SOURCE: Knutson, Susan. “Text: In Which the Reader Sees a Hologram in Her Mind's Eye.” In Narrative in the Feminine: Daphne Marlatt and Nicole Brossard, pp. 155-68. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2000.

La langue est ce qui nous permet d'acheminer l'image mentale vers la pensée.

—Nicole Brossard, Accès à l'écriture

The first edition of Picture Theory (1982) has a design on the bottom right-hand corner of page 97, showing the corner of the page lifting to reveal a three-dimensional city, its highrises modelled in shimmering white outline against a dark grid. “Enter this book/city,” suggests the picture, “and enter a virtual and three-dimensional world.” The image corresponds to a densely written passage describing the vacationers' last night on the island, during which they negotiate the ninth and richest turn of the spiral: “une nuit parfaite”¹ (112):

À l'autre bout de la nuit, j'allais ouvrir une bouteillle. Les cités convergeaient dans nos verres. Des femmes émergeaient de partout, l'architecture; la somme des lois tournait dans leurs yeux, la vélocité de leur vie, les formes qu'elles s'apprêtaient à prendre: chiffres, herbes, livres, lettres, spirale, première neige.²

(112-13)

The scene contrasts two Brossardian conceptions of the modern city, two urban realities which co-exist. The first, defined in a 1981 text entitled “Pré(e),” is the “la ville … patriarcale jusqu'aux dents”³ (5). The second is the urban environment in which radical lesbian women come together. “[L]es cités convergeaient une à une, convoquées par la fulgurante intuition que nous avions traversant l'histoire de l'art, sagittaires aériennes en voie de transformations”⁴ (PT [Picture Theory] 113). Gazing into their glasses as if they were crystal balls, the five travellers witness Universal Man in the form of straight red arrows which inundate the patriarchal city, wounding women in their bodies and in their vision:

chaque ville était un document qui abondait en flèches … l'homme-flèche. … Les villes, l'orbe lunaire, black out, il nous fallait apprivoiser l'énergie pour éviter que s'installe dans nos membres et surtout dans nos regards, une mortelle immobilité pouvant faire croire à un renoncement.⁵

(113)

Still in the virtual world of their glasses, the horizon is opened by a flash of lightning, and the women walk calmly, in spite of the arrows in their souls, into the virtual city of their feminist desire:

Dans nos verres, un coup d'éclat ouvrant l'horizon sous nos yeux, à même mos corps en état de pensée, dans une position de tir, anticipation mentale, la flèche dans l'eau de l'âme, nous avancions calmement dans les rues désertes.⁶

(113)

The flash of lightning that opens the horizon links this spatial traversal to the night voyage across the continent to the island, identifying it with the primary event. Louise Forsyth argues that the city, like the human being, is a transformative topos of concentrated energy: “la rencontre des femmes fait lever la page sur la cité des femmes”⁷ (Préface [Louise Forsyth's “Préface” to Picture Theory] 23. See also “Deconstructing Formal Space” [“Deconstructing Formal Space/Accelerating Motion in the Work of Nicole Brossard”] 337). The city of women is the virtual site of freedom to be for the “[t]raversières, urbaines radicales, lesbiennes”⁸ (105) of Picture Theory. The women walk into the city on page 97, which rises like a hologram above the streets of New York, Montréal, Buenos Aires, Cairo or Paris—its hieratic metonymy evoking the textual three-dimensionality of Brossard's vision.

Three-dimensionality is an important figure in Brossard's work of this period, and not only in association with the virtual three-dimensionality of the hologram. Everyday, ordinary reality also has three dimensions, and Brossard celebrates every woman's effort to live fully, at any given moment, in all three of them. She writes in the dedication to La lettre aérienne of her desire to understand patriarchal reality and its functions, “non pas pour elle-même mais pour ses conséquences tragiques dans la vie des femmes, dan la vie de l'esprit”⁹ (9). In relating this dedication to the figure of three-dimensionality, we remember the patriarchal limitation of women's physical freedom, not only by extreme practices such as foot-binding and purdah, but wherever the ability of girls and women to exercise freely in three dimensions is constrained by regulations of propriety, safety and morality. In Picture Theory, the character of Judith Pamela accepts patriarchal law, unlike the five protagonists who practise extending women's horizons. Brossard writes,

