Euripides and the deus ex machina

Deus ex machina means, literally, God from the machine, and it's a curiously Latin term for what is very much a Greek concept.

To portray the Gods in plays, the Classical Greek actors were lifted in the air using a huge lever system. This is precisely the deus ex machina: an actor portraying a god, hanging from a lever machine.

Of course the audience could see the rope and the lever, but hey, this was early days for special effects. The audience had the imagination to blot out the mechanics. They wouldn't be able to guess which god they saw, but the actor would declare his identity in his opening lines, and the play carried on.

Mary Renault uses this to good effect in The Mask of Apollo. In that story, her hero is an actor playing a god. The audience gasps and the actor looks up to see what the audience can see: the rope is frayed and will snap at any moment and he'll fall to his death. So he does what any good actor would do: he carries on with his lines.

The mechanics of the system worked fine, but there was a problem with the way the Classical playwrights used their divine characters. The gods tended to appear at the opening to set the scene, then they'd disappear, only to suddenly return right at the end and close down the story before it could reach a climax. It's like the writers included too much plot and simply chopped the story off using divine intervention when time ran out.

The technique was so notorious that deus ex machina has come to mean anything which shuts down a story suddenly and without warning, in a completely arbitrary way, thus preventing any natural resolution for the characters.

Euripides was a serial offender when it came to deus ex machina.

I can't help feeling Euripides was born into the wrong time and place. He should have been born in the 20th century, where he would have been totally at home writing post-modernist mainstream literary. Euripides essentially had no interest in plot whatsoever. The plot for him was merely a vehicle to carry his beautiful words and exquisite phrases. If he got to the end of what he wanted to say before the story finished...not a problem. He just introduced a god or goddess as a character, suddenly, at the end, and with no rationale whatsoever, to tie up all the threads of the plot in one momentous speech. Then everyone could go home.

Ion is a good example of his perfidy. In that story an orphan called Ion seeks his true identity. The plot becomes a trifle convoluted. There's a false prophecy which totally confuses everyone. Ion meets his mother, all unknowing to them both. She tries to kill him a couple of times (these things happen). He takes a shot at her too. Then Athena turns up for the first time in the story, and in a single speech reconciles everyone and explains away the early false prophecy with a very dodgy throwaway line. Mother and son for some reason think it's cool that they're related, despite recent homicidal attacks, and everyone lives happily ever after. No natural resolution.

This is almost as ridiculous as following for six years a group of people trapped on an island, with all manner of deep symbolism, intricate plot threads and exotic clues, only to close with a happy, happy, joy, joy ending and all the intricate threads left loose. No one in their right mind would write such an ending these day—oh, hang on...scrap that.

Turning a blind eye to anachronism

In my continuing series on the dangers of anachronism, today's trap for young players is to turn a blind eye.

It's rare that such a common phrase can be pinpointed to a precise moment in time, and a precise man.

It happened at the Battle of Copenhagen. The British were commanded by Admiral Sir Hyde Parker and under him, Vice Admiral Lord Nelson. Nelson had an unfortunate tendency to lose spare body parts. By the time of Copenhagen he was missing an arm and an eye. The missing eye proved to be a decisive advantage in the battle.

Parker and Nelson had split their forces for a two pronged attack: Nelson to attack the Danes directly and Parker to block Swedish support. The wind turned against Parker, but took Nelson into the waiting Danes. The Danes, commanded by the Crown Prince, put up a furious and highly creditable fight. The cannon fire at close range between ships of the line was intense and deadly.

Parker could only listen to the battle and, fearing that Nelson was having the worse of it, raised the signal on his flagship for Nelson to disengage. Parker explained his reason thus: "If he [Nelson] is in a condition to continue the action successfully, he will disregard it; if he is not, it will be an excuse for his retreat and no blame can be imputed to him."

Parker was a fine man, but an indecisive leader. He had abdicated all responsibility as commanding officer present, and what more, if Nelson continued the battle in the face of the order to disengage and subsequently lost, then it would be Nelson's fault.

When the disengage order was pointed out to him, Nelson ordered the acknowledgement flag be flown, but also ordered to remain in place his own signal flag to engage the enemy closely. Thus Nelson took full responsibility for the continued attack.

By the terms of warfare at that time, it was a capital offence for a subordinate to flagrantly disregard a direct order. But in the fog of war -- and it really was a fog in those days with all the cannon smoke -- it was relatively common for a signal order to be missed.

The only problem was, Nelson's flag captain had seen Admiral Parker's signal and pointed it out to his boss.

Nelson solved the problem with these words:

‘You know, Foley, I have only one eye. I have a right to be blind sometimes’. He then put his telescope to his blind eye, and said ‘I really do not see the Signal!’

