If Aristotle advised poet to put 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 novel has largely fallen out of favor, tool remains indispensable: story. Percy Lubbock, as fierce critic of authorial interventions as any, notes why: There comes juncture at which, for some reason, it is necessary for us to know more than we could made out by simply looking and listening. . . . [Y]ou cannot rightly understand this incident or this talk, author implies, unless know what I now proceed to tell you (65). That story is critical should not be surprising when it addresses main questions of Quintilian's inverino: quis? quid? ubi? quibus auxiliis? cur? quomodo? quando? (Del Lungo 142-43). Werth observes that information . . . constructs text world (119). For Herman, it seems evident that the storyteller is likely to tailor his or her narrative in accordance with 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 formal topos (Figures 79); indeed, he defines narrative as a transition from an earlier to later and resultant state (Narrative Discourse Revisited 19), which makes it critical to ground earlier state. To tell story, King of Hearts tells Alice, must [bjegin at (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. chapter of The Duke's Children entitled In Medias Res, Trollope notes that beginning amidst action gives the cart before horse, with result that a certain nebulous darkness gradually seems to envelope characters and incidents and so these blanks must be filled in through story (70).