Il y a dans La Lettre aérienne dix ans de combat contre ce qui fait écran à l'énergie, à l'identité et à la créativité des femmmes. Dix ans de courbes, de graffiti, de ratures et d'écriture afin d'exorciser “le mauvais sort.” Il a fallu me “colleter aux mots” pour que naissent de la bagarre bigarrée des émotions, le flamboiement des spirales et les femmes tridimensionelles qui alimentent mon désire et mon espoir.¹⁰

(9)

These three-dimensional women who nourish desire and hope are related not only to the characters in Picture Theory but also to actual women fighting for women's rights and freedoms around the world. To such women, Brossard offers a mirror which, while it is as provisional as any other representation, is relatively accurate and a welcome relief from the unrelentingly negative portrayals of feminists in mainstream culture. In fact, Picture Theory is full of rather ordinary mirrors which reflect what is: as Brossard puts it, “si le patriarcat est parvenu à ne pas faire exister ce qui existe, il nous sera sans doute possible de faire exister ce qui existe”¹¹ (RI [“De radical à intágrales”] 87).

The figures of the mirror and of three-dimensionality are related to those of the hologram and the three-dimensional text. Narratology describes as three-dimensional any narrative text that includes discourse, or citation, because it implies multiple narrative levels or textual depth. The feminist reader of Picture Theory will see herself repeatedly in the mirror texts of the “discours autour de la table quotidienne”¹² (95). But Picture Theory extends narrative three-dimensionality by signifying holography in all three registers of fabula, story and text. Perspective becomes a function of reading and writing, while mirrors and embedded mirror texts play a key role as part of the holographic mechanism.

Mirror texts share important elements with the primary fabula, signifying the fabula to the reader as to the characters (N [Narratology] 146). An important contrasting mirror text is the fragment of Richard Wagner's Die Walküre, which serves also as a footnote to Oriana's operatic career. Wagner articulates clearly the principles of European patriarchy: the daughter is subject to patriarchal authority on the four levels of her body, her family, her state and her religion: she is dominated by her husband, father, king and god. Because she has rebelled, she is isolated from any community, even the natural one of her siblings:

WOTAN

Did you not hear what I ordained?
J'ai exclu de votre troupe la soeur infidèle;
à cheval avec vous elle ne traversera plus les airs;
la fleur virginale se fanera,
un époux gagnera ses faveurs de femme;
désormais elle obéira à son seigneur et maître,
et, assise devant son foyer filant la quenouille,
elle sera la cible et l'objet de toutes les moqueries.
Si son sort vous effraie, alors fuyez celle qui est perdue!
Ecartez-vous d'elle et restez loin d'elle.
Celle d'entre vous qui oserait demeurer auprès d'elle
celle qui me braverait, prendrait le parti de la misérable,
cette insensée partagerait son sort: cette téméraire
doit le savoir!(13)

(54)

The narratological requirement that a mirror text share a common element with the main fabula is fulfilled by the rebellious figures of the outcast sister and the other, bold woman who stays close to her. Wotan's ordained punishment of isolation images in reverse the feminist community of Picture Theory.

The talk around the daily table is the central mirror text and sign of the novel, as Claire Dérive herself points out early in “L'émotion”: “Nous étions assises autour de la table et Claire Dérive disait que de nous voir ensemble et ici retrouvées au bord de la mer, c'est un signe”¹⁴ (96-97). The women seated together in the house by the sea are a sign of the book and a sign of social change, signifying that the break from patriarchal meaning has been effected, and the second stage, the creation of the imaginary territory or “vacance” to be filled with women's energies, is in progress. The embedded conversations impact causally on the main fabula, producing the energy essential to the primary event. The narrative technique of free indirect discourse blurs hierarchical embedding and underlines the importance of feminist discourse as the irreplaceable model and strategic occasion for the collective feminist practice of semantic divergence in the spiral of political and personal change.

