Picture Theory

In this confounding volume of poetry and prose, Canadian Brossard ( Mauve Desert ) offers disharmonious syntax and esoteric feminist theory, blended in a rambling anti-narrative about the search for meaning among a group of female friends. While giving snatches of background on each character, Brossard is not really concerned with conventional story lines but with the ``formulation a body undertakes in regard to anspace is correct/pk other to reach agreement with a movement of thought.'' Mutual desire between women seems to result in a transcendence of words: ``Responding to certain signs, with complete fluidity, our bodies interlaced m'urged to fuse in astonishment or fascination.'' A woman, when she has expunged the ``haunting memory of Man,'' overthrown the ``semantic line . . . of patriarchal subjectivity,'' will become an ``abstract body,'' one ``filled with intuitions and signs.'' She will then be ready to truly articulate the thoughts and emotions of women. There are some interesting fragments of theory here and there, but Brossard's language is flat and dull, and her interpretation of the relationship between language and desire is narcissistic. (May)