Deus Ex Machina vs Divine Intervention

Deus Ex is, of course, a criticism lobbed at a book, or at an author, when at the end of the story the day is saved by the arbitrarily whimsical hand of God, which is to say, of the author. OR, equally, when the heroes are crushed and their hopes destroyed by the same arbitrary whim, except this time by the active malice of God (which is to say, of the author). The latter is sometimes called Diabolus Ex Machina, which is peachy, but I’m going to refer to both as Deus Ex here because it just simplifies everything to include all fake miracles where the author intervenes in the story by one term, whether for good or ill.

Also, this doesn’t have to be literally the end of the story; deus ex moments can and often do occur at the end of a scene, often but not always the climactic scene. The farther this is from the ending of the story, the faster the pace, the farther the story continues, the more likely the reader is to read through the deus ex ending of a scene and keep going without necessarily thinking too much about it or being too disturbed. Though I think the reader is going to notice the beneficent or maleficent miracle at least a little, at least in the back of their mind, and from then on read the book more skeptically / lose belief in the story / trust the author less / take a more distant emotional stance toward the story / in the worst case, lose interest and stop reading.

When the ending of the whole story suffers from a severe deus ex moment, then the reader may, with or without knowing why, decide the ending was not satisfying, and there’s no better way to make sure the reader gives up on the author’s work entirely. Therefore, ending a book with deus ex machina is bad artistically and also it can turn out to be a dire mistake commercially (though if the author is sufficiently popular, maybe it won’t matter enough to mention).

Regardless, when the author wants a happy ending, but has painted her characters into an inescapable corner, she has four choices:

A) The author accepts that, oops, the ending is unhappy. I don’t think any author ever does this.

B) The author goes back into the earlier part of the story and does sufficient revision to provide a means of escape from the inescapable corner.

C) The author thinks of a clever way for her characters to escape the inescapable corner, and if necessary adds sufficient foreshadowing to the earlier part of the story to make this clever escape work.

D) The author reaches into the story and lifts her characters out of the inescapable corner by means of a miracle, which is to say, the author commits deus ex.

For a negative deus ex, the characters have arrived at a position where they have indeed saved the day, or the part of it that matters most to them, but the author wants a tragic ending. Therefore, the author:

A) Accepts that the ending will be unexpectedly happy. I don’t think any author ever chooses this option.

B) Goes back into the earlier part of the story and does sufficient revision to prevent the characters from getting into their strong ending position.

C) Thinks of a clever reason the characters’ position turns out not to be nearly as strong as it seemed, with sufficient foreshadowing to make this work.

D) Reaches into the story and deliberately crushes the characters and destroys their hopes by means of a malevolent miracle, which is to say, deus ex.

And it is the author’s job to tell a story without resorting to (D).

One of the important jobs of a beta reader or developmental editor is to read a book, point to the ending of a scene or the ending of the story, and say, “For crying out loud, what the hell even is this?”, thus drawing attention to a deus ex moment which the author, because of natural authorial blindness, has not noticed. Then it becomes the author’s job to pick (A) – which never happens, as far as I know – or (B) or (C). Or else the author might, of course, choose, because of laziness or fast-approaching deadlines, to just go with (D) and hope readers don’t notice. Which is a vain hope with more discerning readers, but the author may hope that the many non-discerning readers will carry the book up to a decent star rating. Which, for really popular authors, is exactly what will happen, even though more discerning readers may quit reading that author’s books forever. (Yes, I have an example in mind; just wait for it.)

OR ELSE THE AUTHOR CAN CHOOSE TO JUSTIFY DIVINE INTERVENTION

Deus ex endings can be fine! Readers can be happy with a deus ex ending! Which is a good thing, since I have done deus ex endings, let me see, maybe half a dozen times. Or more. Nor am I alone. Other authors have done deus ex endings that also work just fine. You don’t need a lot of clear examples to demonstrate how to make a deus ex ending work, though I can think of others, which I’ll mention in a moment.

How do you make divine intervention work? You do it by separating the divine from the hand of the author. There are two necessary prerequisites:

First: The metaphysics of the story has to really be there, all the way through.

