THE ANIMAL IN ALLEGORY31of an uncrossable boundary between signifier and signified (i.e., between
the animal and what it means). Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s well-known
distinction between symbol and allegory points to this understanding:
“The Symbolical cannot perhaps be better defined in distinction from
the allegorical, than that it is always itself a part of that, of the whole
of which it is representative. ‘Here comes a sail,’ (that is a ship) is a sym-
bolical expression. ‘Behold our lion!’ when we speak of some gallant
soldier is allegorical.”^11 The artifice Coleridge ascribes to allegory is
marked by the gap between human and animal, whereas his example of
the symbol is a synecdoche. However, as critics of Coleridge’s discus-
sion have pointed out, the line between organic symbol and mechanical
allegory is itself indistinct. There are many examples of allegory in
which the vehicle is not arbitrary, such as in forms of personification
or prosopopoeia. Classical forms of anthropomorphism in which gods,
ideas, and aspects of nature are given human form are versions of alle-
gory. Allegory can represent something otherwise unrepresentable,
bringing distant resemblances to life.
As Fletcher argues, interpretation of allegory is bound up with both
doubleness and contestation of power.^12 An allegorical representation
asserts a hierarchy, since the vehicle of the allegory is inferior to its tenor,
and at the same time belies this hierarchy because our attention is drawn
to what is immediately presented. Allegory is central to the history of
representing animals in literature because of this crucial doubleness. It
is the mode that best reflects the deep conflict in how we have thought
about the relationship between humans and animals. On the one hand,
allegory represents the idea that humans and animals are fundamen-
tally different—that we are always the signified, the heart of the mat-
ter, whereas animals are always lesser beings, ciphers that we fill with our
meaning. Thus allegory effectively reinforces the anthropocentric hier-
archy (which is presumably why Coetzee’s Costello dismisses it). On the
other hand, allegory also allows us to express glimmers of likeness,
connections that lie below the surface. Allegorists choose kinds of ani-
mals because we understand them to be different from each other, to
possess distinct qualities that we apprehend. Because animal signifiers
are not in fact empty, animal allegories reflect our sense that animals in