SHE WROTE: Cranky Bob and the Ficelle

I'm sick as a dog, spending the week in bed with Kleenex, cold meds, and my laptop. Because we have a deadline and I have to keep writing even though I'm probably going to DIE, that's why.

Bob's on the road.

Here's our last e-mail exchange, after he evidently tripped across something I changed in our presentation:


From: Bob
Date: September 23, 2006
To: Jenny
Subject: Re: hey

what the hell is a ficelle?



From: Jenny
Date: September 23, 2006
To: Bob
Subject: Re: hey

I miss you, too.

A ficelle (from Henry James' literary crit, in case you were wondering) is a character, often a best friend, partner, companion, servant, Watson, whatever, who is confused, needs to be brought up to date, arrives late on the scene, or is otherwise without information and so asks the right questions and serves as the reader's stand in for getting information from the protag without invoking as-you-know dialogue.



I'm going back to bed now. Bob is teaching something somewhere. I dunno where. I just want my electric blanket back.

Bleah.



Addendum:
This is why Bob makes fun of my graduate degrees (even though he has one, too):

Ficelle is not an obscure term. It's right there in the old standby Holman's Handbook to Literature which says:

"Ficelle: Literally, the strings by means of which the puppets are controlled by the puppeteer. The term is used by Henry James as a substitute for confidante, a means by which a self-effacing author conveys necessary information to the reader."

I think it's more sophisticated than that, but that's a good simple definition. James often talks about them in his Prefaces, like this one from the preface to The Ambassadors:

"Maria Gostrey . . . is the reader's friend . . . and she acts in that capacity, and REALLY in that capacity alone, with exemplary devotion from beginning to and of the book. She is an enrolled, a direct, aid to lucidity; she is in fine, to tear off her mask, the most unmitigated and abandoned of ficelles. Half the dramatist's art, as we well know--since if we don't it's not the fault of the proofs that lie scattered about us--is in the use of ficelles; by which I mean in a deep dissimulation of his dependence on them. Waymarsh only to a slighter degree belongs, in the whole business, less to my subject than to my treatment of it; the interesting proof, in these connexions, being that one has but to take one's subject for the stuff of drama to interweave with enthusiasm as many Gostreys as need be."

Or you can just take my word for it: Ficelles are useful and necessary, and the term "ficelle" is easier than any of the two long definitions given above (mine or Holman's) or God knows any of the times James explained it.

And now I'm going back to bed. Again.