If you want divine intervention to work, the divine has to be present in the story, not just at the ending, but all the way through. This doesn’t mean the gods have to be chatting with each other in their own special pov chapters, which by the way totally destroys any possibility of a numinous feel to the story. That can work in a more humorous fantasy novel, which is not what I’m thinking of here. I’m talking about metaphysics that are a lot less chatty, but still obviously present, underlying the world, all the way through the story.

I suppose I would say that a sense of the numinous is the sense of the divine, or at the very least a sense of the reality of the metaphysics, and that having gods playing dice on stage while chatting about the fate of mortals reduces the gods so far that they don’t seem divine at all. The author can then have them be arbitrarily nice or malicious and that’s fine because the author has established the gods = just exactly like mortal people except more powerful. Then, when the gods intervene at the end, this isn’t a deus ex moment because they aren’t truly gods, so whatever they do isn’t a miracle. Therefore, the ending can fail for lack of setup or lack of foreshadowing or lack of believability, but nobody is going to point at that ending as a deus ex ending.

Moving on, though, the other necessary precondition to making divine intervention work –

Second: The characters have to believe in the metaphysics.

If the characters don’t believe in the metaphysics, neither will the reader.

Therefore, if the author writes a story in which the characters say, “By the gods!” when they’re surprised, but never think about or care about the gods, and there’s no evidence any of the people in the world think about or care about the gods, then the author hasn’t really put gods in that world at all, and in fact I’d say this is still true even if the gods are shown in little chatty chapters throughout the story. Or else that would create such a severe disconnect between the metaphysics and the way people behave that it would destroy the world’s believability, and I mean totally crush the believability, so severely that only the very least discerning readers could possibly tolerate the story. (I can’t offhand think of an example.) (But I bet there are some.)

If the metaphysics is real, that means the people in the story have to believe in the metaphysics. Their society should show that. So should their behavior as individuals. Individual characters who serve the gods know that they’re serving the gods and act like they’re serving the gods. Individuals who reject the gods know that they’re rejecting the gods. Minor characters  who are just living life in the background nevertheless act like they believe the gods are really there. If the metaphysics doesn’t involve literal gods, then just substitute the word “metaphysics” or “divine reality” or whatever suits the story.

The point is, if the metaphysics is real, then events that happen can draw on the underlying metaphysical reality of the story and this is perfectly fine, especially if the characters refer to, draw on, influence, or in some other way interact with the metaphysics during the divine intervention scene.

This is how you create a literal deus ex ending for a scene or a story, meaning divine intervention, and make it work for readers: it isn’t YOUR hand providing the miracle at all. Deus ex machina is a false miracle provided by the hand of the author. Actual divine intervention is a real miracle provided by the real metaphysics active in the story.

If you do that, then the only reason readers will reject the story is that they don’t like the tone, meaning they’re repulsed by the underlying metaphysics, in which case they most likely don’t get to the ending anyway.

I’m thinking here of grimdark. If the tone is grimdark and grimdark metaphysics underlies the world, then I probably would be so strongly repelled by that that I wouldn’t get through the first chapter. That one year when I accidentally read half a dozen grimdark novels and watched Saw, which I still can’t believe anybody recommended to me, but anyway, that year sensitized me so strongly to grimdark that I think I pick up that attitude and tone much, much faster now and either drop the book immediately or read it in a very emotionally distant way, engaging only at the most superficial, intellectual level. (And then, when the story does indeed turn out to be grimdark, never read anything else by that author.)

So, to reiterate, deus ex machina works when it is true divine intervention, meaning the divine or other numinous metaphysics is really present in the story.

And no doubt there are a fair number of examples, but some sure leap to mind, so:

Tuyo, Tarashana, Tasmakat, Suelen, Tano (epilogue only), Marag.

Also the Death’s Lady series, though there the metaphysics at what we might call the intermediate level is a lot more visible and active than the deeper level. Also Winter of Ice and Iron, with a very different metaphysics. Also White Road of the Moon.

In contrast, there’s no obvious metaphysics or else no connection of the metaphysics to a true sense of the divine in the Griffin Mage trilogy, in the House of Shadows duology, in The Floating Islands duology or Keeper of the Mist.

