ICC ex machina

QWERTYMAN

- JOSE DALISAY

In playwriting and fiction, we call it deus ex machina — literally, the "god out of the machine" — which has come to mean a miraculously happy or fortuitous ending to a long and agonizing drama.

You'll find it, for example, when a virginal heroine — beleaguered by dirty old men and rapacious creditors — seems on the brink of yielding her precious virtue, tearfully praying on her knees for deliverance, when a kindly lawyer comes knocking on her door to announce that a distant uncle has passed away, leaving her his fortune.

We rejoice with her — despite feeling, at the same time, that divine intervention came a bit too conveniently. This is why I admonish my students to refrain from employing deus ex machina in their stories, because in today's hard-bitten and cynical world, nobody really believes in it anymore, and readers simply feel deprived of a more rational ending.

Like many things we know about drama, the idea goes back to the ancient Greeks, whose playwrights used it to great effect, Aeschylus and Euripides among them. Euripides most memorably turned to deus ex machina in Medea, where the title character — having been cheated on by her husband Jason — kills Jason's mistress and their own two children.

Guilty both of murder and infanticide, Medea seems hopeless and bound for damnation — until a machine, actually a crane shaped like a chariot drawn by dragons, emerges from behind the stage. It has been sent by Medea's grandfather, the sun-god Helios, to pluck Medea away from her husband and from the coils of human justice and deliver her to the safety of Athens.