Wallace Stevens’ The Idea of Order at Key West
Jaques Derrida’s literary theory of deconstruction claims meaning “cannot legitimately transgress the text toward something other than it, toward a referent (a reality that is metaphysical, historical, psychobiographical, etc.) or toward a signified outside the text whose content could take place, could have taken place outside of language, that is to say, in the sense that we give here to that word, outside of writing in general…There is nothing outside the text.” Thus, art meaning comes from non-contingent, variable chance and an unlimited number of meanings can be taken from a work. Because texts are recontextualized when read throughout history by different readers, meaning will change based on the workings of signification of the text for that person.
The Idea of Order at Key West suggests a familiar relationship to text and the sea and the meaning and the she. It seems that the sea works like the text with “empty sleeves” causing “constant cry”, however incomprehensible because of its inhumanity. It is dead, like unread words on a page. The woman, however, is a different entity. While she mimics the sea’s every word, her song is entirely different and is the voice heard. Stevens calls her, “the maker of the song she sang” which seems to bring in Derrida’s idea of deconstruction. The sea’s song is the text, the language which meaning will derive from completely. However, her song is the one that derives the meanings. The sea’s song is home to the place she “walks to sing” though it is no more than “meaningless plunges of water and wind”. When she sings in summer, she brings in “theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped on high horizons, mountainous atmospheres of sea and sky.” These significations allow for the possibly selfless sea to become, “the self that was her song, for she was the maker.” Thus, all meaning is derived from a text and only a text, but it is the signification of the reader that gives it life.
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