The typical experience that wasn’t

On historians' struggle to present typical lives through a single person

In my last post, I wrote about the challenges historians face when they rely on memoirs to reconstruct how people lived in different historical contexts. If successful at this step, historians then present what they have learned to their readers. Often, their goal is to present a typical or average experience.

Using the prisoners’ experience in the Gulag as an example, the historian might give the following (fictional) summary: “On a scale of 0 to 10, most people rated food availability a 3, meaning they were hungry most of the time and had a daily calorie intake of only X. They also experienced cold at 9, meaning the temperature was 5 Celsius too low for their comfort. Finally, they rated their work conditions a 2, meaning they worked 5.8 hours longer than they would have preferred, and work conditions were subpar and dangerous, with injury and fatality rates of Y% and Z% at the workplace.”

This is the kind of presentation people forget even before they finish reading the passage. We like narratives, not dry descriptions. So, why don’t we see Harry Potter-style narration in historical works, where a single real-life character is used to describe the typical experience?

People are atypical

The answer is simple: there are no real-life characters who had the typical Gulag experience. Let me explain. The typical Gulag experience cannot be reduced to a single life aspect. Instead, it’s a collection of life aspects, such as the extent of prisoners’ suffering from hunger, their access to adequate clothing, work conditions, health, social relationships, and more. Different people might include different life aspects in their lists, but regardless of the specifics, all final lists will contain multiple items. As the number of items that constitute the typical experience increases, it becomes increasingly difficult to find someone who is typical in every aspect.

Consider the following simplified example: assume the typical experience in any given aspect is shared by 20% of people. If we care about 5 different aspects (e.g., hunger, work conditions, cold, injury risk, clothing), the probability of someone being typical in all of them is roughly 1 in 3000. The Gulag had roughly 2.5 million prisoners at any given time. This means that roughly 1000 people had the typical experience concurrently if 5 life aspects are considered. We can make different reasonable assumptions, but the number of people who are typical in all the relevant life aspects becomes prohibitively small rather quickly.

It’s one thing that 1000 people might have had the typical experience, but how many of them wrote memoirs? We don’t know for sure, but if I had to guess, I would say none. Roughly 18-20 million prisoners passed through the camps over the years. Contrast that with the perhaps few hundred memoirs that have been written about the Gulag. This is a very low base rate. More importantly, to write a memoir is to be atypical. Finding a typical character would be very difficult even if every prisoner had been equally likely to write a memoir. But given the self-selection into writing, the search for the average character becomes outright impossible.

Long live fiction

There is one place that’s not plagued by this issue. It’s called fiction. Unlike historians, fiction writers are not bound by the mandates of historical accuracy. They can build whatever fictional character they want, including one that is average in all relevant life aspects. Somewhat counterintuitively, this could mean that if a single character is better at conveying the typical experience than a multitude of different characters, fiction could do a better job describing typical life experiences than non-fiction. So, is having a single character better?

One vs. many

If there is a single character, readers get to spend more time with this character. Familiarity often breeds fondness, and liking a character makes potential takeaways more likely. Moreover, readers don’t need to keep track of various characters. They get to read about something substantive rather than about the irrelevant personal details of the constantly introduced new characters. In other words, using a single character comes with economies of scale and less overhead.

Having multiple characters also has its advantages. Even though each character gets less airtime, the larger number of characters makes it more likely that at least one of them will resonate with the reader. Think of this as a hedging strategy. The reader might not relate to person A who was used to illustrate the average work experience, but he might relate to person B who was used to illustrate average health conditions. A further advantage of multiple characters is realism. A character who is average in everything is suspect. Given the many hierarchies of skills and traits, even the most average person we personally know is atypical in some things.

It would be tempting to weigh these factors and make a grand pronouncement, declaring the winner to be either the single character or multiple characters. We should resist the temptation and look at the historical record instead. Both approaches produced extraordinary literary works. Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich had a single central character, while Grossman’s Life and Fate featured dozens, with hundreds more making shorter appearances. If two of the best novels in the 20^th century diverge in their character choices, I take that as a sign that both approaches can work just fine.

Conclusion

Historians don’t have the luxury of choosing whether a single character or more characters would help them better convey the typical experience. Their hands are tied. They can only write about real people. These characters would need to be average in everything while simultaneously engaging in the very much non-average act of carefully documenting their experiences in memoirs. Such people simply don’t exist. Even the most typical person is atypical in some ways.