If stories are the vessels for conveying meaning, the stuff of narrative arc is the stuff of life. And that stuff is tension.
Tension is a strange concept to describe, because it is inherently one of Ian McGilchrist’s right-hemisphered concepts, which do not lend themselves well to words. Tension is an in-between-ness, a description of a relationship between things, not a thing itself.
In stories, tension is marked by that sense of anticipation, an unease, an unresolved conflict. It can be between characters, between competing desires of a single character, or between a character and the environment. Tension is what separates a set of facts from a story, and good use of tension is what separates great stories from the good ones.
But let’s leave stories for a minute, and get more concrete. In physics, tension in a rope happens when the rope is getting pulled in two opposing directions. Tension is stored energy, potential for future motion. Importantly, tension is invisible unless the rope breaks or slackens. Is the tight rope holding 100 or 1000lbs? To the naked eye, both look the same: like a tight rope.
Let’s look at tension in one more domain: music. Notes are just sounds of varying frequencies, and melodies are ordered strings of them. We humans attribute great meaning to those notes and melodies: when they sound a certain way, we consider them complete, and other times they feel incomplete. Music holds tension through dissonant chords, unresolved harmonies, rhythmic buildups. So when listening to the buildup in a symphony, we are feeling the tension build - until it is hopefully released once the music resolves into consonance.
A story is tense with opposing desires, risks, unknowns. And just as rope tension breaks when one end lets go, narrative tension releases when the conflict is resolved: the fight ends, love is confessed, the truth is revealed.
So tension is that in-betweenness when something is being pulled from where it is to where it should be, from the present to some completeness. Tension is created in the mismatch, builds over time, and gets released only once one of the forces fully wins out.
So much of life is in that tension. In fact, I would almost argue that Life is tension. A slack string creates no music when strummed. Without the possibility of release, or in our case, Death, nothing is considered alive to begin with.
We humans are possibly unique for our understanding of the in-betweenness of things, and thus for our ability to tell and understand stories. And we alone in the universe (so far) feel the tension between what things are, and what they ought to be. And what a crazy thing that we have any sense of ‘what ought to be’ in the first place. CS Lewis: “human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it.”
“Knowing the ought” is perhaps the curse of Man as described in Ecclesiastes. “He set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom...” We have, for whatever reason, the sense of something beyond what we can fathom. Perhaps the ought was even what was meant by the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil that Adam and Eve ate from. For without the knowledge of the ought, there is no “other place” that is pulling on our current place; there is no tension, and therefore no story, and no Life.