Abstract
Van Dyke argues that the attribution of human speech to animals and birds—what one Chaucerian narrator calls “haukes ledene”—should not be read as merely conventional. Instead, human and nonhuman self-expressions overlap in varying and unstable configurations, many of which “reinscribe” language (to paraphrase Jacques Derrida) “in a network of possibilities” that “are themselves not merely human.” Van Dyke discusses three particularly successful ways in which medieval writers represent nonhuman language: existential (creatures’ assertions of their material presence and actions, as in Anglo-Saxon riddles), onomatopoeic (phonological imitations of nonhuman vocalizations), and catachrestic (implausibly anthropomorphic speech). She argues that in texts by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, and Robert Henryson, instances of the third method constitute apt neologisms—powerful metaphoric formulations with no nonmetaphoric alternatives.
If one reinscribes language in a network of possibilities that do not merely encompass it but mark it irreducibly from the inside, everything changes. I am thinking in particular of the mark in general, of the trace, of iterability, of différance. These possibilities or necessities, without which there would be no language, are themselves not only human.
—Jacques Derrida, “Eating Well”
e càntine gli auselli
ciascuno in suo latino…
(And let the birds sing about it, each in its Latin )
—Guido Cavalcanti, “Fresca rosa novella”
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Notes
- 1.
Alan Hindley, Frederick W. Langley, and Brian J. Levy, Old French-English Dictionary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), s.v. “latin,” (sm); Anglo-Norman Dictionary s.v. “latin” (with citation from The Romance of Horm by Thomas).
- 2.
Susan Crane , Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 121 and 220n7. I cite Cavalcanti’s lyric from Rime, ed. Letterio Cassata (Anzo: De Rubeis, 1993), 44–7.
- 3.
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Dean Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), V.434–6 and 478. Future references to Chaucer’s works are to this edition and are documented in text by line number.
- 4.
That is the approach taken by Patrizia Grimaldi Pizzorno , “Matelda’s Dance and the Smile of the Poets,” Dante Studies 112 (1994): 121 and 131.
- 5.
Crane , Animal Encounters, 121–2.
- 6.
W. W. Skeat, ed., Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Clarendon, 1894), 3:477; here, Skeat endorses an argument of Leigh Hunt.
- 7.
The Politics of Aristotle, trans. Peter Simpson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 1273a7, (58).
- 8.
Peter Koritansky , “Thomas Aquinas: Political Philosophy,” Internet Eyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.iep.utm.edu/aqui-pol/. On the use by Aquinas of the Aristotelian distinction, see also Mary M. Keys , Aquinas, Aristotle, and the Promise of the Common Good (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 80.
- 9.
Dante , De Vulgari Eloquentia, trans. Steven Botterill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), I.ii.2.
- 10.
Bartholomaeus Anglicus , On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De Proprietatibus Rerum, ed. M. C. Seymour (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 5.xxiii, (212).
- 11.
Isidore, Etymologies, trans. Stephen Barney et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 9.i.10; according to his translators and editors, Isidore draws this book mainly from Augustine , Ambrose , Jerome, Servius, Pliny, and Solinus (15).
- 12.
Bartholomaeus , On the Properties, 19.cxxxi (1387), and 18.i (1101). Umberto Eco et al. point to a similar equivocation that Boethius produces in translating Aristotle ’s De Interpretatione, “On Animal Language in the Medieval Classification of Signs,” in On the Medieval Theory of Signs, ed. Eco and Constantino Marmo (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1989), 5–8.
- 13.
Aquinas, Sententia libri Politicorum, I, chap. 1/b, cited in Eco et al., “On Animal Language,” 33–4n30; compare with Aristotle, Politics, 1253a.
- 14.
Eco et al., “On Animal Language,” 4.
- 15.
Middle English Dictionary, s.v. “lē̆den” (n.). In the latest quotations in both the MED and the OED, leden refers to nonhuman utterance or to generalized noise or chatter.
- 16.