The overarching topic of conversation is, of course, women's trajectory out of patriarchy, making the embedded conversations argumentative and mirroring the intentions of the book as a whole. The conversations move rapidly over a range of theoretical issues associated with the radical feminism of the 1980s, including the concept of matriarchy, the nature of patriarchy and the role of the patriarchal mother, and the resocialization of women's sexual desires. Claire is thinking about a key condition for the creation of the hologram:

Bien qu'elle affirmait que le mot abstraction se glisse quelque part dans sa pensée, elle admettait pour le moment qu'il lui était difficile d'établir un lien direct entre le fait d'être cinq femmes dans une île et la notion même de ce que peut être une abstraction.¹⁵

(97)

Her intuition of an abstraction refers to “l'abstraction vitale” (88) of May 16, which, I have argued, corresponds to Brossard's concept of turning away from negative memory in order to build on what is ecstacy, and new. It also recalls the abstraction through which women, as subjects of language, “lay claim to universality,” as Wittig argues in “The Mark of Gender” (6). Claire develops her ideas further, relating being to utopia:

à la source de chaque émotion, il y a une abstraction dont l'effet est l'émotion mais dont les conséquences dérivent la fixité du regard et des idées. Chaque abstraction est une forme potentielle dans l'espace mental. Et quand l'abstraction prend forme, elle s'inscrit radicalement comme énigme et affirmation. Avoir recours à l'abstraction est une nécessité pour celle qui fait le project, tentée par l'existence, de traverser les anecdotes quotidiennes et les mémoires d'utopie qu'elle rencontre à chaque usage de la parole.¹⁶

(105)

The “je suis” of “La perspective” (76) and “des phrases complètes et abstraites liant la vie et la parole”¹⁷ (96) are also Brossardian responses to this key issue of language and the access to undivided subjectivity.

While Claire's friends don't respond theoretically to her point, they respond in practice, each woman offering her own being, preoccupations and thought:

Oriana se mit alors à parler du temps tout en cherchant ses mots en français pour dire comment elle l'imaginait. Elle dit ne pas comprendre pourquoi, chaque fois que des femmes sont réunies, dans les films par exemple, le temps semble s'arrêter autour d'elles après les avoir figées ou changées en statues de sel chargées de symboles. Oriana, après que Danièle Judith l'eût interrompue pour dire matriarcat, continuait sa description du temps.¹⁸

(97)

In speaking of the deathly effect of the patriarchal gaze on the bodies of women, Oriana refers to the myths of Lot's wife and Eurydice, each woman paralyzed by her husband's gaze. These classical myths, rewritten by Brossard as well as by Marlatt and Wittig, are central to lesbian rewriting of patriarchal mythology. The lesbian is able to lead her lover out of hell—unlike the male lover who betrays her and incorporates her death into a religious symbology. In Picture Theory, the taste of salt is a motif associated with the memory of ancient betrayal. Danièle interrupts Oriana with the talisman of matriarchy to charm away damage to the body and imagination. Later, however, she corrects herself, disassociating the concept of matriarchy from that of utopia: “Danièle Judith disait que le matriarcat est un mot d'anthropologie et qu'il ne peut pas être utilisé d'une manière contemporaine pour exorciser le patriarcat. Ce mot ne pouvait non plus servir à élaborer quelque utopie qui aurait rendu les femmes à leur genre”¹⁹ (101). The developing political critique of lesbian utopianism, discussed in chapter 1, lies behind Danièle's qualifications of the word “matriarcat” as well as Michèle's and Claire's programmatic interventions with respect to ecstasy: “Je voulais dire que l'extase est une réalité en soi qui rend le temps éternel. Claire Dérive affirmait qu'il ne fallait pas confondre la nuit des temps, le temps patriarcal et l'extase”²⁰ (97).

In Picture Theory, ecstasy is related to utopia, and both are feminist issues. As Brossard explains, La lettre aérienne addresses a feminist question to the heart of “des séquences utopiques qui traversent nos pensées, nos paroles et nos gestes”²¹ (9-10). The timelessness of ecstasy, Claire specifies, has nothing in common with the timelessness of women's non-being in patriarchal systems, as patriarchal darkness has nothing in common with night. To imagine otherwise is to identify pleasure with a masochistic annihilation: “de cette confusion naissaient des femmes suspendues et immobiles dans l'espace”²² (97). Ecstasy is part of the utopian program because it is forward looking; it can provide a match for our glimpses of what is not, but what could be. Even Oriana's search for words corresponds to the creation of a screen sufficiently imbued with ecstatic elements that it will be able to interact eventually with the utopian screen. At issue is a quality of emotion:

Nous étions assises autour de la table. … Je disais, avec dans la bouche un goût de sel, à propos de l'utopie en commençant par le mot femme que l'utopie n'allait pas assurer notre insertion dans la réalité mais qu'un témoignage utopique de notre part pouvait stimuler en nous une qualité d'émotion propice à notre insertion dans l'histoire. Avant que Claire Dérive parle d'abstraction, j'ajoutais que nous devions socialiser nos énergies de manière à n'en être point victimes ou encore pour éviter que nos ventres seuls soient méritoires comme une virilité mentale pouvant servir par la suite à meurtrir les corps pensants.²³

