itself from illusory linguistic constraints in order to become liberated, pro-
ducing the meanings that it makes rather than discovers.”^12 Instead of seeing
works of literature as generally scrutable human communications, we
should, the Newreaders hold, see literary texts as free-floating instances of
self-proliferating écriture: self-proliferating writing without any agentive
origin, without any stable message, and without any stable reader or hearer
capable of receiving it whole. Stanley Fish seems to embrace such a charac-
terization of his own theoretical stance when he mentions“people like me
who push the instability of the text and the unavailability of determinate
meaning.”^13
According to Abrams, this view is outrageous. It denies the obvious truth
that“the author [of a literary work] actualizes and records in words what he
undertakes to signify of human beings and actions and about matters of
human concern, addressing himself to those readers who are competent to
understand what he has written.”^14 Abrams takes care, however,notto adopt
the Cartesian stance that the literary message is wholly and specifically
preformed in the mind of the author as a governing intention, prior to the
production of the text. People come to mean what they do in speaking and in
writing, not by having thoughts in mind prior to an acquaintance with
language, but instead by taking through training to a course of fluid linguis-
tic social practice. They form their messages by taking up the shared and
fluid linguistic tools that are available in practice, revising, reforming, and
making that message more specific in the course of writing. Conceptual
consciousness, explicit linguistic ability, and the ability progressively to
formulate coherent messages through the use of shared linguistic tools are
all coemergent. As Abrams summarizes his view,
We are born into a community of speakers and writers who have already
acquired this skill [of“knowing a language”], and we in turn acquire it by
interplay with those others, in which we learn how to say what we mean
and how to understand what others have said by a continual process of
self-correction and refinement, based on what are often very subtle indications(^12) Ibid., p. 272.
(^13) Stanley Fish,“Is there a Text in this Class?,”in Fish,Is There a Text in This Class(Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), reprinted inCritical Theory Since 1965, ed. Adams
and Searle, pp. 525–33 at p. 525A.
(^14) Abrams,“How to do Things with Texts,”p. 269.
Understanding art 151