Augmenting reality

Far from producing only weakened images of reality – shadows, as in the Platonic treatment of the eikõn in painting or writing – literary works depict reality by augmenting it with meanings that themselves depend upon the virtues of abbreviation, saturation, and culmination, so strikingly illustrated by emplotment.

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (The University of Chicago Press, 1984) p. 80