JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #58
July 1, 2021
Years ago, I was reading Euripides’s Orestes play, in which Orestes, having murdered his mother Clytemnestra and been driven mad by the Eumenides, stands on the precipice of ruin--in my memory, the palace is burning all around him, and Orestes is a madman bent on destruction--when suddenly Apollo appears on the rampart. By divine will, Apollo removes Orestes’s madness and sets everything aright. And that’s it. It is one of the most disappointing scenes of my reading career. I’d been deeply invested in Euripides’s telling, but as soon as Apollo flew in the save the day, nothing mattered anymore.
In the Athenian theater, there was a machine on which actors, usually in the guise of a god, could be lowered onto the stage, often with the purpose of bringing the story to its end. This practice gave rise to the term deus ex machina, the god out of the machine. There was a joke among theater people I knew that for his production of Orestes, Euripides shrugged and said, "We have the machine, so we might as well use it."
The reason this scene is so disappointing is that up until that point Orestes has driven the story through his own choices. He decided to kill his mother, to seek solace from his sister, to try and escape his coming execution. When Apollo shows up, he undermines Orestes’s agency. And because he’s a god with immense power, Apollo can change the hearts of everyone involved and order things as he wills without any consequence. The ending isn’t earned. The palace doesn’t burn down, and Orestes survives, but only by auctorial-divine fiat. (It’s interesting to compare Euripides’s Orestes with Aeschylus’s Eumenides, in which Orestes goes to trial and Athena speaks on his behalf, offering an argument you’ve got to read to believe. Although Athena is a god, she does not declare the verdict of the trial, but offers an argument that opens the way for Orestes’s salvation.)
The deus ex machina is just one version of a common narrative problem in which characters suffer (or profit) not because of their own actions, but as victims (or beneficiaries) of someone else’s decisions. The problem doesn’t arise simply because it happens, but rather as a consequence of the narrative focusing on someone other than the decision-maker. If we had a story called "Apollo," in which we follow the deliberations Apollo made before he decided to intercede on Orestes’s behalf, the final moment of the story would be much more compelling because we got to follow the character with agency.
The lesson for our own fiction is to consider who in the story has the power to effect the outcome, whose decisions bring about the ending, and to understand that they may be the protagonist of the story: they are the character whose journey primarily drives the narrative. In most cases (counter-examples go beyond the scope of this rumination), this means the reader will find the most interest in seeing the protagonist’s point of view.
(yes, "effect" is the right word.)