Passionate Love as a Plot Arc

In an earlier blog entry, I wrote about how one might conceivably use Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit" as an alternative plot arc for screenwriting - or at any rate as a plot arc for dramas of recognition. Actually, that book could support a whole genre of plot arcs, much like the Hero's journey does.

There is another sort of screenwriter's "scaffold" for creating plot arcs that I have found, and I think this one is even cooler. It is a model of passionate love described by Sharon S. Brehm in a book called "The Psychology of Love", edited by Robert J. Sternberg and Michael L. Barnes (Yale University Press, 1988).

In this article, Sharon Brehm describes her search for models of passionate love that are "passion-positive" rather than focusing on the destructive aspects of passion. She finds such models, perhaps unsurprisingly, in the writings of Christian mystics. Religious passion is ostensibly "desexualized", and hence escapes condemnation. However, clerics have often had occasion to tell certain zealots, ascetics and other passionate devout people to "tone down" their devotion... Excesses of passion are seen as dangerous everywhere, I guess...

Brehm did find a line of literary texts that dealt with passion, with a point of origin in the works of Marie-Henri Beyle a.k.a. Stendhal, and a point of insertion in a book by Dorothy Tennov called "Love and Limerance" (1979). Tennov notes that Stendhal is virtually unique among the students of love ("sopho-philiacs?") in his 'failure' to criticise, scold, castigate or caution the lover, the beloved or the experience of passionate love.

Perhaps even more interesting, however, is the fact that, according to Brehm, Stendhal's theory of passionate love (developed in his work "De l'amour") describes several phases of the growth of passion, which turn out to be a loose but salient match to the vision of love described by St. Theresa of Avila (most fully described in "the Interior Castle" - her account of her own mystical experiences).

Hmmmm..... <=things that make ya go...

Each theory is summarized in turn. Keep in mind that my main interest is in a model for dramatic plotlines, not so much the theories per se.

STENDHAL's THEORY OF PASSIONATE LOVE

STAGE 1: ADMIRATION
The lover encounters the beloved and is attracted by his/her qualities. Since initial encounters are usually brief, these qualities are usually fairly superficial e.g. looks, sense of humor, charm, etc.

STAGE 2: ANTICIPATION
The lover begins to elaborate upon these impressions, imagining the pleasures that would come with a closer association with the beloved. The circumstances of the lover are important in this. If the lover is stuck in a boring routine, fantasy elaborations are more likely, as they are if the lover is romantically confident, bold or imaginative.

STAGE 3: HOPE
Once the lover starts investing time and energy in the elaboration of fantasies, hope must be evaluated to assess whether or not to escalate fantasies into plans or action preparedness. This evaluation is not a cold, rational accounting. It also depends greatly upon the circumstances the lover is in, as did stage 2.

STAGE 4: ROMANTIC ATTRACTION
Admiration, anticipation and hope together form the hook - or cupid's arrow. They give rise to what amounts to the *real* first stage of passionate love - "romantic attraction", or a "crush". This is the point at which the resolve to press things further is flirted with. Different subjects would do this with differing degrees of agency/patiency.

STAGE 5: CRYSTALIZATION
When you suddenly realize that you have fallen hard for somebody, they become outstandingly wonderful beings in your eyes. Stendhal referred to the "deification of a charming object", calling crystallization:

...that process of mind which discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at
every turn of events... it is sufficient to think of a perfection in order
to see it in the person you love...

Crystallization develops over time, and during this time, your friends begin to dread your late-night phone calls. Brehm describes it as "...an increasingly tight, closing system in which the world contracts to the beloved and the beloved fills all the world. The beloved becomes joy and beauty incarnate."

It *is* kind of pleasant... you have to admit!

Since the beloved comes to represent all joy and beauty, our anticipation of the delight we will experience with them expands in measure. This state is made only more intense by the terrible risk that the beloved might reject us, meaning that all of this anticipated wonderfulness will never come to pass. Eeeeeek!!

So there are three aspects of crystalization, which intermingle:
1) The increasingly self-perfecting image of the beloved
2) The imagined delights of being loved back by this perfect beloved
3) The terror of being rejected by irreplaceable source of delight

Increase or decrease any one of these pressures, and the others will increase or decrease along with it. In this, we find what Brehm calls the "quintessential Stendhalian proposition that passionate love depends on uncertainty and distance."
This quintessential proposition is so important that it supports the sixth stage of Love's progress...

STAGE 6: DOUBT
A serious blow, a serious threat, a rival, news that he/she may be moving... a major crisis of doubt is necessary to kick the obsession up a notch... up into...

STAGE 7: SECOND CRYSTALIZATION
This is full-blown obsession. The beloved is everything, reality-testing is seriously imaired. There is no more casual wondering about the beloved. Coincidence and chance vanish. Everything that happens is "destiny", a "sign", a "message"... Every nuance of the beloved's behaviour is scrutinized with intense focus on each detail and its posssible ramifications... for hints of interest, disinterest, acceptance, rejection... All other concerns and interests in life fade into nothingness.

At this point, your friends begin suggesting that you might want to consider getting professional help... you're scaring them now...

