"The Novel and History have been closely related in the very century which witnessed their greatest development. Their link in depth, that which should allow us to understand at once Balzac and Michelet, is that in both we find the construction of an aitarkic world which elaborates its own dimensions and limits, and organizes within these its own Time, its own Space, its population, its own set of objects and its myths.
The sphericity of these great works of the nineteenth century found expression in those long recitives, the Novel and History, which are, as it were, plane projections of a curved and organic world of which the serial story which came into being at that precise moment, presents, through its involved complications, a degraded image. And yet narration is not necessarily a form a lot of the form. A whole period could conceive novels in letters, for instance; and another can evolve a practice of history by means of analyses. Therefore Narration, as a form common to both the Novel into History, does remain, in general, the choice or the expression of the historical moment."
