The fundamental purpose of a novel like Count Julian is to achieve the unity of object and means of representation, the fusion of treason as scheme and treason as language.

In the Europe which was created by the Second World War, divided into two blocks, each in need of a revolution that would end the abuses and injustices of capitalism and the privileges of a bureaucratic caste, collective faith does not exist.

And with each day that passed, the gulf broadened and my isolation became more accentuated. In such a situation, the discovery that my experience was not unique, that it had also been that of other Spanish intellectuals, became very important for me.

When I write now I do not invent situation, characters, or actions, but rather structures and discursive forms, textual groupings which are combined according to secret affinities among themselves, as in architecture or the plastic arts.

I not only lived physically away from my native land, but the values and critical judgments of those closest to me became stranger and stranger.

Marks of Identity is, among other things, the expression of the process of alienation in a contemporary intellectual with respect to his own country.

The fundamental purpose of a novel like Count Julian is to achieve the unity of object and means of representation, the fusion of treason as scheme and treason as language.