The Golden Arc Program: Story as a Committed Wave

Abstract

This paper states, in brief, a research program developed across three companion papers. The model: narrative is a signed waveform of dramatic charge whose decisive structural point is not the climax but the fold, the moment the space of possible endings closes, and one recursive operator, the golden section of what remains, generates the fold, the climax, the aftershock, and the settling at positions 1 − φ⁻²ⁿ. The instruments: affective proxies (sentiment) and causal scoring (annotated bifurcation) turn out to measure different points of the same wave, the settling tail and the fold respectively, a distinction discovered empirically and then confirmed four independent ways. The measurements so far: eleven works' last affective reversals cluster in the final decile of span against a measurement-matched null (p ≈ 10⁻⁶), landing on the cascade's late terms; four hand-scored dramas place the causal fold at mean 0.67 against a null expectation of 0.82 and a predicted 0.618 (p ≈ 0.06, suggestive); and in every work measured by both instruments the causal fold precedes the affective tail, never inverting. What is confirmed, what is merely consistent, and what remains open are stated separately and plainly, with the decisive experiments named.