In high school I was introduced to the concept of Deus ex Machina, the Mechanical God. It is a sudden plot twist or introduction of some fortuitous often irrational coincidence that is needed to make the story work.
Once I became aware of the concept, it ruined many a story for me because the story no longer followed a logical path, but instead relied on a cheap gimmick to get to a happy or tragic ending or to allow the story to continue.
Often I would start a novel and halfway thorough would go: Oh Please! And it would instantly result in suspension of disbelief.
Sometimes I almost made it to the end of the novel and then come to realize I had been dragged through a pointless illusion by the author.
I specifically remember this happening in “Gone with the Wind”; a book I read because a girl I was interested in told me it was her favorite novel.
I tried to enjoy the novel but found it irritating because it really was just one damn thing after another. But wasn’t every novel supposed to be that way anyway? Novels have an arc, a path, a voyage of discovery, or character development and that is sort of one damn thing after another and wasn’t that what “Gone with the Wind” was about? I could not quite figure out why I felt so dissatisfied with Scarlett, and Rhett, and Ashley until I realized that the author was creating characters that behaved in ways that simply made no sense, just to be able to add one damn thing to another, and write 1000 pages of unrealistic drivel. Her deus ex machina was unrealistic characters interactions.
The central issue is this: Why would Rhett Butler bother with Scarlett? Love? Nah, Rhett Butler is not driven by love, and he is completely self-sufficient. Just one lick of Scarlett’s neurotics and he’d find a more suitable companion. A man like Rhett would have said “I don’t give a damn” around page 100, and walked out on the principle that there are plenty of tastier fish in his sea. But then the book would have been too short for a novel. So Margaret Mitchell needed to make the characters interactions more unrealistic to be able to extend the story to the length of a novel.
After reading “Gone with the Wind” I also lost interest in the girl that loved the book. If she liked that novel, I might as well not give a damn about her right then and there.
I am condemning a 1937 racist novel, which is easy, but this type of broken plot development still occurs. While, overall, the 1997 novel “Cold Mountain” is a quite decent read, the ending introduces such a pathetic plot twist that I literally threw the novel into the fireplace after reading the last page. A whole novel destroyed by the author’s laziness in constructing a compelling ending.
Deus ex machina is a complex concept. The use of deus ex machina, is not necessarily a flaw. Magic realism, and all of science fiction needs some level of artificiality, but even in science fiction there needs to be discipline in its use. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman is an excellent example of a science fiction novel that never takes advantage of deus ex machina in its plot or character interactions.
Over the years I continued to read short stories, novels and what is often defined as literature and started parsing the stories that did not depend on deus ex machinas, and came to a weird discovery.
In general, plot and character development in maritime novels does not rely on deus ex machinas. There may be sudden storms that challenge the characters, but that can be expected. In maritime novels I never got the sense that the character interactions or story lines were unrealistic regardless of how incompatible the characters may be.
I took me while to figure it out, but it depended on the fact that characters were on a boat. They could not leave! If Scarlett and Rhett were on a boat, quite possibly the inability to escape each other might have resulted in a realistic happy, or sad, resolution. It may not have gone on for 1000 pages, but it probably would have been interesting.
Maritime settings simply made better novels. At first, I figured it was a personal bias, but then it also must have been a personal bias of Melville, Cooper, Conrad, Hemingway, Crane, Stevenson, London, Steinbeck, Kipling and more recently O’Brian and the list goes on and on.
Not all of those authors are my favorites and they may not be favored by everybody, but I think it is fair to say that Melville and Conrad really stood at the cradle of the modern novel and quite possibly more so than any other English authors, and they both cut their teeth with nautical literature. Somehow their novels had a drive and depth that set the standard for modern literature and, when I read them, I never felt cheated.
So do great novels only exist in maritime settings? I don’t think so, what I do think is that once an author writes or thinks in the maritime setting, their land-based work becomes more disciplined, and they avoid deus ex machinas for the cheap devices they are.
What they do is they tighten their setting to an extent that the characters have to work out their issues. This is quite evident in Melville and Conrad’s land based stories. Melville’s “Bartelby the Scrivener” is an excellent example, and all of Conrad’s land based novels are tightly locked to a location with captive characters. Sometimes a tiny location that through plot design cannot be escaped. A particularly interesting example is Conrad’s last novel “The Rover”. A very simple plot that is set in France but keeps all the characters pretty much in the same place for very simple reasons.
Somehow, all these authors learned something from maritime that apparently could not be learned ashore.
Maritime changed the history of the world, but, if you ask me, it also changed the history of literature.
