The main route I have taken through this book has been the broad path where science and literature are knitted together. I have traced their individual paths, of course; and I imagine them topographically as running in parallel, one always visible to the other but kept apart by a thick vegetation between. More interesting territory, however, has been those moments when the two paths close up to form a wider route, broken still by a grassy central reservation but one which is worn by continual crossings over and is sometimes entirely eroded.

This analogy, I hope, registers the fact that science and literature remain different but sometimes come close to being the same. I have suggested, for example, that literature makes efforts to become science. This is not to say that the literary text is on a path that leads it to be, in the end, a work of science. In fact the opposite is true: in becoming science, the literary text enters into a series of correspondences with science which positions it in relation to science. The literary text does not imitate or resemble science, but by becoming science, as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari argue, it ‘form[s] a block that runs its own line “between” the terms in play and beneath assignable relations’.