Brian Chasnoff

My father-in-law, Jose Flores, is an English professor. He gave me a book this past weekend called The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms, Third Edition. My inner word nerd is highly aroused. 

I’ll occasionally share terms I find interesting. Today, it’s deus ex machina.

What a beautiful phrase. What does it mean? Literally, “god from a machine,” from the Latin. The Bedford Glossary defines it as “a phrase referring specifically to the intervention of a nonhuman force to resolve a seemingly unresolvable conflict in a literary work.”

In other words, it’s a technique that an author uses to bail out a character in a bind, although the resolution often rings false. Wikipedia says the phrase has its origins in Greek tragedies, in which cranes literally were used at times to lower actors playing gods onto stages, where they would then conveniently solve life’s knotty problems such as death.  

Can anyone conjure a deus ex machina they’ve read?

I just did… In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a father and son spend many, many pages trudging through a hostile, uninhabitable landscape, desolate save for the occasional cannibal.

(Spoiler Alert!)

At the end, the father dies, just in time for a few random strangers to save the boy. Don’t get me wrong, Cormac. It was a moving work. I’m glad the kid survives. But I believe you just employed a deus ex machina.

Or, as Tom Petty would say, “You got lucky, babe.”

We all start with empty pages. For those who have to fill and submit those pages to an audience by sundown, this can be a sobering reality. What happens when there’s nothing to write?

On Tuesday, February 5, 2008, photographer Nicole Fruge and I woke up before dawn in the French Quarter and got into a rented Jeep. We were covering Mardi Gras for the newspaper, and our self-imposed assignment was to seek out and record in photographs and words the traditions of New Orleans that unfold in hidden quarters on Fat Tuesday. No more bared breasts on Bourbon Street or drunken tourists in garbage bins (I’d written about those things the day before).

We had some clues.

(more…)