The Group
“When shall we four meet again?”
This phrase was suggested by a recent weblog entry recounting how the author hesitated to meet for lunch with three of her friends because, while acquainted in pairs, the four had never met before as a group. It was not clear how the previous relationships would play out in this larger context. The author suggested that her readers see the introduction to Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead for details. I did, and found the following:
“The idea of community…. This was not easy. Most novels get by with showing the relationships between two or, at the most three characters. This is because the difficulty of creating a character increases with each new major character that is added to the tale. Characters, as most writers understand, are truly developed through their relationships with others. If there are only two significant characters, then there is only one relationship to be explored. If there are three characters, however, there are four relationships: Between A and B, between B and C, between C and A, and finally the relationship when all three are together.”
This implies that when four people meet, there are 11 relationships going on: six from pairs, four from triplets, and one from the quartet.
It gets worse…
“Even this does not begin to explain the complexity — for in real life, at least, most people change, at least subtly, when they are with different people. The changes can be pretty major….
So when a storyteller has to create three characters, each different relationship requires that each character in it must be transformed, however subtly, depending on how the relationship is shaping his or her present identity. Thus, in a three-character story, a storyteller who wishes to convince us of the reality of these characters really has to come up with a dozen different personas, four for each of them.”
Therefore when four people meet, there are actually 44 personas to account for. This makes the stateroom scene from “A Night at the Opera” look underpopulated.
See also my journal note “Metaphysics for Tina.”