When the saints go marching in

Do you ever have the wish that life was more like a play, or a video game, or a musical - someplace where a higher power can swoop in from above and rectify all of your problems?

Well, NOW YOU CAN - sorry, couldn't resist the temptation. I blame infomercials.

In any case, this blog will cover a literary device for which all literature buffs have the utmost contempt: the deus ex machina.

The Latin phrase (literally, God from the machine) is a translation from the original Greek, where it referred to the mechane, a device in ancient Greek theatre used to lower the actors playing the gods as if they were descending from Mt. Olympus. The gods functioned in the play as a means of resolving the plot or rescuing the protagonist from a particularly sticky situation, like some archaic Staples easy button.*
Let's not forget that divine intervention, however, doesn't lend a play any more substance.

Even ancient Greeks were critical of the mechane; in his play Thesmophoriazusae (Women Celebrating the Thesmophorae, the Thesmophorae being an annual fertility celebration held in honor of fertility goddess Demeter), Aristophanes makes fun of Euripides for overusing the convention. In the play, Euripides swoops in on the mechane in attempt to save his kinsman from harm when he is discovered spying for him at the females-only rite.**

Today, the deus ex machina refers to a device abhorred by every self-respecting literary buff - a tidy, but improbable and ultimately unsatisfying resolution.

My first encounter with the concept was a reading of Moliére's Tartuffe, or the Hypocrite (title character at right), where King Louis XIV sends an officer in the nick of time to arrest the impostor Tartuffe, to restore the house Tartuffe had swindled and blackmailed out of the family, and to announce the wedding of the play's young lovers - all the space of a few lines.

The convention is not something that disappeared with time and can today generally be chalked up to the laziness of the author. Modern versions include cavalry riding over the hill to the rescue, the villain's sudden death from cardiac arrest or - the particular brew of "God from the machine" that I love to hate - the protagonist waking to find it was all a bad dream.***

We call them cheat codes in video games for a reason.

In other news, a student's recent twist on the motorcycle made the list of search results, though I can't say any implications of divinity in its machinery look promising. And if the deus in question is the driver of the motorcycle, doesn't labeling a human "God" defy and defeat the purpose of godhood anyway?



Information purloined from The Phrase Finder, Statemaster.com; image purloined from idlemindproductions.com



* - "and Hephaestus heard the pleas of the bureaucrats, and paper clips rained from the heavens"
** - Subtext: crashing a goddess's charity function might kill you
*** - or a bad trip, if you fell down a rabbit hole