Everybody points to the Five Gods stories as worldbuilding where the religion “feels like a real religion,” which it does. And the reason it does is that this religion is sufficiently consonant with real religions that it feels like real people might actually believe in it, which a lot of fantasy religions do not; plus the metaphysics is present in the stories, plus the characters believe in the metaphysics. 

Another example is From All False Doctrine by Degan, and here the challenges were different because the religion in question is a real-world religion. Degan’s challenge therefore lay in treating the religion as real all the way through, pulling the metaphysics out where the reader could see it, and utilizing the metaphysics in the plot of the story – my favorite moment of divine intervention here is not the ending, but the scene where Kit experiences the church crashing down around him and then that experience is transmuted to a wholly different experience. That’s a beautifully written scene, not easy for vision or dream scenes, and also the emotional reactions during and especially after the scene create a sense of reality and truth. Because, I should add, separate from everything about metaphysics, a sense of reality and truth comes, I think, from the consonance of the emotional experience of the characters with the reader’s own emotional experience. A sense of falsity comes from emotional dissonance. Which is a different topic, I guess, except that saying “the characters believe in the metaphysics” means “their emotional experience is consonant with their own belief in the metaphysics and with the reader’s emotional experience in connection with the reader’s own deep beliefs.”

Which is a big topic, so back to examples.

A negative example, that is, an example of deus ex machina rather than divine intervention, occurs at the ending of Duma Key by Stephen King.

This book was written during a period in which Stephen King included, in every single book he wrote, a nice female character who dies in order to produce a tearjerker moment. I don’t know whether he’s kept that up, because I stopped reading his books after Duma Key. His use of a nice-female-character’s death was so consistent that it became possible to begin a new book by King, and the INSTANT this character stepped on stage, point to her and say, “She’s the one! There she is!” Sure enough, toward the end of the story, that character would die and it would be very sad, especially if you didn’t see the careless, facile manipulative setup. In Duma Key, it seemed that this character might survive, because the protagonist conquered the evil (don’t remember anything about this) and the Tearjerker Girl was still alive.

But lo! Even though the protagonist has solved the problem, a remnant of the evil nevertheless lingers in the world juuuuuust long enough to kill the Tearjerker Girl, and no doubt everyone wept except me and readers like me. I threw the book across the room and I have never touched another Stephen King book. It wasn’t the death of Tearjerker Girl, though that kind of obvious manipulation of reader emotions should be handled in a way that is far, far more subtle. The problem was the obvious deus ex as the author deliberately and openly reached into the story and crushed the protagonist’s hopes himself, in one of the most blatant deus ex moments I have ever seen, in order to force a tragic ending into this story. He’s so popular, and so many readers read his books so uncritically, that this book has a fine star rating. Nevertheless, ugh.

What are some other clear-cut examples of storytelling successes that include divine intervention? Or storytelling failures that result from deus ex?

Because of Duma Key, it sort of pains me to acknowledge that Stephen King pulled off a fine example of divine intervention ending in The Stand. Throughout The Stand, the characters keep moving forward even though they doubt victory is possible and even though they doubt divine intervention is possible, but they sort of think it is, really. The metaphysics is there, underneath. Therefore, when the hand of God intervenes, it works. Or I think it does.

Looking for negative examples, A Court of Wings and Roses pops up as an example of bad deus ex. I haven’t read it, because the first book of the series begins this way:

The forest had become a labyrinth of snow and ice.

I had been monitoring the parameters of the thicket for an hour, and my vantage point in the crook of a tree branch had turned useless.

And I got to that second sentence and thought, Wait, does the author know what “parameters” means? How did the copy editor miss this? Did the copy editor flag this and the author said No, stet, because she was committed to using “parameters” in this completely incorrect way? In fact, if the author thought this word was the same as “perimeter,” how could she have used “perimeters” plural, when a thicket probably has only one perimeter?

And I was so utterly put off by this stupid wrong word in the SECOND SENTENCE OF THE BOOK, for crying out loud, that I did not get past this paragraph, deleted the sample immediately, and dropped the author on my “never bother with” list.

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I wound up thinking about that because of various people saying, “Neumeier uses deus ex a lot in her books, but for some reason, it works.” So, this is my take on the difference between deus ex and diabolus ex moments versus actual real divine intervention, and why the former doesn’t work but the latter does.