One of the most noticeable things in Berlin Stories to me was the idea of side-by-side metropolitan worlds. In the scene in which Frl. Schroeder and Frl. Mayr are eavesdropping on their Jewish downstairs neighbor, around pg. 216, the scene—thin boundaries around personal, urban lives—became especially conspicuous to me. One of the things I remember hearing about frequently while studying abroad was the many, side-by-side worlds coexisting in an old college town, all the conglomerated stories and histories divided by a door or a hallway. That’s where all the fantasy stories of parallel worlds and mystic passages just around the next corner come from, says popular university legend.

That romanticized view of many lives and histories is portrayed in a much less fluffed and idealized rendition in this scene. An “ardent Nazi” revels in overhearing the suffering of a neighbor; that neighbor has eliminated personal boundaries in her life by “advertising for a husband” in the paper. The publicity of the neighbor’s private pain—the gleeful public entertainment of her pain being accessible—was a different kind of “parallel world,” but one in which the word parallel is misleading. A parallel world wouldn’t intersect with its parallel, wouldn’t connect or have an effect on. The tragedy in Isherwood—and the unreality he describes near the end of Goodbye to Berlin—is that these separate lives, jammed up against one another, are not parallel, but have a real and frightening impact on one another, that real moment of personal pain by a neighbor expanding and intensifying on a terrifying scale.

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.

Mrs. Dalloway gives a surprising sense of violence for a novel that takes place within the stereotypically tame, domestic circles of Clarissa’s comfortable London class. Part of this forceful diction comes through with the vehemence in Woolf’s treatment of Clarissa’s—as well as other characters’—mental landscapes. Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness relies in part on that tough, forward force and the action-verbs and metaphors that fuel it. With repetitive, powerful language, memory “plunges” again and again on page thirty-seven, mornings have “pressure,” and moments are “transfixed” (37). Even in one short segment of the text, the process of language and thought becoming striking, active, and physical is apparent. As so much of the novel’s action is mental, that forceful language of Mrs. Dalloway transforms the safe, sanctioned, and controlled domestic life—the “lark” of buying flowers—into “dart-like; definite” action, bringing to life thought as tangible action, visceral and tumultuous through the unexpectedness of violent or at least highly physical language.

There are instances where the shock of Woolf’s language is used explicitly, to express a small moment of daily life not only as visceral but as grotesque. On page thirty-six, “She felt only how Sally was being mauled already, maltreated; she felt [Peter’s] hostility; his jealousy, his determination to break into their companionship.” His intrusion into the brilliant moment of intimacy between Sally and Clarissa “was like running one’s face against a granite wall in the darkness! It was shocking; it was horrible!” (36). This language is expressly violent, the male invasion into an earnest, free moment of interpersonal connection crafted as “mauling” or the heavy, painful grinding against a “granite wall”—in either case, there is real, physical harm implied in the metaphor. The stake of visceral danger in this explosive—but, literally, momentary—freeze-frame is a method Woolf uses to express the weight of immediate, mental activity, the inner sphere portrayed through gut-level reactions. That method of physically-grueling language, and the expression of danger there, also impresses the reader with the validity, the real stake in these moments for the characters, shaping these reactions not as personal indulgences but as “plunging” tangible events.