42THE ANIMAL IN ALLEGORYChaucer’s “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” has been about animalizing as much
as anthropomorphizing from the beginning.
Chaucer’s foray into the genre of animal fable is clearly an extraordi-
nary example. “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” is atypical in its length and com-
plexity, and in the multiplicity of its allegories. Allegory is the mode
that brings the animal into the tale and allows for thinking about the
animal and about the animal nature of the human. Chaucer’s text is
remarkable too in that its animal characters are individuals with names
and personalities and not simply representative of their types (though
they are that too). Animal fable in general does not reflect interest in
the individuality of animals; fables are abstractions about categories
of truth, actions, and species—character as the summation of species or
type. However, Chaucer is not unique in early English literature in
symbolically blurring human-animal boundaries. As we have seen, this
occurs to a certain extent in Henryson. Both authors’ allegories reflect
the animality of the human and some human traits in kinds of animals.
This blurring occurs dramatically too in Beowulf. There is not enough
space here for a detailed reading of this epic poem, but it is worth not-
ing the ambiguity of animality in the poem. The poem’s most obvious
figuration of the animal is Grendel, who is a monster and an allegory of
the feared other. He is a part of nature in that he is a predator with fear-
some teeth and claws, living in a lair and brutally killing and devouring
his human prey. He must be, and is, subdued by heroic human action.
Yet just as plainly, he is human, a descendent of Cain; his brutality is not
motivated by simple instinct but serves as revenge for being a descen-
dent of outcasts: “It harrowed him / to hear the din of the loud banquet
/ every day in the hall.”^21 Moreover, his violence is not substantially dif-
ferent from that of the kings and warriors whose battles are described
in the beginning of the poem as the result of “the killer instinct /
unleashed among in-laws, blood-lust rampant” (84–85). Grendel is thus
simultaneously a symbol of violence as something animal, deeply repug-
nant, and other and a recognition of animality as something human
after all. That this profound ambiguity exists in some of our earliest
literature underscores Derrida’s point about how central the human-
animal divide is to the history of philosophy and self-representation.