Plausible Miracles and Eucatastrophe

[marycatelli]

From the Readercon blurb:

Mark Twain instructed other writers that "the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable." This rule can be generalized: the more favorable to the characters an unexpected plot turn is, the better it needs to be set up (see the end of James Morrow's Only Begotten Daughter). But what about eucatastrophe, where the power of a happy ending comes from its unexpectedness? Is the eucatastrophe in fact a form of plausible miracle where the plausibility derives not from things the author has put in the text, but from beliefs the reader already had, perhaps without knowing it? Or is there another explanation?
 

I think this one gets the ten-foot pole, too.  (poke, poke, poke)

The eucatastrophe does not have to be any kind of miracle at all.  J. R. R. Tolkien cited an actual fairy tale, "The Black Bull of Norroway", as the example in "On Fairy-Stories." :

"Seven long years I served for thee,
The glassy hill I clomb for thee,
Thy bloody clothes I wrang for thee;
And wilt thou not waken and turn to me?"

He heard, and turned to her.

But the reason why he heard her the third night is that after he had been drugged the first two, people asked him about all the racket of weeping and pleading they heard from his room at night, and he figured out he had been drugged, and didn't drink it.  An entirely mundane explanation, even if she used magical means to reach the place and then to bribe her way into his room.

Happy endings, from the miraculous to the entirely mundane, need to be surprising and inevitable -- surprising first, and then, with hindsight, on reflection upon all the clues whose significance the reader did not grasp at the time.  When the writer pulls the white rabbit out of the hat at the climax, the reader needs to remember how it was tucked into the hat in chapter 3.  (That is one of the things that makes writing such a bear.)  The reason why Jane Austen manages to produce a nobleman in the last chapter of Northanger Abbey to marry Henry's sister and make his father so pleased that he relents about Henry's marriage to Catherine (and to solemnly point out evidence that she hadn't just produced him) was that she had set up how fickle his father was.  We had already seen him change his mind about Catherine twice on little evidence, and what little it was, was not very good.

One of the charms of re-reading is the realization of all the clues pointing the right way.  For a plausible miracle, they have to be more numerous, which makes it harder to surprise people with ending, but it's not fundamentally a different process.

part of bittercon 

Comments

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Okay, Tolkien's kind of eucatastrophe was not what got the characters out of trouble in the first place. What got them out was some normally set up and more or less expected thing (or possibly some surprise, like an eagle helping). But that's not what he meant by eucatastrophe.

What he meant was, following the actual problem-solving event, some bonus good thing, some unexpected icing on the cake. It kind of depended on wording, and I don't have Tolkien's examples to hand, so here's a modern example:


Tie a yellow ribbon 'round the old oak tree
It's been three long years
Do you still want me?
If I don't see a ribbon round the old oak tree
I'll stay on the bus
Forget about us
Put the blame on me
If I don't see a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree

Now the whole damn bus is cheering
And I can't believe I see
A hundred yellow ribbons 'round the old, the old oak tree

One yellow ribbon was the expected, logical, problem-solving end. Then we get a double eucatastrope: 99 more yellow ribbons, AND the whole damn bus cheering.

In the Black Bull example, imo the surprise/bonus is in the wording: the last line almost repeats the next to last.

[marycatelli]

Except that in the actual example cited, it was the thing that got them out of trouble -- he was awake and could hear and escape with her.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

But that simple fact is not a eucatastrophe in itself. It's logical, it's what she was working toward and expecting. Imo it's the presentation, the poetic twist, that gives the eucat effect. That, and the surprising suddenness, maybe.

[marycatelli]

but she hadn't been working toward it. She had done all she could and thought everything was futile.

Tolkien cited it for the way it "turned."

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Well, Tolkien ought to know. ;-) But 'the way it turned' sounds like a presentation issue to me, though I don't have the book handy.

[marycatelli]

We get the same turn in other fairy tales of the same type.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I thought about this one for Bittercon, and hedged. Glad someone did it!

[marycatelli]

Glad you like it!

[thanate.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how much point I have to make about it, but the first thing that comes to my mind reading this is actually the ending on Catch-22, which is both hinted at in advance, and set up to be happy in that everything else is brought down to be so bleak that one cheerful note can make the entire book ok again.

I don't immediately think of any more positive twist endings, though a couple things with key plot points that follow the same pattern come to mind. (hindsight-inevitable plot twists, that is) The other thing that I'd associate with this as a reader is books where the last half-page or so makes or breaks the whole experience of the book.

[marycatelli]

Twists can be very hard to pull off because of that very chance of breaking the whole book.