THE ANIMAL IN ALLEGORY37physical details no doubt suggest a comic allegory of royal finery, but
they also suggest the attention of a loving bird owner. At the end of
the initial description the narrator appears momentarily to forget that
he is speaking about animals; instead of crowing as the sun rises (2858),
Chauntecleer begins to “synge / Whan that the bighte sonne gan to
sprynge, / In sweete accord, ‘my life is faren in londe!’ ” (2877–79).
While it is the central convention of animal fables that the animals can
speak, the narrator here appears troubled by this crossing of boundar-
ies, one that appears to have happened almost naturally through the
sheer “animal joy” of the cock, and of the narrator in his own account
of the animal. The nun’s priest offers an explanation of the weirdness of
his own anthropomorphism, of his having forgotten whether his main
character is animal or human: “For thilke tyme, as I have understonde,
/ Beestes and brides koude speke and synge” (2880–81). The narrator’s
confusion is funny, of course, and it sets up a pattern of error, correc-
tion, and redirection that marks his tale as spontaneous, drawing from
multiple confused sources (even as the poem’s iambic pentameter marks
Chaucer as being in control of all details). One of these sources is the
actual animal, whose physical presence is repeatedly brought back into
the poem, however mediated through Chaucer or his narrator’s interest
and knowledge and through the conventions of the animal fable itself.
The narrator’s frequent confusion satirizes, among other things, audi-
ence demands on narrators, the desire for certain kinds of meaning
that may well conflict with the narrator’s own ambitions and abilities.
This confusion extends to the human lessons of the allegory that are
an expectation of the animal fable, revealing the animal as ultimately
undefinable, a category inexorably linked to the human.
This confusion is signaled in many of the tale’s funniest and most
interesting moments. Chauntecleer’s description of the animal he
has seen in his dream keeps ambiguous what kind of beast it is, and
indeed the long debate over the significance of the dream is in a sense a
debate about what kind of meaning this representation of the animal
should have: does it signify the devil, a fox, or indigestion in the human/
animal body? Similarly, Pertelote’s interpretation of the dream as a
product of poor eating rather than as a premonition despiritualizes (or