(101-102)

Michèle argues that women's energies must be resocialized in order for them to cease to live as victims—a radical argument made convincingly by Monique Wittig in “La pensée straight.” Michèle might have added that such resocialization, if it is possible at all, could never take place in isolation but would require the complicity of others doing the same. Michèle's words metonymically interpellate the reorganized subjectivity of which she dreams. In order to effect the transformation of individual utopian experience into a new symbolic and historical organization of gender, women must generate a new libidinal economy. The ideal point of departure for such an enterprise is exactly where these characters are, around the table sharing language and energy. The repetition of the phrase “nous étions assises autour de la table”²⁴ (96, 101, 105, 107, 109), with its feminine “assises,” underlines the round-table discussions as a motif in the novel, and a mirror for the readers who find themselves participating in a virtual reality there.

The circle around the table is also a healing circle, for the long-term destructive effects of the formation of female identity in the patriarchal family is also a feminist issue, as the characters' tearful memories of childhood make clear. Women are paralyzed in “le temps patriarchal,” betrayed in many ways, as Mary Daly elaborates in chapter 4 of Gyn/Ecology, often by their own mothers who initiate them into patriarchal law. In the morning light of Picture Theory, Claire Dérive denounces the patriarchal mother:

Le temps patriarcal ne s'est-il pas arrêté autour d'elles pour les confondre morbidement à la folie, à la mort et à la soumission. La mère est partout quand le temps s'arrête, la mère est pleine de secrets qui angoissent les filles laissées à elles-mêmes dans les ruines patriarcales: autos, pneus, ascenseurs, métros, verres brisés. L'âme en ruine, l'esprit de l'homme ne peut plus se concevoir autrement qu'en projetant la perte de sa déité dans les corps abstraits de quelques femmes isolément réunies, l'âme en ruines. Il y a là un manque à imaginer qui bien que n'étant pas nôtre, nous accable dans l'exercice même de nos fonctions mentales.²⁵

(97-98)

But the narrator testifies to the changing times: “Pour la première fois, comme ce matin devant la mer, je n'ai pas peur d'entendre les mots d'une autre femme”²⁶ (98). After L'amèr, in the transformative world of Picture Theory, Michèle can listen without fear to the words of another woman because, in this world, women no longer have anything to gain by initiating other women into patriarchal law.

In “L'émotion,” the characters reach for words adequate to a shared experience of utopia/ecstasy freed from the patriarchy, and they depend on each other for a linguistic community that understands words the way they do. In Brossard's thought, the women are speaking with the same accent, having undergone a parallel process of semantic deviation so that, by the time they reach the spiralling world of Picture Theory, they are practised at articulating reality from multiple perspectives. “La perspective,” which follows “L'ordinaire” but precedes the virtual production of “L'émotion,” prepares the reader to participate in “L'émotion” by developing the double perspective first suggested in the fragmentary scènes blanches.

“La perspective” presents two scenes: the scene of the book, which reads Djuna Barnes's Nightwood as mirror text/intertext, and the love scene, which carries forward the abstraction and which reveals the narrator to herself. Claire's arrival, announced with great anticipation at the close of “L'ordinaire,” is the beam of coherent light that transforms the holographic plate, the incoherent record of the first exposure, into the virtual three-dimensionality of the holographic image. The love scene between the narrator and Claire Derive puts “L'ordinaire” into a new perspective.

Perspective is traditionally thought to formalize a relationship between a work of art and an observer. The mathematical principles of one-point or central perspective, known to the architects of classical Greece but lost during the Middle Ages, were rediscovered by Renaissance architect Filippo Brunelleschi, and Leon Battista Alberti theorized and applied Brunelleschi's discovery of the vanishing point in his thesis Della pittura (1436). According to his “picture theory,” all parts of a painting were to be constructed in rational relationship to each other and to the observer. The ideal observer's height and distance from the painting are established by the artist during the perspective construction, thus placing the viewer in a fixed position. This traditional one-point perspective is made obsolete by the three-dimensionality of the hologram, which permits a multiplicity of points of view.

