“I would have liked very much to explore certain of these parallel fictional universes, and I had proposed to my Publisher, in spite of the enormous amount of additional work it would have imposed upon me, to furnish him with an absolute forest of multiple diverging and reconverging tales, with approved spatio-temporal travel maps, and a guide provided for the tourists of the fiction. The same unchangeable book would not have been stupidly printed for everyone but, rediscovering good old thirteenth-century customs (it was only yesterday), during the age of manuscripts, each reader would have his own personalized book. The book would not be available in stores. Or rather, in good bookstores, you would have had the chance to choose: either the standard edition, everybody’s book . . . or else you would have placed an order for your edition, chosen according to a “menu” of possible forkings in the course of the tale. This copy would not yet have been printed. By pressing here and there on a keyboard, the bookstore clerk would have transmitted to the computer-printer the specifications of the novel and at once, thanks to modern typesetting/composition processes, vroom, vroom, the book would be on its way; and it would arrive in no time.”

(Jacques Roubaud, Hortense is Abducted (1989), quoted in Dominic Di Bernardi’s afterword to The Great Fire of London, pp. 321–2.)

“(And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.”

(Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 18; cited in Jacques Roubaud’s The Great Fire of London.)

“The clouds drew closer and gusts of wind ruffled the surface of the brown water. Drops of rain struck the windows. I left my stool and moved across the room for a better look at things, taking a table next to the American woman. Four pelicans in a column were gliding over the water, almost touching it. Behind them came two more. These two were flapping their heavy wings and they were climbing up to the misty edges of the cloud. A shaft of lightning struck the second bird and he contracted into a ball and fell like a rock. The other one took no notice, missing not a beat with his wings.

I was astonished. I knew I would tell this pelican story over and over again and that it would be met with widespread disbelief but I thought I might as well get started and so I turned to the woman and the boy and told them what I had seen. I pointed out the floating brown lump.

She said, ‘It looks like a piece of wood.’

‘That’s a dead pelican.’

‘I heard the thunder but I didn’t see anything.’

‘I saw the whole thing.’

‘I love storms.’ ”

(pp. 159–160.)

“I told them about the pelican that was struck by lightning. They didn’t believe it. I tried to tell them about Symes and Webster and Spann and Karl and their attention wandered. I saw then that I would have to write it down, present it all in an orderly fashion, and this I have done.”

(p. 243 of Charles Portis, The Dog of the South.)