Is Fiction Autobiographical?

Many critics claim it is mistaken to think of fiction as being autobiographical. They say, “A novel is made up. It’s the product of imagination. You are going down the wrong road if you try to see one character as representing the novelist or another as the author’s mother.” The problem with this argument is that it is based on a simple-minded notion of what it means for a novel to be autobiographical. The bridge to a deeper understanding is a word these very same critics use, imagination.

What is imagination? It is what people think when they let themselves go, when they “take a leap.” It is the generator of fiction. Imagination is fed by what is unworked-out, what presses upon one from within, that with which one is most vitally concerned. Why would someone indulge in and expand on anything else? What could provide the energy for constructing a fictional reality other than someone’s inner preoccupations?

Fiction is autobiographical not in a trivial external way, not as a recitation of events and behaviors. Fiction is autobiographical in the much deeper sense that it is a playing with, a musing on, an expression of what matters most to the individual. In this essay, I will use examples from the work of a college student named “Terry” and the Russian novelist Tolstoy.

Terry was shown Card 3 BM from the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), a picture of a person huddled on the floor, and was asked to make up a dramatic story based on this image. What follows is the student’s story.

John couldn’t believe what he’d just done. He collapsed to the floor and slumped weakly over the couch. The gun slid from his hand and clattered noisily on the floor. The house was silent, dead silent. John began to sob as the last several minutes played through his head like a video.

He had crept into the house quietly, knowing what he would find. They were making so much noise upstairs they wouldn’t have heard even if he had pulled into the garage and walked in like normal. That made him angry. So much better for his story: he had simply come home early to an intruder in his house. He couldn’t be blamed for shooting the man out of self-defense, could he? John began climbing the stairs slowly. He was no longer worried about making noise, but something was still holding him back. He knew what he was about to see, but still he didn’t want to see it, didn’t want to finalize it in his mind. He made it to his bedroom door. It was open a crack. Voices were coming through, his wife’s voice and—a stranger’s? No, it was oddly familiar. John pushed open the door and stood in shock. The scene was as he had expected, but the other face was not. He was enraged. They didn’t even notice him. In a moment of hatred, John fired his pistol, twice.

Is this story autobiographical? The author never was cheated on by a spouse, never shot anyone, and she has never been a husband, let alone a man. But when she talked to me she said she was startled that the story expressed so much about herself that she had not intended.

She explained that several months ago her father left her mother and their family and began living with a woman. To make matters worse, this woman once had been Terry’s boss. Terry is further torn because everyone else in the family has refused to talk to her father, while her role is to be the accepting, mediating child who remains friendly with her father.

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The story reflects the heated thoughts and feelings that are on fire within her and contending with one another. It offers expression especially for that which she has tried to suppress. She told me she avoids thinking of the strife within her family but she knew she was disappointed with her father and found it hard to be on friendly terms with him. According to the testimony of the story, she also feels murderous rage toward him and his lover, and a sense of having been betrayed by both of them. She said that, until considering the story that her imagination had produced, she had been unaware of these two factors, the murderous rage and the sense of personal betrayal.

Some might argue that, yes, Terry’s story is fed by and expresses her inner conflicts, but a student’s TAT story has nothing to do with literature. I chose her story because it provides such a clear illustration of my point but also because, in my view, the creative process that underlies fiction is the same with an ordinary person as with a major literary figure. Next I will discuss how that same process takes place in the fiction of Leo Tolstoy, who is the epitome of the great novelist.

The critics who protest that fiction is not autobiographical see Tolstoy’s works as an exception. Countless incidents in his writings seem to be drawn, without distortion, from his life. For example, Levin in Anna Karenina proposes to his future wife in just the same manner as Tolstoy did to his future wife. But these critics do not appreciate that his writings are autobiographical in the more significant way that is the subject of this paper, that is, they stem from the struggles going on in his inner world.