Picture Theory interpellates a viewer/reader who develops new perspectives while engaged in the ongoing activity of reading. Whereas traditional perspective effectively transforms three-dimensional objects and spatial relationships in order to represent them on a two-dimensional plane or in flat relief, in Picture Theory, the printed page, imagined as a shallow relief of paper and ink, functions as a relay-transistor or screen for the reconstitution of a utopian and three-dimensional image. Brossard creates a place for the reader in the textual perspective, but it is no longer necessary for this place to be fixed because a hologram, like a “real” object, can be regarded from any situation without distortion of its vital characteristics.

The difficulties encountered in reading Picture Theory are guides for the developing perspectives of the reader. The hologram is to appear in the mind's eye of the reader, not as an image of woman, for images of women are everywhere and entirely co-opted, nor as a hologram of a woman, for such holograms already exist, and have changed nothing. The hologram is to appear like a wave of emotion evoked by the memory of utopia; it is to appear as interacting wave formations in the cervical cortex, resulting in a three-dimensional consciousness/memory/picture of “la femme intégrale”: a generically female human being, with all ensuring consequences. In order to produce this desired effect, Picture Theory assembles the necessary elements: Claire Dérive, the love scene, the narrator who reconstitutes nothing, the mirror and the beam of coherent light which is split into two. The love scene will be holographed, and at the right moment, the hologram will be activated by the reader.

The split beam of light, necessary for three-dimensional perspective, is figured in a variety of ways. In la scène blanche and “La perspective” the text is diffracted into the parallel scenes of the carpet or love scene, the holographed scene (43) and the book (43). Concurrently, a double perspective on time is elaborated through alternate use of the present tense with the imperfect or the passé composé (65), and through the correlation between changing consciousness and crossing the threshold. The motifs of the “hall d'entrée” and the room filled with light, familiar from la scène blanche, guide the reader through the transformations of “La perspective.” The split scene corresponds to the split beam of light; the passages in the present tense correspond to the reference beam and the passages in the past tense have been reflected off the love scene and carry that information forward to the future. Claire's cheek, offered to her lover, is a “mise en abyme” (65), but, as the section continues, the perspective appears more and more to be based on a vanishing point of light (88). The rose of light which Dante saw in paradise appears in aerial perspective: “posture aérienne / l'apparence d'une rose double dans la clart锲⁷ (69). Claire enters “le hall d'entrée,” and then the forest, and the images turn to Dante, Wittig and the Joycean event of the book.

Parallel linguistic strategies model wave-front interaction throughout Picture Theory. Just before the achievement of the hologram, “Screen Skin Utopia” evokes the polysemy of words in the first-person, present tense: “La langue est fiévreuse comme un recours polysémique. Le point de non-retour de toute affirmation amoureuse est atteint. Je suis là où commence ‘l'apparence magique,’ la cohérence de mondes, trouée par d'invisibles spirales qui l'activent”²⁸ (188). The second paragraph, written in the pluperfect and imparfait tenses and in the third person, looks at the scene from a position in the future: “M. V. s'était redressée, avait lentement tourné la tête le regard pris entre le rebord de la fenêtre et l'horizon. Le poème hurlait opening the mind”²⁹ (188). As the mind opens, Michèle's gaze traverses the boundary of the window to reach that of the horizon. The temporal gymnastics implicate the deixis inherent in verb tenses, analyzed by Benveniste as one of the primary means through which subjectivity is created in language. … Picture Theory uses every tense in the French language to invoke every conceivable relationship a subject may have to time.

In addition, the text moves between English, French, Italian and sometimes Spanish. This is characteristic of Brossard's work, as testified by her long interest in linguistic plurality and translation, her fascination with what can be richly present in one language, yet absent from another. Translation, like thought, is understood to be “a complex act of passage which inflame[s] the mind” (“Nicole Brossard” 53). Because translation is always the site of an encounter between language, thought and meaning, it suggests the transcendent figure of the white centre, that sudden illumination of the mind which transforms consciousness.

