It isn’t that simple. The desire to make an imaginary world appear ‘possible’ – and for this world to be evoked by language – is the double origin of novelistic writing (as well as reading). In his introduction to Stendhal et les problèmes du roman, Georges Blin described this paradox as ‘an impossibility that can possibly happen to me [as a reader]’.2 The reader of a novel must conjure up mental images of a world described through the medium of language; in the process of writing a novel, the author must also become a reader of his or her own pages in order to pursue a story which can represent a ‘possible’ world.