30THE ANIMAL IN ALLEGORYas an actual image in art or film) still relies to some degree on an aware-
ness of the animal and its kind or species. Unless the allegorical animal
is entirely mythical, even in fables some small sense of the actual ani-
mal must enter into the allegory. The animal chosen to represent some
aspect of human behavior is not an arbitrary choice. We may use the
eagle to represent martial ability, the lion to represent courage, the fox
to represent cunning, or the pig to represent gluttony, and these mean-
ings may be narrow and distorting of the entire animal, but these mean-
ings are not entirely projected onto these kinds of animals. The lion’s
nobility is connected to its actual strength, its ability to kill many other
animals, including humans; the dog’s servility and untrustworthiness
in fables no doubt comes from the actual servility of many dogs, their
seeming ability to display shame and ingratiation (certainly not com-
monly shown by other domestic animals). These representations still
hearken toward an origin in the physical animal, rather than in some-
thing entirely imagined, and to some original familiarity with the animal,
even if that familiarity involves a misreading. Indeed, Frank Palmeri
argues that there are many examples of animal fable that critique the
tendency to allegorize animals, in which animals can be imagined “to
speak from the subject position of their species”: for instance, a wolf
“who sees some shepherds eating mutton [and] remarks, ‘what an uproar
you would make if I were doing that.’ ”^9 These narratives allow for some
resistance to the desire to allegorize and complicate their reader’s aware-
ness of human-animal difference and similarity.
The debate about whether animal fables can be about real animals
reflects the complexity of allegory as a mode of representation. Allegory
and the representation of animals in literature are deeply connected
because allegory is the dominant mode through which animals enter
literature, and it becomes the mode through which they are read. More-
over, the difficulty of allegory is also the difficulty of teasing the animal
out from behind our representations of it. Angus Fletcher suggests that
“in the simplest terms, allegory says one thing and means another,” which
connects it to irony and the symbol. Allegory suggests a deliberately arti-
ficial representation, a way of simplifying and making clear, using seem-
ingly arbitrary signifiers.^10 This mode of allegory suggests the existence