Lesley Kordecki , Ecofeminist Subjectivities: Chaucer’s Talking Birds (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 93. A fuller version of my reading of the “Squire’s Tale” appears in Carolynn Van Dyke , Chaucer’s Agents: Cause and Representation in Chaucerian Narrative (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005), 81–7.
- 17.
My discussion of this episode is indebted to Jon Kenneth Williams , “Sleeping with an Elephant: Wales and England in the Mabinogion,” in Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), especially 176–80.
- 18.
Patrick K. Ford , trans., The Mabinogi, and Other Medieval Welsh Tales (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 147.
- 19.
Williams, “Sleeping with an Elephant,” 177.
- 20.
Ford , Mabinogi, 147. I take the creatures’ grammatical gender from Mark H. Nodine, English to Welsh Lexicon, http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/fun/welsh/LexiconEW.html.
- 21.
Ford , Mabinogi, 147–8.
- 22.
Craig Williamson, ed., The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), riddle 74 (110).
- 23.
Robert Stanton , “Bark Like a Man,” chap. 6, this volume.
- 24.
Following Derek Attridge , I use “lexical onomatopoeia” for linguistic units that can be pronounced and inflected as English words (Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce [London: Routledge, 2004], 136–7).
- 25.
“Bark Like a Man,” especially section on riddles. See also Stanton’s “Mimicry, Subjectivity, and the Embodied Voice in Anglo-Saxon Bird Riddles,” in Voice and Voicelessness in Medieval Europe, ed. Irit Ruth Kleiman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 29–43.
- 26.
John Henry Mozley and Robert R. Raymo, eds., Nigel de Longchamps, Speculum Stultorum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 65; Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, VII.3277.
- 27.
Stanton makes a similar point in “Bark Like a Man.” Like his, my examples come from Derek Abbot’s table of animal sounds at http://www.eleceng.adelaide.edu.au/Personal/dabbott/animal.html.
- 28.
Here I allude again to the statement from Derrida in my first epigraph.
- 29.
See Donald H. Owings and Eugene S. Morton , Animal Vocal Communication: A New Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), especially 105–14; and Morton and Bridget J. M. Stutchbury, “Vocal Communication in Androgynous Territorial Defense by Migratory Birds,” ISRN Zoology (2012): 2 and 5–6. The acoustical gradients are frequency (pitch), tonality (harsh or tonal), and loudness. High tonal sounds are usually appeasing, whereas low tonal ones are aggressive, but “most communication events lie between these endpoints and most vocalizations do too”; for instance, loud “barks”—that is, sounds with mixed harshness and chevron-shaped pitch changes—are often used in ranging (Morton and Stutchbury, “Vocal Communication,” 2).
- 30.
E. Font and P. Carazo , “Animals in Translation: Why There Is Meaning (But Probably No Message) in Animal Communication,” Animal Behaviour 80, no. 2 (August 2010): e2–3.
- 31.
Otto Glauning, ed., Lydgate’s Minor Poems: The Nightingale Poems (London: Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1900), 35–6n5, 90; Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), 232.
- 32.
My first example of ocy is from Huon de Mery, Le tornoiement de l’antechrist (Reims: P. Regnier, 1851), http://archive.org/details/bub_gb_OzpOAAAAcAAJ, p. 98. The second pertains to many Passion poems; particularly influential was John Pecham’s lyric “Philomena praevia.” The troubadour lyric, attributed to Trebor, is in Paul Zumthor, Toward a Medieval Poetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 222.
- 33.
Melissa Ridley Elmes , “Species or Specious? Authorial Choices in the Parliament of Fowls,” in Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts, ed. Carolynn Van Dyke (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 241.
- 34.
Owings and Morton , Animal Vocal Communication, 116.
- 35.
In an excellent forthcoming article in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Michael Warren reads the onomatopoeic passage in Parliament of Fowls as a kind of translation and connects it with the poem’s allegory.
- 36.
Canterbury Tales, IX.243 and following. Cokkow rather than cok is conventionally the cuckoo’s call, but before Phebus deprives the crow of its song, it can “countrefete” the speech of any man and the singing of at least one bird (IX.133–8).
- 37.
Attridge, Peculiar Language, 151.