Since the characters of Picture Theory are Québecoise, American and Italian-American, the encounter of languages in Picture Theory is realistically motivated; Claire, for example, speaks English as her mother tongue. But Brossard's “literary bilingual consciousness” is creative because, as Bakhtin suggests, in the encounter of languages, “two myths perish simultaneously: the myth of a language that presumes to be the only language, and the myth of a language that presumes to be completely unified” (62, 68). In Picture Theory, the confusion of tongues is related to the creation of new discourse based not on the single origin of patriarchal law but on a double origin and all that it might represent for the development of a non-binary symbolic:

Claire revenait avec le vin, hors d'elle, parlait bitch, dyke, sentait l'américaine à plein nez, ultra modern style new-yorkais. Stop it, Michèle, watch it, disait Florence très énervée pendant que je savais vouloir réaliser la fameuse synthèse de l'eau et de feu qui brûle la langue. I know, ça me trahit cette synthèse de la double origine, I knew, I know.³⁰

(112)

“I knew, I know” enacts the strategies of parallel verb tenses and the use of English, while naming the new perspective. “Cette synthèse de la double origine” is opposed to the single logos of phallogocentric vision. The creative chaos of circulating language elements is underlined by Oriana's speech, which slips from French to English to Italian to German: “Elle était tout genre à la fois d'une langue à l'autre³¹ (111). Oriana, who of the five women is the character most marked by patriarchy, is helped in her progress towards a generically feminine mind by her polyglot origins.

Picture Theory ends on page 188 where it begins again in a new book, Hologramme, another figure of translation and another mirror text, a sign of utopia which re-enacts Picture Theory on the level of the hologram. The translation and re-enactment of a text within a text is a technique that Brossard has explored in French Kiss (1974), Le Désert mauve (1987) and Aviva (1985), exploiting, as she has explained, the “abundant use of synonyms, homonyms … rhymes and rhythm” (“Nicole Brossard” 54). Activating musically symbolic associations between words and things, Brossard creates an intertextual magnetism within her texts and from one text to the next. Certain words tend to evoke others as they do in translation or in any act of interpretation. Reading Brossard reading Brossard makes virtual both the musicality of her language and the flexibility of the intertextual alliances (les connivences) between the dominant figures in her work, including a radical reading of reading. Brossard has qualified the enthusiastic claims made for “écriture feminine” by specifying that writing which is “traversé,” or “crossed,” by feminist consciousness simply permits “another reading of reality and self” (personal interview with Nicole Brossard, June 8, 1988). Feminist desire to “metamorphose mental space” (43, 58) and “open the mind” (188) can result in the cortical realization of a three-dimensional virtual reality. This hologram will not be found in a holography museum, but between the leaves of a book, where it waits for the readers' gaze to illuminate lovingly or boldly traverse the body/screen/text, seeking the perspective that will reconstitute feminist desire.

Notes

1. a perfect night (84).

2. At the other end of the night, I was going to open a bottle. The cities were converging in our glasses. Women were emerging from everywhere, architecture: the sum(ma) of laws revolving in their eyes, the speed of life, the forms they are preparing to take on: numbers, grasses, books, letters, spiral, first snow (85).

3. the city … patriarchal to its teeth.” (My translation.)

4. The cities were converging one by one, called forth by the flashing intuition we had passing through the history of art, aerial sagittarians en route to transformation (85).

5. Each city was a document abounding in arrows … arrow-man. … The cities, lunar orb, black out, we needed to tame energy in order to avoid the installation in our limbs and especially in our gazes, of a moral immobility able to make one believe in renunciation (85).

6. In our glasses, a flash opening the horizon under our eyes, our very bodies in a state of thought, in firing position, mental anticipation, the arrow in the water of the soul, we were advancing calmly through the deserted streets (85).

7. The encounters between women lift the page on the city of women. (My translation.)

8. Border crossers, radical city dwellers, lesbians (76).

9. not for its own sake, but for its tragic consequences in the lives of women, in the life of the spirit (35).

10. Ten years of anger, revolt, certitude, and conviction are in The Aerial Letter; ten years of fighting against that screen which stands in the way of women's energy, identity, and creativity. Ten years of curves, graffiti, erasures, and writing, in order to exorcise that “curse.” I had to “come to grips with words,” in order that, from the heated emotional struggle, the three-dimensional women who nourish my desire and my hope would spiral forth (35).

11. If patriarchy can take what exists and make it not, surely we can take what exists and make it be (103).

12. Talk around the daily table (67).

13.                     Did You Not Hear What I Ordained?
    J'ai exclu de votre troupe la soeur infidèle;
    No more will she ride her horse through the air with you;
    the virginal flower will wither,
    a husband will win her womanly favours;
    henceforth she'll obey her lord and master
    and, seated at her hearth will ply the distaff,
    she'll be the target and object of all mockery.
    If her fate frightens you, then flee her who is lost!
    Distance yourself, keep away from her.
    One of you women who dare to stay near her
    who will bravely defy me, take the side of the miserable wretch,
    that rash woman will share her fate: that bold one must know it!

