The Forms and Functions of Back Story in the Novel

If Aristotle advised the poet to "put the actual scenes as far as possible before his [the reader's] eyes" (Poetics 1455a), our modern injunction is "show, don't tell." While authorial telling in the novel has largely fallen out of favor, one tool remains indispensable: back story. Percy Lubbock, as fierce a critic of authorial interventions as any, notes why: "There comes a juncture at which, for some reason, it is necessary for us to know more than we could have made out by simply looking and listening.… [Y]ou cannot rightly understand this incident or this talk, the author implies, unless you know—what I now proceed to tell you" (65).

That back story is critical should not be surprising when it addresses the main questions of Quintilian's inventio: quis? quid? ubi? quibus auxiliis? cur? quomodo? quando? (Del Lungo 142–43). Werth observes that "background information… constructs the text world" (119). For Herman, it seems evident that "the storyteller is likely to tailor his or her narrative in accordance with the amount of background knowledge he or she assumes me to have" ("Stories" 164). And for Genette, an in medias res opening followed by an "explicative turning back" has become a formal topos (Figures 79); indeed, he defines narrative as "a transition from an earlier state to a later and resultant state" (Narrative Discourse Revisited 19), which makes it critical to ground the earlier state. To tell a story, the King of Hearts tells Alice, one must "[b]egin at the beginning" (Carroll 106)—but if "[a] story has no beginning or end" (Greene 1), if "one may as well begin" anywhere (Forster, Howards End 19), then this advice is harder to follow. In a chapter of The Duke's Children entitled "In Medias Res," Trollope notes that beginning amidst the action gives "the cart before the horse," with the result that "a certain nebulous darkness gradually seems to envelope the characters and the incidents"—and so these blanks must be filled in through back story (70).

Yet this aspect of the novel remains poorly understood. Despite some definitions (Brooks and Warren 684; Herman, Cambridge Companion 275), substantive research is scarce. Propp's "initial situation" (designated as α) is "an important morphological situation," but he does no more than limit its role to "temporal-spatial determination" (25, 119). Rousset writes that the mise-en-place "lays out the spatio-temporal frame and the insertion of characters in a defined space" (42). Chatman devotes two paragraphs to it in Story and Discourse, noting that back story is usually done in summary mode (63, 67), and he has recently written on Amis's Time's Arrow, an admittedly extreme case of consistently backwards narration ("Backwards"). Genette usefully distinguishes between external and internal analepses, but the analysis is hardly complete (Narrative Discourse 49–50). Bal briefly argues that exposition has a "delimitation" function, shedding light upon the narrator's motivation (36–37). While there is a burgeoning study of narrative beginnings (Del Lungo; Morhange; Nuttall; Phelan, "The Beginning of Beloved," "Beginnings and Endings"; Brian Richardson; Said; Traversetti and Andreani), there is only one in-depth study of back story, Sternberg's Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction: "It is the function of exposition to introduce the reader into an unfamiliar world, the fictive world of the story, by providing him with the general and specific antecedents indispensable to the understanding of what happens in it. There are some pieces of information, varying in number and nature from one work to another, that the reader cannot do without" (1). While brilliant in its reading of individual texts and significantly more complex than almost all the extant criticism, the analysis is at times unwieldy, as Sternberg argues that exposition is always marked off from the "'story proper' in an essentially similar fashion" (26) and that it is "generalized" and "deconcretized" while action is "specific" and "concrete" (26–27); in sum, it is an "inevitable bad business" (46), what Holden Caulfield calls that "David Copperfield kind of crap" (Salinger 3). This aesthetic judgment is possibly a result...