You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Evidence showing that some admired work of fiction is rooted in experiences, either objective or emotional, that are known to have been the author's, will always interest cultivated readers, because it satisfies one of the basic appetites for aesthetic reading: the will to believe. Such evidence reassures the conscious or unconscious wonder accompanying a reader's passive surrender to the writer's patterned statements of fact, the wonder if they are really true. Of course, a reader of fiction does not demand factual truth, he may even despise it when the factual veracity of the story is blatantly asserted by the author in prologue or footnote; but he does want emotional truth, and he welcomes any hints from other sources than the work of fiction itself to strengthen his imaginative conviction. Conversely, if it is rumored that persons known to him are to be portrayed in a certain novel, the reader tends to buy the novel because it promises satisfaction to the will to believe, as well as to the aesthetic desire for a sustained narrative.
It is a truism that the most impressive novels have been found to be expressions of personal experiences. Impressiveness in a novel is a matter basically of conviction; and conviction depends largely upon the depth and genuineness with which a described emotion has been either spontaneously experienced by the author, or imagined, or imaginatively recreated from sensitive observation. So an analyst who shows that the author has been telling about himself or about people well known to him may help to explain the power of a book, or he may add to the reader's final sum of aesthetic satisfaction by confirming his belief in its genuineness. The analyst may also discover that certain failures to produce conviction are owing to a lack of genuineness.