Time & Perspective Quote by Edmond De Goncourt

Edmond de Goncourt’s line is a sly demotion of “the past” from solid fact to curated narrative, and a quiet promotion of the novel from entertainment to cultural instrument. He’s not just flattering his own profession. He’s drawing a border war: historians claim authority by looking backward, but the novelist, he argues, has the sharper mandate because the present is where meaning is still molten, undecided, morally ambiguous. If the historian is an archivist of outcomes, the novelist is a reporter of pressures.

The intent is partly polemical. Nineteenth-century France was drowning in upheaval, class churn, and the modernization of daily life; realism and naturalism were trying to make literature answerable to what people actually ate, wore, feared, and desired. De Goncourt (and his circle) wanted the novel to be treated as a serious record of lived experience, not a frill. Calling novelists the storytellers of the present is a bid for relevance, even power: the writer as someone who catches society in the act of becoming itself.

The subtext has teeth: “history” is not the past, it’s a version of it, stabilized after the winners have had their say. By contrast, the present has no official narrator yet, only competing perceptions. Novelists thrive there because they can admit messiness, contradiction, interiority - the stuff that doesn’t fit neatly into timelines and treaties. It’s also a warning shot to historians: by the time you write, you’re already late. The novelist’s advantage is immediacy, and his liability is the same.