Gone with the (West) Wind: Shelley, Apostrophe, and Inept Interpellation

ABSTRACT

In this essay, I read Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ as dramatizing the paradox of the apostrophe as a poetic device. Shelley presents a case where the speaker fails to understand the limitations of apostrophes before eventually realizing the revolutionary possibilities the serious (and embarrassing) employment of this device opens up. I read the poem alongside Althusser’s formulation of ‘interpellation’ and his ‘theatre’ of the encounter with the Police. Thus, reading Shelley’s ‘Oh hear!’ in the poem, alongside Althusser’s ‘Hey, you there!’, I argue, helps us better understand Shelley’s dramatization of the failure of the speaker’s attempts at interpellating the West Wind. This failure, however, quickly turns to admiration for the revolutionary non-subject that the Wind is in the poem. I show that Shelley’s desire to be the West Wind is not because it functions as a revolutionary subject but in fact because it doesn’t.

KEYWORDS:

• Lyric speaker
• apostrophe
• interpellation
• revolutionary subject
• animacy
• personification

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Barbara Johnson, for instance, notes ‘Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”, … is perhaps the ultimate apostrophic poem’: Barbara Johnson, ‘Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,’ Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 29–47, (p. 31). Jonathan Culler notes ‘Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” is perhaps the clearest example of the way in which the apostrophic mode poses the problem of the poetic subject as a problem of the wind’s relation to him’. Jonathan Culler, ‘Apostrophe,’ Diacritics 7.4 (1977): 59–69, (p. 63).

² Culler, ‘Apostrophe,’ 59.

³ Harold Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 1, 73.

⁴ Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,’ in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–86 (pp. 172, 173).

⁵ Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,’ 174.

⁶ Here, I borrow Jane Bennett’s concept of vibrancy that accounts for affect produced even by nonhuman forms. Her equation of this ‘affect with materiality […] rather than posit(ing) a separate force that can enter and animate a physical body’ is of significance to our understanding of the West Wind. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), xiii.

⁷ Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, 173.

⁸ Ibid., 160.

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Kaushik Tekur

Kaushik Tekur is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of English, Binghamton University (SUNY). His research interest lies in studying the intersections of the long eighteenth-century, its literary forms, and the British Empire’s evolving policing and surveillance practices. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, The LA Review of Books, and Countercurrents.