- 38.
Peter Travis , Disseminal Chaucer: Reading the Nun’s Priest’s Tale (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 143; Jill Mann , From Aesop to Reynard: Beast Literature in Medieval Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 261.
- 39.
Mann , From Aesop to Reynard, 254; emphasis mine. Mann borrows “connaturality” from Peter Dronke, Intellectuals and Poets in Medieval Europe (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1992), 193 et passim.
- 40.
Bartholomaeus , On the Properties, 12.xvii (627) and 18.cxiv (1263–4).
- 41.
Lanham , Handlist, 31; Patricia Parker , “Metaphor and Catachresis,” in The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice, ed. John Bender and David E. Wellbery (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 61.
- 42.
Parker , “Metaphor and Catachresis,” 60; The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, ed. and trans. Harold Edgeworth Butler (London: W. Heinemann, 1921), 3:8.vi.34–46. The insertion in square brackets is Butler’s.
- 43.
Parker , “Metaphor and Catachresis,” 62–3; see Butler, Institutio, 3:9.i.4–5.
- 44.
Judith H. Anderson , Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor-Stuart England (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 146; Butler, Institutio, 3:8.vi.34. As Anderson acknowledges, the referents of eo remain uncertain because the sentence is preceded by “a passage of three to four lines that, according to Butler, is ‘too corrupt to admit of emendation or translation ’” (Anderson , Translating Investments, 146, citing Butler, Institutio, 320n1).
- 45.
Alternatively, César Dumarsais and Jacques Derrida argue that catachresis subsumes metaphor; see Parker , “Metaphor and Catachresis,” 65, and Jacques Derrida , “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philology,” NLH 6 (1974): 59.
- 46.
Butler, Institutio, 3:8.31–6, and 320n2.
- 47.
Paul de Man , “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” Critical Inquiry 5, no. 1 (Autumn 1978): 21. I draw my periphrasis for Locke’s “modes” from William Uzgalis, “John Locke,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/locke/.
- 48.
Paul de Man , The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 241.
- 49.
de Man , “Epistemology,” 21.
- 50.
Marjorie Garber , The Use and Abuse of Literature (New York: Knopf, 2011), 242.
- 51.
Chaucer, “Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” Canterbury Tales, VII.2920. American Heritage Dictionary Indo-European Roots Appendix, s.vv. “dhē–” and “-kan”; Middle English Dictionary, s.vv. “wīf,” 3.a and 3.b, and “bērd.”
- 52.
On medieval thinking about animals’ dreams, see Trevisa , On the Properties, 6.xxvii, and Stephen Kruger , Dreaming in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 86.
- 53.
Robert Henryson , “The Morall Fabillis of Esope the Phrygian,” in Poems, ed. Charles Elliott (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 1754 and 2832.
- 54.
Frederick James Furnivall, ed., “Lydgate’s Horse, Goose, and Sheep,” in Political, Religious, and Love Poems (London: Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1866), 292–4. The Latin is from John 19:2 and Psalms 64:14.
- 55.
Large toads can eat small mice, though they usually don’t. In the first Henryson fable that I discuss, the inappropriately pedantic Latin comes not from the victims of predation but from the swallow, whose Latinate “preiching” to the farmer’s prey is ineffective.
- 56.
My examples of animal deception are from K. L. Barry, “Sexual Deception in a Cannibalistic Mating System? Testing the Femme Fatale Hypothesis,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 282, no. 1800 (December 17, 2014): 2014–28; William A. Searcy and Stephen Nowicki, The Evolution of Animal Communication: Reliability and Deception in Signaling Systems (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 220; and Desmond Morris, Animalwatching: A Field Guide to Animal Behaviour (London: Arrow, 1991), 82.
- 57.
“Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” VII.3431–5.
- 58.
Furnivall, “Lydgate’s Horse, Goose, and Sheep,” 308–15, 321–3, 330, 384–5, and 297.
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Van Dyke, C. (2018). Understanding Hawk-Latin: Animal Language and Universal Rhetoric. In: Langdon, A. (eds) Animal Languages in the Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71897-2_8
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