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clarté’’27 (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 (see chapter 18). 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 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). 166 Narrative in the Feminine 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...

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