Authors and Critics: If One Thing Stands, What Will Stand Beside It?

A number of articles have recently appeared about the new interactive technologies either in the course of development or already with us: illustrated texts visually and orally available through CD-ROM, and computers or other devices connected through interfaces to musical instruments, television, and recording mechanisms in such a way that the viewer/listener can intrude upon and add to the presentation. Whether we like it or not, another revolution in the way we interact with texts is upon us. An article in Newsweek, "Breaking the Binding Power of Text," suggests that the cultural authority of writing will disappear, that in 10 to 15 years paper texts will be less than 50 percent of the publishing business. The article quotes the author Robert Coover, now teaching hypertext fiction at Brown, that "the iconization of the author, the making of him into a mythic figure, is over. That's a characteristic of our past, and it's not going to be the case in the future" (49). At the brink of such a future, then, what does Charlotte Otten's and Gary Schmidt's collection of forty-one essays by writers, illustrators, and critics, which assumes the centrality of the author in the narratorial process, have to offer?

The Voice of the Narrator is divided by genre into eight sections. The first half of each section, after an introduction by Schmidt or Otten, contains two or three essays, sometimes based on interviews by one of the editors, by an established author or illustrator. The author essays, of varying quality, are then followed by two or three critical essays; the connection between the two sets is often tangential. A majority of the critical essays verge on the naive and superficial; it is as if recent (and not so recent) critical developments like reader response, intertextuality, deconstruction, Marxist theory, orientalism, semiotics, gender criticism, and new historicism, not to mention narratology and the distinction between "male" and "female" plots and their application to children's literature, had never occurred. Even the more substantial essays tend to rely on older critics like Barthes, Booth, Fry, Iser, and Rosenblatt. Phyllis Bixler's detailed and perceptive review of the collection in Children's Literature discusses its insights into the art of narrative as it exists today. Those insights are perhaps best illustrated by Lois R. Kuznets's fine essay, "Henry James and the Storyteller." But there are not enough essays like Kuznets's or the one by Janice Alberghene, who uses Jean Fritz's work to bring recent feminist criticism to bear on the intersection of art and memory, of children's writing and women's writing, and on the question of whether (autobiographies for children should present role models or their subjects warts and all.

While Alberghene pays close attention in her essay to Jean Fritz's own remarks about her work, many critics here do not. This choice may be in part because the editors apparently made no effort to pair a critical discussion with an author's piece; the biography section is the only place where the happy confluence of Fritz writing about her work and Alberghene writing about Fritz occurs. An author may no longer in the future, in Coover's words, be an "icon," but authors have managed so far to survive their death at the hands of Derrida and Foucault, and the caveats about the "intentional fallacy" should not blind us to the fact that what authors have to say about what they are doing is not only interesting, but, in many cases, has an importance that reaches beyond a simple connection between art and experience. There are at least 66 videos already available of children's authors and illustrators (Vandergrift), and it is difficult to believe that visits by children's authors to schools will cease. In the future, part of the presentation of an interactive text might be an...