    (33)

14. We were seated around the table, and Claire Dérive said that to see us all here together again, meeting at the seaside, was a sign (69).

15. Even though she asserted that the word abstraction slipped its way somewhere into her thought, she admitted for the moment that it was difficult to establish a direct link between the fact of being five women on the island and the very idea of what could be an abstraction (69).

16. at the source of each emotion, there is an abstraction whose effect is the emotion but whose consequences derive from the fixity of the gaze and ideas. Each abstraction is a potential form in mental space. And when the abstraction takes shape, it inscribes itself radically as enigma and affirmation. Resorting to abstraction is a necessity for the woman who, tempted by existence, invents the project of going beyond routine daily anecdotes and the memories of Utopia she meets each time she uses language (77).

17. complete sentences, abstract ones, linking life and speech (69).

18. Oriana then began to talk about time and the weather all the while searching for the words in French to say how she imagined it. She said that she did not understand why, each time certain women got together, in films for example, time seemed to stop around them after having frozen them or changed them into pillars of salt, loaded (with) symbols. After Danièle Judith had interrupted her to say matriarchy, Oriana continued her description of time (69).

19. Danièle Judith was saying that matriarchy is a word from anthropology and it cannot be used in a contemporary way to exorcize patriarchy. This word could not be used either to elaborate some Utopia that would have restored women to their gender (73-74).

20. I wanted to say that ecstacy is a reality in itself which makes time eternal. Claire Dérive affirmed that we mustn't confound time out of mind, patriarchal time and ecstacy (69).

21. the utopian sequences which traverse our thoughts, words and deeds (36).

22. from this confusion were born women suspended and immobile in space (69).

23. We were sitting around the table. … I said, with a taste of salt in the mouth, on the subject of Utopia beginning with the word woman that Utopia was not going to ensure our insertion into reality but that a Utopian testimony on our part could stimulate in us a quality of emotion favourable for our insertion into history. Before Claire talks about abstraction, I added that we ought to socialize our energies so that we would in no way be victims or again to avoid having our wombs alone praiseworthy as mental virility able to serve afterward for the murder of thinking bodies (73-74).

24. We were seated around the table (69, 73, 77, 78, 81).

25. Didn't patriarchal time come to a stop around them merging them morbidly in madness, death and submission. The mother is everywhere when time stops, the mother full of secrets that cause anguish to girls left to themselves in the patriarchal ruins: cars, tires, elevators, subways, broken windows. The soul in ruins, the mind of man can no longer conceive itself differently except by projecting the loss of his deity on the abstract bodies of a few women reunited in isolation, soul in ruins. There is a lack of imag(in)ing in this which, although not ours, overwhelms us in the very exercise of our mental functions (70).

26. For the first time, as this morning in front of the sea, I was not afraid to hear the words of another woman” (70).

27.                               [A]erial posture
    the appearance of a double rose in the clarity

    (45)

28. Langu age is feverish like a polysemic resource. The point of no return for all amorous affirmation is reached. I am there where “the magical appearance” begins, the coherence of wor(l)ds, perforated by invisible spirals that quicken it (153).

29. M. V. had straightened herself up, slowly turned her head her gaze caught between the window ledge and the horizon. Le poème hurlait opening the mind (153).

30. Claire came back with the wine, beside herself, saying bitch, dyke, feeling American to the tip of her nose, ultra-modern New York style. Stop it, Michèle, watch it, said Florence very worked up while I knew I wanted to real-ize the celebrated synthesis of water and fire that burns the tongue. I know, that synthesis of the double origin betrays me, I knew, I know (84).

31. She was all genders at once in one language or another (83).

Abbreviations

A: Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic.

HHS: Daphne Marlatt's How Hug a Stone.

IASR: Roland Barthes's “Introduction à l'analyse structurale des récits.”

MG: Monique Wittig's “The Mark of Gender.”

N: Mieke Bal's Narratology.

NBBW: Alice Parker's “Nicole Brossard's Body Work.”

Préface: Louise Forsyth's “Préface” to Picture Theory.

PT: Nicole Brossard's Picture Theory.

RI: Nicole Brossard's “De radical à intágrales.”

RM: Hélène Cixous's “Le rire de la Mèduse.”

Touch: Daphne Marlatt's Touch to My Tongue.

WG: Robert Graves's The White Goddess.

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