I call this a rather stern pronouncement in spite of the fact that as a university teacher. I spend a lot of time telling my students that they need to be able to justify their responses and interpretations by reference to textual and other evidence, and this is because, although academic discussion of literature has to insist upon such standards in order to establish ground-rules for discussion and debate, I do not think that readers (as against students or critics) of novels are or ever have been obliged to remain within the boundaries of the authorized. Indeed, were it possible to render ‘whimsical responses’ impossible, then I suspect that novel-reading would be a lot less popular than it is today. I agree that certain aspects of literary response are like those forms of play which are bound by very rigid rules: football or chess, for example. Reading novels also resembles the child’s make-believe games, those games where it is the imagined roles and situations which offer the only constraints. To a certain extent Peter Lamarque himself clearly accepts this point, as in a later book he argues that fictive storytelling ‘disengages standard conditions of assertion, it invites imaginative rather than belief-based involvement, it creates worlds and characters, and it encourages participation, not a concern for correspondence with the facts’(Lamarque 1996, 144).