I think this gets us to the first major reversal of the second act. Motivation now exists for the exceptional course of action and its complications... or alternatively, for the tragic failure to act... or whatever...

--SIDEBAR--
What's good for love is good for hate, in dramatic terms, I would think... surely a passionate hate could be meaningfully represented as developing in essentially the same way that Stendhal describes for passionate love. This could be hatred of a person, like Iago's hatred for Othello, or the more abstract and global hatred of symbols of power, like "America", "Microsoft", "the market", "the right", "the left"... etc. Stendhal's progress of passion could be used to analyse the public rhetoric of polemicists of all stripes, and the process by which groups of people are induced to dehumanize other groups of people.

TERESA OF AVILA'S INTERIOR CASTLE
St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) is one of the great psychologists of the mystical experience, and many of her writings strive for the clearest possible description of them. A notable example of this is her _Interior Castle_: a text where she explains the process of loving God using a spatial metaphor - the metaphor of a journey through a great castle containing many "mansions" (rooms). In this work, she develops seven basic stages of the progress of the devotee's soul towards the beloved God.

(This, by the way, would be a really good way to get around writer's block for some dramatists - for writers with more of a structural/overview sense of design, rather than an event-by-event/act-consquence-act timeflow sense of design. If you find the Aristotelian-arc metaphor unhelpful, or if Robert McKee's Neo-Aristotelian act-goal-gap kinds of temporal/timeline models also fail to kick-start your engine, you can design your plot spatially, as a house or as a whole kingdom that your characters will have to voyage through to reach the goal. When I was a kid, before computers were common, we used to play Advanced Dungeons and Dragons in exactly this way. The Dungeon Master would design a world on graph paper - or hex paper for the hardcore players. There would be rumors of treasure, carried by strangers with information, shops for buying equipment, all kinds of hazards and obstacles to overcome along the journey, antagonists of increasing power, experience points gained by the players, etc... This spatial, Advanced D&D metaphor for plot design is a great way for spatially-minded dramatists to organize their plots... and this little rant was inspired by St. Teresa of Avila, so it can't be Satanic mind-control being channeled by Gary Gygax!!)

Teresa's model of devotional love is outlined below, with Stendhal's stages appended in square brackets, to explore the parallels.

STAGE 1: ENTERING THE CASTLE
The individual makes a decision to love God.
[S1: ADMIRATION - the accumulation of reasons to cathect to an object.]

STAGE 2: OPENING THE SELF
One prays to God and offers oneself to Him, if He should deign to accept, or not (one devotes oneself without holding out for recognition).
[S2: ANTICIPATION - An elaboration of one's focus on the beloved, and a sense of possible futures with him/her.]

STAGE 3: EMBODYING DEVOTION
Living an exemplary life of prayer and good works, defined throughout as an offering to Him.
[S3: HOPE - One begins to believe that a life with the beloved is possible.]

STAGE 4: ON GOD's HOOK
This is done through the Prayer of Recollection and the Prayer of Quiet. The Prayer of Recollection involves the active awareness of all of one's activities, and the growing realization that all of them are concentrated upon God. The Prayer of Quiet is the inward-focusing twin of the Prayer of Recollection. The Prayer of Quiet involves withdrawing inwards, with one's will totally concentrated on God, giving rise to the awareness that the soul is powerless to do anything else but serve God - nothing else is possible for the self.
[S4: ROMANTIC ATTRACTION - Admiration, anticipation and hope together form the hook - or cupid's arrow - "romantic attraction", or a "crush".]

STAGE 5: BETROTHAL - THE PROMISE OF UNION
Brief glimpses of God's perfection are permitted, in contemplative "absences" when all awareness of world and self melt away. One develops a sense of what it will mean to be fully given over to union with the divine. One has entered the penumbra of the divine presence, and one feels humility of place.[
S5: CRYSTALIZATION - The "deification of a charming object", "...an increasingly tight, closing system in which the world contracts to the beloved and the beloved fills all the world. The beloved becomes joy and beauty incarnate." <==Actually, all of Teresa's Stages 1-4 could be described as stages of crystallization...]

STAGE 6: BEING GRANTED INTIMACY WITH GOD
One enters the divine presence, enjoying experiences of rapture, transport and the famous Teresaen "wounding of the soul" - God's angel brandishing an iron-tipped spear with a flaming head, repeatedly piercing her heart and guts, causing her unimaginably ecstatically pleasurable agony... ahem... rapture and transport are altered states of consciousness, trance-like states wherein visions or revelations may be experienced. At this point, one is a full journeyman in the "God" business...
[S6: DOUBT - a threat or rival appears... the parallelism with Stendhal here is a parallelism of precise opposition. Teresa posits full confirmation at the point where Stendhal puts it into doubt. This would support the tactic - described below - of using Stendhal's progress as template for the beginning of act two, and Teresa's as a template for the latter part.]

STAGE 7: THE SPIRITUAL MARRIAGE
One is accepted by God in a permanent union. One is given over to God, one become's God's.
[S7: SECOND CRYSTALIZATION Full-blown obsession. The beloved is everything, coincidence and chance vanish. Everything that happens is "destiny", All other concerns and interests in life fade into nothingness. <== This sounds a bit like Teresa's Stage 4: On God's Hook.]

