The novel, a closed world made out of words in which various characters, including the narrator or authorial point of view, attempt to solve the life problems that arise for them or for other characters, problems that are themselves products of worlds made out of words, or rather of the making of worlds out of words, these inner worlds being open and fragmentary relative to the frame which encloses them. What is novelistic is the mode of imaginative and invested thinking and feeling involved in this structure - the subject to its substance. If the novel is life recreated at a desk, or in a bed, or at a cafe table, the conscious merging of the scene of action with the scene of inscription, then the novelistic is the same operation viewed from the side of life. It is a technology of mind and its great achievement was the invention of psychology in a form that seems now to be waning or at least dispersing with the fortunes of the novel, its dissolution or mutating into the visual or videographic. It is curious what a large role jealousy has played in the construction of the novelising mind if by the loose term jealousy we mean all of the passions that are connected with the inflamed and defensive imaginations of exclusion from the secret and especially sexual joys of others. This mind which seeks to realise itself through investigation of the satisfaction of others and ultimately of itself - they are the same thing, only inverted - can never come to the end of its quest since it is always gloriously pointing away from its own origin, to turn back on which would be to die.