Second small discovery. I noticed that in literary work reality tended inevitably to be reduced to a rich repertory of tricks that, if skillfully used, gave the impression that the facts had arrived on the page just as they had happened, with all their sociological, political, psychological, ethical, etc., connotations. The opposite, therefore, of the thing as it is. Reality was a game of illusion that to succeed had to pretend that no one had told it, no one had written it, and the real was there, reproduced so well that it made you forget even the marks of the alphabet.