The parallels between Teresa's account of devotional love and Stendhal's theory of passionate love are suggestive, though not perfect. Passion and devotion intersect in each, but it is a matter of determining which comes first. The first form of love will frame or support the other. For Teresa, devotion comes first - the conscious choice to dedicate oneself. This produces passion in the end, as a kind of reward for devotion. Stendhal describes passion as coming first, and devotion (more accurately, obsession) then develops.

Passion is not willed in Stendhal's model. Rather it develops as an instance of what some psychologists describe as "elaborated intrusion". Due to some kind of subconscious (subcortical?) evaluation, a thought, image, name, memory, whatever, has enough valence or salience that it continually "pops up" in the minds, intruding on other thoughts upon the flimsiest of associative pretexts (or for no reason at all...). The active thought won't go away, and so it gets elaborated into further associations, further hypothetical action plans, further hypothetical scenarios... all of which increase the valence and salience of the intrusive thought...

Teresa's devotional love begins with a decision to love with no guarantee of reciprocation... so it has a very different, and much firmer, basis than elaborated intrusion. Elaborated intrusion does appear in Teresa's model, but it is cultivated through devotional effort - it is attained through practice - rather than appearing gratis courtesy of the subconscious. (In her *model*, anyhow. Those who psychoanalyse her writings do comment on the visceral/limbic "kick" she seems to have going for this "God" fellow!)

Maybe, as suggested earlier, in terms of a dramatic arc, if the development of passion takes us to the first major reveral of the second act, the devotional phase follows upon it as the struggle for redemption and the attainment of the beloved (be it a person, thing, achievement, state-of-being or state-of-affairs sought). This would carry us throught the second act. Once the one who is captivated is in danger of losing it all (Stendhal)... then... he/she *devotes* him/herself to achieving/deserving the passion again (Teresa).

Taking each progress of passion as its own arc, one can characterise them in various ways. Stendhal's begins with a patientive moment that revs up the motivational engine to spur a character to agency. It is an awakening of agency. That in itself is a drama. On a plot level it is a truncated version of a full three-act romantic master plot (e.g. the master-plot "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl" would be shortened to "boy meets girl, boy los..."). By truncating the romantic master-plot, however, a well-loved genre of character-drama emerges - the "awakening/rejuvenation of the spirit by precarious desire." We get to see a shut-down, patientive character slowly deconstructed by passion, and awkwardly reconstructed into an agent with some chance of success. The whole drama of a person overcoming his/her own limitations can be very compelling.

These kinds of truncated-master-plot-character-dramas make great calendar-house/atrs-cable-station films.

The Teresean arc is an arc of devotion, dedication, ultimately of submission - as are most acts of religious devotion. Teresa begins as a strong-will agentive character, who goes about the process of stilling herself and bringing herself into alignment and under the guidance of an agency bigger than herself. A lot of social-conscience drama, addiction-recovery drama, escaping-the-ghetto drama and so on involve this kind of disciplined realignment under a new logic for the promise of a greater future as part of something else...

Another way to contrast the two arcs is to describe Stendhal's progress as the progress of Eros, and Teresa's as the progress towards Storge. In John Alan Lee's article on "Love Styles" (from the same awesome collection of articles as Brehm's artcle on Stendhal and Teresa: The Psychology of Love" edited by Robert J. Sterberg and Michael L. Barnes, Yale U Press, 1988) he describes Storge (Stor-Gay) as follows (fall-owes):

Typical storgic lovers often grew up in large, supportive families, or in stable, friendly communities. They enjoy their friends and are satisfied with life. They expect love will be a special friendship in which more than the usual time and activities are shared. No particular body type is strongly preferred. Storgic lovers are not anxious or preoccupied with an absent beloved. "Time will tell" whether they were meant to be together. They recoil from an excessive show of emotion in the partner, and prefer to talk about interests they share rather than about their feelings for each other. As the partnership matures, they become possessive in a quiet way unless a real threat to the relationship occurs, forcing them to declare stronger feelings. It's important to get to know the partner first as a friend before getting into sexual relations. Once deep friendship is secured, sexual problems can be "worked out". Mutual love is not a goal of life itself, but as an aspect of the greater goals of friendship and family.

The goal of Teresa's arc is the marriage, the settling or establishing of the loving relationship that will become the quiet, humble, background basis and support for a holy life. There is passion, but it is one-sided, and it quiets itself as one's position beside the beloved becomes defined. The slow development of companionate/storgic love is a great "weepy" story arc, particularly when it is non-sexual and develops within an odd-pairing, like an old man and a little boy. If their growing importance to each other is developed slowly, strongly and casually enough, then when you finally hit that moment where an unusual threat makes one of them act or speak out their dedication to the other - guaranteed waterworks!! (But like music or comedy, timing is everything.)

Like now, for instance... it's time I got back to work. Of course, I have been working on all of this love and drama stuff, but it's not what I get paid to do. As I have reflected in earlier posts... it is almost always more fun to do what you are not paid to do. Sigh...