And so for the first time in history, someone had turned a blind eye to something he didn't like.

Turn a blind eye appears in literature only after the Battle of Copenhagen, so Nelson was almost certainly the source.

It raises a problem for the humble historical writer. Is it reasonable for a character to use the phrase prior to 1801?

The conceit is that we are reading in modern, everyday English, what was spoken 2,500 years ago in modern, everyday Attic Greek. I think of it as like "translating" an ancient text. To turn a blind eye references a well known event in 1801, no one in Classical Athens would have used it, and therefore it's not acceptable ancient usage.

The galley for Pericles Commission

Look what arrived in the mail!

It's a book. A real book!

This is the galley, or ARC -- Advance Reader Copy -- for The Pericles Commission. It's a very small print run destined for advance reviewers. Whereas the the final book will be hardcover, this is trade paper format.

The white blobby thing on the cover says Advance Uncorrected Proofs. This was printed after the copyedit review, but before we checked the final pages, in which we found a few things that had been missed. The back cover of this issue is precisely the page from the St Martin's catalog of books, in black system font on a white background (there's a picture below).

It's a totally surreal experience to open a book and see your own words. Words I've only ever seen on a screen, or printed on A4, were there inside, as if they were part of a real book.

You've seen the picture on the left in a previous post. It's the copyedit of the first page. I scanned the first page of the real book and put it alongside:

It's also perfect for hiding behind inconspicuously.

It's a Sherlock Holmes story, Watson, but not as we know it.

Loretta asked in the last post: Gary, what do you think of the "Faux Holmes" that are popping up now, like The Italian Secretary? Personally, I've yet to find one that rings true, but YMMV.

I believe Sherlock Holmes is now out of copyright, except for some very late stories, and I presume that's why there's been a surge of Holmes stories and the movie cashing in paying homage to the world's greatest detective.

I haven't read The Italian Secretary, so I don't know about it, but as a general rule IMHO the emulations fail to capture the combination of style, atmosphere, and character.

My view is, the moment you write in your own interpretation of Holmes and Watson, you may as well be writing your own detectives rather than using someone else's. For that reason I think if you're going to do it, you have to aim for ultra-emulation.

The only exception I've read to prove that view wrong is a book called Sherlock Holmes and the 1902 Fifth Test, by Stanley Shaw. In that book the narrator is not Watson, but another man entirely who's a cricket fan, and the POV character reveals Watson to be considerably smarter than the self-deprecatory biographer gives himself credit for. At the end of the book, the POV character and Dr Watson find themselves batting for England to save the test match, disguised as the actual players who were supposed to be there!

There was an SF anthology called Sherlock Holmes In Orbit which I read years ago (they took pains to say they had permission of the estate), and I thought a few of those stories were pretty good. They succeeded by not even trying to emulate the original style, and were so far outside the Canon that it didn't matter.

Another thing which the Holmes copyists do that doesn't work, IMHO, is mash him up with famous characters. (I don't know of a story in which Holmes meets Spock, but I'll bet someone's done one.) Or they introduce Holmes into famous incidents where he patently was not.

This sort of mash up is sensationalism for the sake of grabbing reader attention. But the essence of Holmes is that he eschews the sensationalist cases and applies his skills only to those which present features of interest, no matter how humble the client. (Okay, Conan Doyle himself broke that rule a few times, but that only proves even the best writers can get lazy, and those cases were rarely Holmes' best.)

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen wisely excluded Holmes because his character would have been overwhelming.

If I were insane enough to try a Holmes story myself (and I might be that mad) I would stick to a short story, because that's the natural length for Sherlock Holmes. I would pick a humble client with an odd tale to relate; a case that presents features of interest, and I would target the earlier period during which Watson and Holmes shared rooms. In other words a classic Holmes tale. Then I'd allocate about a month to edit the short story into the right style, which would be very, very hard. Oh, and I'd include this line:

"You interest me strangely," said Holmes, leaning back in his chair. "Pray continue."

You interest me strangely

I've been re-reading Sherlock Homes recently, because it's good for my soul. I think most mystery writers are inspired by Holmes in the same way musicians are inspired by the Beatles.

Yes, I'm aware Conan Doyle was not the first mystery writer. Poe et al. got their blows in first, but try saying "Auguste Dupin" to a random stranger and see what blank reaction you get.

So my strange factoid of the day is this: at no point in the Canon does Holmes ever say, "You interest me strangely."

Which is a pity because it sounds like it should be there.

"You interest me strangely," said Holmes, leaning back in his chair. "Pray continue."

The biggest users of the phrase appear to be P.G. Wodehouse(!) and Sax Rohmer.