According to Michelle Hoover, dramatic tension begins from a character’s “concrete desire” that is more superficial and consciously perceived (e.g. he wants the girl) and progresses toward the character’s “abstract desire” that is the deeper true reason that underlies the apparent desire (e.g. he wants to have a home) [1].

To elaborate Hoover’s idea, let’s propose another formulation that turns things around:
1) Dramatic desire: abstract desire for a concrete thing.
2) Desire beyond drama: concrete desire for an abstract thing.
In this new formulation, dramatic tension begins from 1 and progresses toward 2 but never actually reaches there. 1 and 2 are like life and death. If the story could actually reach 2, the drama would already be over and there would remain nothing to be told. Yet 1 can progress only as long as 2 remains on the story’s horizon. 2 never enters the story, but the reader is always able to access 2 as the audiable ambient virtual background [2].

In this formulation, Hooverian “abstract / concrete” aspects are both covered as the two parts of dramatic desire: “Girl” is the desired concrete thing and “home” marks the abstract form of the same desire for the girl (insofar as “home” locates the girl spatially in the dramatic world).

Desire can never truly get concretized as long as it remains dramatic, i.e. as long as it relies on the repression (or disavowal) of a fantasy. Since the usual metaphor for a desired concrete thing is a carrot, let’s imagine dramatic desire as belonging to a metaphorical rabbit and introduce a new term: “Home-carrot” designates any fantasy that underlies any dramatic desire [3].

This is a Freudian condensation: “Home” plays the role of death, as one’s grave is one’s final home. “Carrot” plays the role of sex by evoking the image of mating rabbits. “Home-carrot” means that all drama has something to do with fantasies about death and sex.

As formulated above, there is also a desire beyond drama, a concrete desire for an abstract thing. One goes beyond drama by concretizing one’s desire; in other words, by traversing one’s fantasy.

Dramatic tension plays an ambivalent role in the fantasy traversal: On the one hand, the dramatic flow in the story bars and resists the traversal by repressing (or disavowing) the fantasy. This is the explicit role of dramatic tension. On the other hand, this very barring and resistance leaves certain traces (returns of the repressed, symptomatic markers) in the story that can open pathways for interpretation that may aid and guide the fantasy traversal. This is the implicit role of dramatic tension.

In fact, two desires belong to different subjects: Dramatic desire belongs to the character that dwells in the story, whereas desire beyond drama belongs to the reader who dwells in his/her reception of the story. What is staged within a story can only ever be an abstract desire for a concrete thing: Fiction continually presents concrete things but fictional desires can never get concretized. But the same fictional staging also accomplishes the concretization of the reader’s desire by shaping the punctuation of his/her reading of the story (start/stop moments, emotional moments, reminiscences, associations, sharing with others, etc.). The abstract thing that the reader concretely desires beyond drama is the very fictional story itself, which in turn throws back and immerses the reader in the desire within drama. Since this constant oscillation of desire between the drama and its beyond defines humanity, the academic institution of this oscillation is called the Humanities.

(Turkish)

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] See “The Duplicity of A Character’s Desire” Michelle Hoover

[2] About the horizon as what is heard, see: “Three Levels of Staging Truth: See the Icon, Understand the Index, Hear the Symbol”; about the audiable, see: The Hum of The World (2019) by Lawrence Kramer.

[3] See “Yuva-havuç peşinde koşan tavşan ile ev-semptomu dinleyen kaplumbağa”