THE ANIMAL IN ALLEGORY29that there came to be an easy and obvious distinction between the
actual animals and their representations. The act of representation in
fables and bestiaries (a kind of field guide to animals that included
descriptions of the symbolic meaning of textual animals, in addition
to knowledge based on observation) explicitly converted the animals
into human signifiers.^5
Fables in this understanding are perfect allegories—texts in which
the signifier loses any vestige of referential meaning and is instead filled
with a meaning that comes from other texts or the narrative itself. Thus
in fables the lion is a figure of nobility and the dog a figure of denigra-
tion, even though in real life most denizens of the Middle Ages would
not have encountered an actual lion, and dogs could be favored com-
panions. This process of anthropomorphism, in which animals become
masks for human meaning, is confirmed as central to fables by other
critics as well. Howard Needler argues that in fables “man is an ass, a
snake, a lion, a wolf to other men. But this is only to say that man is con-
ventionally identified with this or that animal because certain animals
are identified with particular human characteristics.”^6 Similarly, How-
ard Bloch, anticipating Jacque Derrida’s discussion of the links between
beast and the sovereign, argues that “these tales are not about man and
beast at all, but about men and their representation as beasts.”^7 That is,
fables represent some of the ways in which state power makes itself felt,
in which hierarchy is made to seem a part of the natural world. Though
the animals in fables invoke familiar creatures, they somehow succeed
in effacing their apparent origins to point only to a realm of allegorized
meaning. So a fox can be crafty and vain, a victor and a victim, and
these meanings bear no relation to an actual fox.
This is a neat trick, to be sure. Yet as Edward Wheatley in his book
on the Aesopic tradition in medieval literature reminds us, “To believe
that a fable is best interpreted in one particular way suggests an
entrenched dogmatism which the later Middle Ages did not espouse.”^8
Criticism in any case is wont to exaggerate the power of literature and
culture to shape and mediate our perception of the world. The actual
world, including actual animals, does continue to reveal something of
itself. Thus, any kind of allegorical use of an animal (in a literary text or