Tolstoy wrote a series of three stories about men who were overwhelmed by and felt guilty about their sexuality. One of these, “The Devil,” is about a wealthy landowner who had an affair with a peasant woman while he was single. After his marriage, sexual obsession continues to plague him, and he one time asks someone to stay with him to prevent him from committing adultery. There is unimpeachable testimony, from Tolstoy’s diaries and from the accounts of people in whom he confided, that Tolstoy had these same experiences.

But Tolstoy in this work was not giving an account of his history. Instead, his imagination fastened on these events because they offered an expression of his inner struggle with desire and guilt. During his marriage fierce battles raged in his mind. He often felt overcome by lust, but also believed, not only that adultery was wrong, but also that sex itself, as an aggressive exploitation of another person, was selfish and sinful.

In the second story, “Father Sergius,” a similar mixture of illicit desire and guilt is expressed, but the external events are far distant from Tolstoy’s personal experience. Father Sergius is a holy man who fights against sexual desire, cuts off his finger to resist a woman who is trying to seduce him, and eventually falls victim to temptation with another woman. Even in “The Devil,” the ending, or, I should say, the endings, because there are alternate endings, reflect Tolstoy’s inner feelings, not his actual behavior. In one, the main character kills the temptress; in another, he kills himself.

In the third story, “The Kreutzer Sonata,” the main character, Pozdnyshev, is married but disgusted with his sexuality. As a bachelor, he consorted with prostitutes. After marriage, he concludes, his desire for his wife dominated and undermined his relationship with her. He was especially sickened over his inability to refrain from sexual relations with his wife while she was pregnant. Pozdnyshev explains how his overmastering sexuality results in uncontrollable jealousy. “I considered myself to have a complete right to her body as if it were my own,” he notes, “and yet at the same time I felt I could not control that body … and she could dispose of it as she pleased.”

The climax of the story is a scene remarkably similar to Terry’s TAT story. Sneaking into his house when he is supposed to be out of town, Pozdnyshev hopes to catch his wife with the man he is sure is her lover. He does find the two of them together—eating dinner. Although they certainly have not been having an affair, Pozdnyshev kills his wife with a dagger and would have murdered the man, too, had he not escaped.

Because the two scenes—Terry’s and Tolstoy’s in “The Kreutzer Sonata”—are so much alike, they provide a striking illustration of what I mean by a profounder form of autobiography. Neither scene depicts the actual life situation of the author. Neither Terry nor Tolstoy ever tried to kill a spouse for unfaithfulness. Each scene is the product of inner forces that troubled the author, but these forces are dramatically different for the two authors.

Terry’s scene reflects her anger and resentment toward people she felt had hurt and wronged her and her family. It expresses a desire, which she would never enact in real life, to lash out at her

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father for breaking up the family. It also expresses her yearning for revenge on her father’s lover, not only for being complicit in her father’s affair, but also for a special betrayal of her; the lover had once been Terry’s kindly, and respected, boss.

Tolstoy’s scene reflects something very different. He believed that his powerful libido threatened to dominate his life. It led to his forcing sex on his wife with no regard for her needs, and it produced his obsessive jealousy, since he wanted to be the only one to possess her. The scene shows the danger of sexuality and jealousy; they can be so irrational and malignant as even to result in murder.

Tolstoy’s three stories, taken together, are misleading and contradictory if viewed as an autobiographical account of his external life. But they depict in detail the landscape of his inner struggle over sexuality. They illustrate, for example, how and why he was plagued by his powerful urges; his unconscious strategies of sometimes blaming others, especially the women who attracted him, and sometimes blaming the unruly forces within himself; and his inability ever to find peace in the face of these inner conflicts. These stories help explain why he settled on the seemingly absurd conclusion that the only answer—proposed in “The Kreutzer Sonata” as well as in non-fiction—is for everyone to be celibate.

Fiction stems from a natural tendency people have, also seen in the production of dreams and daydreams, to create stories that express and explore their deepest, most pressing, often unresolved concerns. Writers try to come to grips with, to reconcile, and to find solutions to that which lacerates their souls.

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