“The Idea of Order at Key West” has traditionally been, if not an art object in itself, contained within an art object—a book, in fact. Books, along with films, are a special class of art object; they are copies without originals, and as such the “aura1” surrounding them is diffuse. No single copy of the book can be considered the single “authentic” copy, and neither can the manuscript (as it is a manuscript, not a book, and is therefore a different kind of art object), and so the aura of authenticity that would surround, say, a painting, must be diffused across all copies of the book, since all are equally authentic. A first edition would not be any more authentic than any subsequent edition, because any additional value it may be said to have is the result of it being a fetishized commodity, rather than an art object. That is to say that its special value comes not from it being a first edition of a particular book, but simply from being a first edition. The text of the poem itself has nothing specific to say about this kind of mechanically reproduced art object—but we are no longer living in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, although elements of it are still very much present in our society. We are living, instead, in the Age of Digital Reproduction, in which art objects exist (if they can be said to exist at all) and are reproduced as electronic signals—a kind of pure information. “The Idea of Order at Key West” can be read as a metaphor for the art object as hypertext, the way in which it is reproduced, and how its audience interacts with it, in this Age of Digital Reproduction. It is by no means my intention to suggest that Wallace Stevens himself intended any such reading—indeed, it would have been impossible for him to do so, because when he died in 1955, the technology did not exist to support it—but I believe such a reading is now open to us, and I wish to lay the groundwork for it here.
The metaphor, and the poem as metaphor, are both summarized in the first line: “She sang beyond the genius of the sea” (Stevens 128). To translate from the precise language of poetry to the imprecise language of criticism, both the “She” and the song in question are the hypertext poem itself (and, by extension, all hypertext art objects), “the sea” is any hypertext environment2. By “[singing] beyond the genius of the sea,” the hypertext poem is being transmitted to the reader via the World Wide Web (WWW), but is not contained within it, is not, in fact, limited by its context as a hypertext document. The word “genius” here means the spirit of a place. The WWW is not literally a place, but that is the primary metaphor we use when referring to it (we visit websites, and send electronic mail to certain addresses), and so the word “genius” remains appropriate, although it refers, in this reading, to the properties of the WWW as we experience it.
Ultimately what this means is that hypertext poems, because they exist electronically, transmit meaning (or rather can be interpreted) independently of their context. Hypertexts do not exist in the same way that books, or films, or paintings exist. They are electronic signals, representations of binary codes. They are not copies without originals, because there are no copies: they are pure language. It is true that when you view a hypertext poem on the WWW, you must first create on your hard drive, via downloading, what we call a “copy” of the hypertext (which is almost always temporary). This is not a copy in the same way that a volume on a bookshelf is a copy of a book. Hypertext poems are language objects that are in turn constructed by a programming language, which is also, ultimately, a construction of binary code, a kind of language. What you have on your hard drive when you download a hypertext poem is a linguistic signal, and nothing more. It is no more a copy of the poem than the words you hear when spoken to by a friend are a “copy” of that friend’s speech act. No matter how many “copies” of the hypertext poem the reader were to download, the aura of the art object could never be diffused; in fact the aura would no longer exist. The reader would experience the hypertext poem, not as an art object at all, but as an act of language.
The entire poem points to that single line. I cannot, due to limitations of space, cover the entire poem line by line. I will limit myself to a few representative passages.
The second stanza of Stevens’ poem is a more elaborate construction of the first line. He writes,
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard (128-9).
In this stanza we find that the sea (the WWW) and the hypertext poem (she) do not interfere with each other in the transmission/interpretation (the singing) of the linguistic act, and that “The song and water were not medleyed sound,” that is the hypertext poem and the WWW are not dependent on each other for meaning. They exist side by side, and I do not wish to suggest that they have no relationship at all. This stanza suggests, in fact, that even if the subject of the hypertext poem were to be the WWW itself, it is not the context of the WWW that provides it with meaning, nor is the reader dependent on the presentation of the hypertext poem through the WWW for his interpretation of it. No matter how closely the hypertext poem resembles the WWW, or how much it references it, it is still “she and not the sea we heard.”
Later the poem opens itself to an exploration of the special properties of the hypertext, specifically the ability to link to other texts, thereby bringing those other texts inside it. Stevens writes,
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made (129-130).
Because the hypertext poem is a linguistic act, an instance of pure language, the woman, her voice, and her song, are all one. This point cannot be stressed enough: the hypertext poem, the language which constructs it (thereby making it an act of language), and the act of transmitting it are all one and the same, because all three at the same time involve the construction, transmission, and interpretation of a linguistic signal, and none of those acts can be separated from the signal itself, nor can it be separated from them. In this stanza the sky vanishes; it vanishes where it meets the sea, and it also vanishes because twilight descends. The singer, however, brings the sky, the sea, and even the point at which they meet and vanish under twilight into herself—just as the hypertext poem is capable of linking to other hypertext documents. Those documents, by being linked, become a part of hypertext poem, and as part of it are created in the same linguistic act at the same time. The hypertext poem, by linking to them, creates them, gives them meaning (or opens them up for discourse and interpretation). These documents, “Whatever self [they] had, became the self / That was her song, for she was the maker” (Stevens 129).
The final stanza of “The Idea of Order at Key West,” though at first glance seeming to cast doubt on this reading, in fact reaffirms it. Stevens writes:
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds (130).
The narrator, who with Ramon is the reader of the hypertext poem, sees the singer as having created (or perhaps imposed, as the word “rage” may imply) a kind of order in the world through her song. She linked the sky, the sea, and even the narrator and his companion through her song, and perhaps in so far as their relation to it, created them. The hypertext poem does as well. The linguistic act that is the hypertext poem requires its audience (perhaps a better word than “reader”, since the hypertext poem is not experienced in quite the same way as the printed word) just as a book or a film requires one. The hypertext poem, however, by its ability to link to things and thereby take them inside it (and in a sense create them), when it implicates the reader in the act of creation does so not, as do books and films, as a kind of co-creator, but as a creation of the hypertext poem. The hypertext poem creates/imposes order by being a linguistic construct that contains within itself all things to which it links, but as it is more importantly also a linguistic act, it creates those things which are inside it, and so also imposes a kind of order on the audience.
Clearly there is more to be said. A line-by-line examination of Stevens’ poem would yield a more sophisticated and more tightly integrated argument, but the groundwork is here. There is no reason why the poem must be read as a metaphor for hypertext poems as art objects, but I believe such a reading can help us to understand how hypertext art objects differ from books, and how the digital reproduction of literary works as art objects differs from the mechanical reproduction of same. Hypertext poems, as pure language, are a special class of art object—are in fact a kind of non-object.
1Walter Benjamin, in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” suggests that art objects have an “aura” about them that, among other things, marks them as “authentic” (1166-1186).up
2For the purposes of this essay I will assume that all hypertexts exist on the World Wide Web, which is probably the most common vehicle for accessing hypertexts, although of course hypertexts exist outside the WWW.up
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Trans. by Harry Zohn. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Edited by Leitch et al. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. 1166-1186.
Stevens, Wallace. “The Idea of Order at Key West.” The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. 128-130.
