains an enigma for me. I know and I don't know what wrote this book. In that sense I think it will be a tool in writing the essay I am planning.