1. Let's say you are a novelist or a poet, composing a rather long text inhabited by characters of your own invention. At some point you get stuck; there seems to be no way to extricate the heroine, Z, from the extraordinary tangle of circumstance and inner conflict that she has gotten herself into —no, sorry, that you have imagined for her. (That's the problem with these characters, as any novelist can attest: they very rapidly acquire a surprising autonomy and a certain irreducible integrity vis-à-vis their creator.) Eventually you decide that, for the sake of the novel, maybe even for Z's own sake, the best thing is simply to ‘kill her off’. No one, in our literary ecology, would doubt your sovereign ability to do just that. After all, Z is only imaginary.

So you concoct a death scene, maybe even a funeral, and everyone inside the novel along with the readers theoretically outside it, to say nothing of the author, has somehow to come to terms with the sad loss of Z. Even I, in the second paragraph of this paper, can't help feeling a slight twinge, though I hardly knew her.

But what if Z were suddenly to turn up on the street, or in your study, and demand attention, protesting loudly that she is still very much alive?