In Quicksand, Nella Larsen’s autobiographical aspects of her story, as Kimberly Monda writes in the spring 1997 issue of The African American Review, are extensive. From similar parentage, to their “escape” to Denmark, to their employment in libraries—biographical details taken from McDowell’s introduction—Helga Crane and Nella Larsen’s lives mirror or model one another. Even their names roll similarly, syllabically. And that’s a conflation between character and author—or rather, authorial voice—that troubled me throughout the text. The same conflation haunted readings of Nabokov’s novels, especially Lolita: whose desires and distastes are we really reading?

The tangling of author and character is, generally, misplaced, discounting the mediating activity of the author’s imagination in crafting a story, rather than adapting their own factual experiences. But the fact of autobiography in fiction opens up the question again—and here I found it a particularly troubling trend. Was the systematic, repetitive disgust Larsen’s, or her protagonist’s? Obviously, the first answer is the protagonist: that’s the mechanism of the novel. And when we read in the introductory comments to Fire!, that commentary claims to write as and not for, it almost seems as though autobiography would be more tempting, more fitting for that specific appeal, for the author to write as themselves, rather than for a character, posed and directed through a series of societal contexts.

But autobiography in this specific case would contradict my understanding of my novel, as a commentary on the protagonist as well as her surroundings. I read Larsen as looking down a little on her protagonist, critically, making some moments of rage feel self-indulgent rather than prudent, making some motivation questionable, particularly the religious catapult into marriage at the end. An autobiographical frame presents challenges for that kind of interpretation, if more of the stories’ phenomena belong to reporting, rather than critical invention.

I know of course that these two modes can intermingle, speak to and inform one another. But at the point where critics, like Monda, become clumsy with antecedents, where it almost seems inconsequential if the she refers to Larsen or Crane, if the popular or even scholarly distinction between authorial voice and character voice have broken down to a damaging degree, a degree that would bar certain interpretations—criticisms, satires, exaggeration—from consideration by Larsen’s readers.